One More Post for Gov. Sanford

It's now painfully obvious that any further political aspirations of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford are completely down the drain. Reihan Salam wrote a pretty good elegy for the disgraced governor today. Says Salam:

"The sad fact is that Sanford was too interesting, too smart, and too strange to ever really make it on the national political scene, which seems to demand inhuman levels of discipline and, to put it bluntly, boringness."

He goes on to describe how Sanford's "mile-wide" independent streak was never going to fly on the national level, and it had already made just about every South Carolina Democrat and Republican hate him. But for us Libertarians, he was a breath of fresh air. As Salam also points out, he had a "intense distaste for glad-handing, and an unapologetic contempt for authority", and that's exactly why we all needed him.

While many believed that his open warfare against the legislature that wanted to use Obama Stimulus money was an attempt to fire-up right-wing talk radio hosts and fuel a potential 2012 Presidential bid, but Salam correctly points out that it was more a result of Sanford's "admirably dogmatic" small government beliefs.

Sadly, his attempts to roll-back or eliminate S.C.'s income tax has never been taken seriously by the state legislature either. To get their attention about too much pork spending, he once brought live pigs into the state Capitol building.

"The 2008 uprising...that fueled Ron Paul's quixotic bid for the White House was looking for a leader, and Sanford seemed to fit the bill."

Indeed he did. On the bright side, maybe he came to the realization that the political system in this country was beyond repair and just decided to give up. I kinda hope that is the case, and if it is, I hope he is as happy with the choice he made.

If it came down to a choice between an Argentinian beauty or a lifetime of fighting against politicians that were never going to change and a public that is too stupid to know better, maybe he did the right thing after all.