As naughty erotic missives go, Mark Sanford’s exchanges with “Maria” read like what your passionless 11th grade English teacher wrote in his half-completed novel. At some point, the lovers have an hours-long coffee where they talk about Thoreau while it rains outside.
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Hey, don’t knock it. He didn’t do too badly.
Me, I’ve made a woman cry with one of mine. Just saying.
I think you mean my humorless 10th grade English teacher. My 11th grade English teacher was famous for holding completely raunchy erotic conversations with his wife in french on the phone in the language arts resource center.
I’m sure they did for the French student’s comprehension what he did for most of his student’s English comprehension.
Below are excerpts of e-mails, obtained by The State newspaper in December, between Gov. Mark Sanford’s personal e-mail account and Maria, a woman in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In December? Have the local papers been covering this story for the past 6 months and we just never heard about it? Also, how exactly did The State obtain emails from the Governor’s personal account?
What ema said. December? And they sat on it for 7 months?!! Yay, journalism!
I think it kills my ‘wife finally drug him out and spanked him in public’ theory unfortunately.
You know, I’m not defending him, but really not terrible writing. A bit florid, he’s definitely into the concept of romantic love as all consuming, beyond your control (that plays nicely with Xian’s understanding of loss of male control regarding sex/how powerful women are as an excuse to not take responsibility for their own behavior), but not too bad.
I’ve written worse myself. There’s a reason I burned the email account I courted my wife with to the ground.
Maybe because it isn’t a story when a governor sleeps with a woman not his wife unless he chooses to do something random and official and public about it.
Ah, the gratuitous shots at English teachers! And they say the left and the right can’t find common ground.
Maybe because it isn’t a story when a governor sleeps with a woman not his wife unless he chooses to do something random and official and public about it.
Hey, I do not want all of this nasty personal information. It’s the Republicans and the fundamentalists. They want everyone’s personal business in the public square. It’s distasteful, but it’s what they want more than anything.
Yeah, the quality of the writing didn’t make me cringe. I wouldn’t buy his first novel or anything, but the only thing that squicked me enough to stop reading was the fact that I was reading someone’s private emails.
Whatever was he thinking of? Couldn’t he see that it was likely anything like this would inevitably become public—particularly when he was already running for president? Why are so many of these polticians so foolish?
“Maybe because it isn’t a story when a governor sleeps with a woman not his wife unless he chooses to do something random and official and public about it.”
Ehn. There is at least some argument to be made if said governor is sleeping with a woman not his wife while making a great deal of public hay about the sanctity of marriage, the state’s compelling interest in snooping into the citizenry’s sex lives, and/or that you can judge a person’s fitness for office by the degree to which they adhere to puritanical lifestyles/patriarchal family models.
If you live in SC, you’re not the least bit surprised if a paper sits on that kind of story.
SC is a still in many respects a colony ruled by oligarchs. Privilege is not only respected, it’s positively worshiped.
Preying mantis:
Well the most common patriarchal family model in the old Testament was one man with many wives and concubines. So that works.
Looks like Sanford needs to learn how to use Yahoo like Palin does.
As for “why are these guys so foolish”, well, privilege.
It’s the “but, hey” that sends me. All this odd, florid weirdness, and then “but hey, that would be going into sexual details…”
Just creepy as hell. Yuck. In general, I’d say don’t even publish it, but since this is a guy who runs on “family values” and believe that allowing glbtqi people the right to marry destroys marriage, I’m for it.
How could same-sex marriage make the Sanford marriage much worse? And what sanctity does that union have and what respect does it deserve?
I’m an English teacher. My kids would most likely assume that I have never experienced, and am congenitally incapable of comprehending passion. They would be wrong. Now, as for your characterization of English teacher desire, an hours-long coffee and lively discussion of a subject you both find intellectually stimulating (and that’s NEVAH Thoreau) is HAWT. Then again, I have a serious Beatrice and Benedick issue.
I can dissect an animal, research political massacres, and contentdly watch horror-movie bloodbaths, but I cannot even get through a paragraph of these e-mails, honestly.
