The Dishonorable Gentleman Blathers On and On

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s Argentine fling saved us from a presidential candidacy that would have flooded the country in blather.

Sanford is a poster boy for the politician’s disease — the inability to use one word when you can vomit out a dozen or more. This man is incapable of a short statement, a short sentence, a clear expression.

I’ve written on this blog before that I’m keeping my ear out to hear if Amy Klobuchar succumbs to the Washington way with words. So far she hasn’t. She still seems capable of using small clear words and short crisp sentences. Keep up your immunity, Senator.

I watched a House transportation hearing for a few minutes on C-SPAN a couple of nights ago. Our own Iron Ranger Jim Oberstar chairs the committee, and as he passed the microphone around to the few other committee members who showed up it was easy to spot the DC disease. Each representative, before he or she spoke, had to blather on and compliment Oberstar. “Before I begin, I want to thank the chairman for his leadership on this issue, he has certainly been blahblahblahblah…” They always heap praise on one another before they do anything — probably because nobody else will praise them. I can picture a politician with DC “Imustalwaysbetalking” disease saying to someone who opens the door to the bathroom for him, “Well first I want to say thank you for the courtesy you have always shown me in the past when I’ve come to this restroom and I want to extend to you my heartfelt and deepest thanks for the exceptional way you have opened this door in this particular and most-important instance for me, and then….” Normal humans would say “thanks” and get on to the peeing part.

If you want to see this disease at its most virulent and most stressed, here’s Sanford last week goiing on and on and on and on about his affair and his wonderful children and his thought process and his everydamnthing. With beautiful irony, he several times calls himself “a bottom-line kinda guy” and about every five minutes, punctuating the nothingness of his wordstream, he says “bottom line” and then goes on to meander so far from any bottom line it’s clear he’s never actually gotten to one.

At his cabinet meeting Friday, Gov. Sanford apologized to his cabinet members and then said, according to the AP, “Every one of you all has specific duties to the people of South Carolina that you have to perform, and that is with or without me doing right on a given day or doing wrong at a given day, those responsibilities still exist.”

Forty-three words. I’ll give him the “you all” — he’s a Southerner, of course. But the “with or without” is grammatically superfluous and an example of the padding politicians use. So is the important-sounding but redundant phrase: “that you have to perform.” These yahoos seem to think that if they use big words, and a whole lot of words, they’ll sound smart. Precisely the opposite. “You all have duties to perform for the people of South Carolina, regardless of what I’ve done.” Seventeen words.

Sanford’s nether appendage has saved us from his oral one.

– Bruce Benidt