Family Value(ables)?

"Hello, and welcome to This is Your...Wife?!&qout;

"Well, no...uh...you see, my wife's very ill....this is my personal secretary, and, uh...well, she's joining me here, so....um...so I can get some work done while I relax."

"Very good, Senator. Welcome to Aruba."

As if I wasn't glad enough not to have kids, these past few weeks have made that decision all the better, as I am not faced with the task of explaining to them why our Hallowed Halls are full of cheats, liars and philanderers. There was a time, not too long ago, when a thing like that could actually ruin your chances at elected office.

One only need look back to the early '80s. Remember Gary Hart? Yeah, well he challenged the Miami Herald to follow him. And, guess what? They did. What they discovered was a man with a condition known as "zipperitis." Symptoms include slinking around dark places with strange women, and doing other foolish things (such as getting your picture taken on the back of a boat, named, appropriately, "Monkey Business," with a bikini-clad women who is not your wife sitting on your lap). When that photo appeared, poor Gary knew he was through. The sitting President, however, seems to have lowered that bar. And since his poll numbers have remained largely intact, a number of his detractors have come forward to admit that they, too, had gone astray. Hypocrisy, as they say, is the lubricant of political intercourse, and these past few weeks have really proven that point. >From Senators fathering children out of wedlock to Representatives breaking up marriages, the Capitol Hill Confessional has been full. The main difference between this and the Church being that these admissions are splayed across front pages from here to L.A. It's hard to use words like "scumbag" to describe other people (although they may, in fact, be scumbags) when you, yourself, have performed scumbag-like acts. Which brings us back to that whole hypocrisy thing. Of course, those in Congress draw distinctions between their behavior and that of the President, because they didn't lie about it (although, they didn't offer information either, until it became painfully apparent that they were about to make news). As the Impeachment Train gathers steam, those very Scarlet Congressmen will sit as judge and jury for the Chief Philanderer. "Yeah," they'll say, "but his indiscretions are different." I sure am glad the Republicans have taken on the mantle of Family Values, but I am equally happy that the Democrats are the ones defining what is, and what is not, "sexual contact." Unfortunately, like most Americans, I can't convince my wife that some of those items the President is accused of are not sex (and, quite frankly, I would have liked to be a fly on the wall when Bill tried to make that case to Hillary).

I'm relatively certain her response was something akin to, "Oh, do shut up, Bill. My boots will never get polished if you keep using your tongue to talk!" And politicians wonder why they rate with used car salesmen on the trust-o- meter.

Ah, but there is a cure for this virus that has infected our government. It's the polls. We can vote them out of office. Either that, or we can go back to a more genteel time when such topics were "off-limits."

But I doubt that will happen. Ever since the Herald picked up the gauntlet that Hart threw down, the mainstream media has clamored for fresh meat once reserved for supermarket tabloids.

Of course, it is a great deal more entertaining to write about White House trysts that foreign policy initiatives, so I don't see that happening. With the mid-term elections right around the corner, it will be interesting to see if the family values banner will still be flying as a backdrop for politicians, or if they will abandon it for something more realistic, like, "At least I'll wait until I get back to my apartment!"

No. The hypocrisy will likely continue. After all, this is the same bunch that violated their own Telecommunications Act by releasing the "pornographic" Starr Report on the Internet.

What we are more likely to see is a stronger effort by Congressmen to keep their peccadiloes off the front page.

Now if only they can get the President to cooperate...