Hmmm, wife “knew” for 5 months, paper had emails for seven. Wife seems kinda savvy, if this is a private email account, what are the chances that wife slipped the paper the emails? Maybe wife “knew” for a while (staffer tipped her that the reason he didn’t pass McCain’s sniff test was Argentinian?)
I’m just waiting for the woman to tell her side of the story.
?:~)
I’m just waiting for the woman to tell her side of the story.
Hey…..she and Sanford….together or separately could do the main singing musical scene in the possible upcoming broadway play as a duet along with some solo numbers…...
I love his not very subtle effort at talking about her breasts, before offering an obviously flawed attempt at being demure. Truly, what can be more erotic than talking about two magnificent parts of one’s companion.
That and the fact that he was numbering his paragraphs. And starts the penultimate one with “finally” before starting the final one with “Lastly”.
The whole thing seems very sad. He’s obviously trying to justify his actions, but seems to think talking a lot is a substitute for actual introspection. At least Marie seemed to be confronting the situation. Sanford is just trying to filibuster his conscience.
This being Republicans, I’m just waiting for the big reveal that this was a menage a trois that fell apart…
For those wondering about the “emails obtained in December”, it does says “At the time, efforts to authenticate the e-mails were unsuccessful.”
Now, who knows how hard they tried, but I can see them sitting on something they couldn’t verify.
Ah, the gratuitous shots at English teachers! And they say the left and the right can’t find common ground.
Hey, now. It’s not a shot at English teacherS. It’s a shot at a particular type of teacher, unless you’re saying that there’s no such thing as a passionless high school teacher working on a novel anywhere on Earth.
Um, it seems weird to me that the styles of “Maria” and the Governor are so exactly alike. Not weird that the Governor would write the way he does. But they all read, for the most part, like filler—like, the correspondents need to be writing something but don’t really have a particular conversation to carry on.
It really looks fake to me—like whoever wrote “Maria’s” stuff is the same person who wrote Sanford’s. That may have been Sanford himself—I am thinking of the historian who proved that Abelard wrote Heloise’s letters as well as his own in the famous “correspondence” between them.
Mind, I once wrote some love letters, or at any rate letters to a beloved person, and while I don’t think they were as pointless and stilted as “Sanford’s,” I am kind of embarrassed to remember some of the stuff I did write. But her letters back to me (which may or may not embarrass her the same way if she ever thinks of them…) were very definitely of a different style. And she was another American, raised in a way not entirely dissimilar to how I was.
I’d think an Argentinian mistress would just write casually in a noticeably different style, what with English being a second language and all. I gather that there is a large British expat community in BA, and suppose many Argentinians acquire quite a bit of proficiency in English quite early—but it would be distinctive, taking British rather than American English as the standard.
So I doubt the authenticity of this “exchange.”
I admit I too had a hard time actually reading through any of them. I read the first two fairly closely and skimmed the later ones—I did notice a bit more getting down to brass tacks of the relationship in the later ones, but not enough to overcome my urge to protect my eyes and brain from this drivel!
As to the “responsibility” or lack thereof of the good “journalists” who bring us this news a half year late (and it seems to me, some dollars short)—well, if they somehow intercepted these alleged e-mails way back in December, that suggests they were casting the net pretty wide already by then, and presumably had many strands of evidence to work with. Even if they couldn’t “authenticate” the things—(presuming they didn’t just make them up themselves yesterday) I imagine they must have been sitting on quite a lot.
I fully appreciate this—the standards of “authentication” that must be met when casting aspersions on powerful Republicans are very different from those that apply to Democrats. I understand they’d want to have all their ducks in a row before firing the first shot!
Honestly, The emails were passionate. He loves Maria.
He should resign and just go be with the woman he really loves.
I don’t know why he should resign to be with her. He should sort it out with his wife, divorce or no, and it really isn’t our business.
If he’s going to resign, it shouldn’t be for adultery. He should resign if he misused public funds or violated the terms of his office. At this point, reelection is unlikely.
As much as I am pleased to see a hypocritical conservative moralizer go down in flames, reading and ridiculing someone else’s love letters seems distinctly sleazy to me. I’m staying away from all that shit.
I too doubt the authenticity of these missives. They’re just too . . . too much.
reading and ridiculing someone else’s love letters seems distinctly sleazy to me. I’m staying away from all that shit.
fastandsloppy
This.
Personally I find it sad.
This guy chose to identify with a group of people who fear that someone, somewhere might be happy.
And now it bites him in the ass and tosses him into a woodchipper.
Yet people refuse to learn from the lessons of others and continue to work against their own best interest.
Uhura, I had the same thought, and yes, reading even a little of that badly-written but profoundly soul-baring stuff left me feeling deeply sad for the guy.*
staffer tipped her that the reason he didn’t pass McCain’s sniff test was Argentinian?
If she didn’t find out on her own (there are usually signs, both big and not-so-big), someone tipped off Mrs. S., at which point she may well be the one who anonymously outed his affair to the State paper. As for the McCain involvement, it’s a possibility, but given what we know about the depth and diligence of his campaign’s Palin-vetting—they had, what, one meeting after a single phone call? And no foreknowledge of the various, ah, “offspring issues”?—I doubt they knew anything about anything, really.
*That compassion evaporates when I remember how many families and schools he would have hurt if his callous, grandstanding refusal of stimulus money hadn’t been overruled.
Looking over the timeline, it looks like The State’s role in this was far more complicated than simply covering for him. Sanford only admitted to having really gone to Argentina after one of their reports busted him at the airport. The State is also the original source of the “Mark Sanford is Missing” story, although it now looks like they had a far better idea of where he was they let on.
I can’t speak as to whether they were waiting for solid evidence or for the story to get bigger - I’m not a mind reader. Nevertheless, they did let his staff issue a known lie, and having a reporter waiting for Sanford means actual investigative journalism. I say kudos.
I love his not very subtle effort at talking about her breasts, before offering an obviously flawed attempt at being demure. Truly, what can be more erotic than talking about two magnificent parts of one’s companion.
Who’s to say he was talking about breasts? It could have been something far more innocent and he could be referring to ankles ...
Oh, wait ...
But in all serious, I find these less disturbing and more ... corny! If you are going to do something as incriminating as WRITE SOMETHING that you shouldn’t be writing DOWN, then at least make it sound hot, or sexy, or romantic.
After reading that, I felt like I just swallowed a whole can of Cheez Whiz. It seemed like a good idea at first, but now ... ugh!
Apparently the staff didn’t lie, they just misheard “getting some Argentinian tail” as “hiking the Appalachian trail”...
< / snark>
I don’t believe those excerpts are real or demonstrative of the real thing… Like someone said above “Maria” writes just like Sanford. The excerpts that surfaced have a scrubbed up, “pity me” tone to it.
Who’s to say he was talking about breasts? It could have been something far more innocent and he could be referring to ankles ...
Man, my mind is dirtier than both of yours…
I just heard the latest Fox News promo commercial on the scandal:
“Is the liberal press celebrating the scandal surrounding Governor Mark Sanford? We’ll ask Bernard Goldberg tonight on the O’Reilly Factor!!”
How they can take an issue that in no way, shape, or form implicates liberals or Democrats in a negative way and try to spin it into “the evil libruls are persecuting us!!!” is astounding.
Fucking bags of shit.
So, hardly anyone else thinks that the “Maria” side of the “correspondence,” at least, was just plain made up?
I admit that when I later skipped down to the end, “Maria” seemed to find a different voice.
But Sanford’s drivel as demonstration of passionate true love?
Well, maybe, if he’s a complete dweeb. Which I think we already knew long before this he was and is.
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Okay. This morning I skipped completely past his later notes, looking only at “Maria’s” to see if she ever seemed like a real person. Reading Sanford’s last one, I guess I see what Uhura and litbrit are saying. He’s still emotionally clumsy, a fool, and a weasel.
I think both his wife and “Maria” would be well rid of him. As would the people of South Carolina and the whole United States.
Not that there’s any other nation in the world I want to wish him on.
Well, maybe North Korea or Saudi Arabia.
I hear my sister, who lives in South Carolina, is glad he’s unmasked like this. Maybe she can start a “Send Sanford to the Saudis!” campaign?
Doesn’t even come close to topping the Foley IMs !