Shoot, I’m Running for Office

So, I think this morning was the moment when you could watch the Republican strategy shift from “Smear Morrison” to “Smear Stanley.”  This morning, Morrison was a homeless, trashy crack user. By lunch, Stanely was a serial affair-haver who drinks too much and (warning, hard to take scandalous conduct about to be mentioned) charges it to lobbyists.

I will wait for you to regroup.  I know many a Tennessean is unfazed by affairs, but getting drunk and making someone else pay for it?  Whew, I have to fan myself here a second. How practically Democratic of him!

Anyway, I wanted to take  a second to look at Woods’s post about the scuttlebutt on the Hill, about whether we should think of Morrison as victim or vamp–

Her life is back on track. But her psyche remains fragile and she is susceptible to temptation, right? Hello Paul Stanley, the lech.

That’s one way to look at it. The other way doubtlessly will appear shortly on conservative blogs across the state. McKensie Morrison’s low-down past proves what some Republicans have been suggesting from the beginning: She’s a Mata Hari who used her feminine wiles to lure the innocent senator into sin and ruination.

Because Woods suggests that they’re both to blame, both bear responsibility.

And that’s nice, isn’t it?  Quite feminist of Woods, really.

But here’s the thing–it doesn’t matter if Morrison was a girl who fell on extremely troubled times after high school, and who moved to Tennessee to ably put her life together and do something with herself, who was preyed on by Stanley or if she is a brilliant evil genius who plotted late at night in her high school bed of a way to be the perfect lure–troubled young woman with shady past and bad taste in men–in order to trap some politician, any politician into ruination in order to get, um, sex and… um… embarrassment and shame for her and her family? Maybe she wasn’t such a brilliant evil genius after all. But she was young. You have to fail a few times before you hit upon the perfect plan that allows you to take over the world.  Shoot, ask Bill Hobbs about that.

The reason that we should have rules in place that clearly state that legislators cannot carry on with interns is so that we don’t have to sit around and debate whether a young woman was victim or villain (madonna or whore) and whether she deserves our sympathy or our scorn.

Politicians who have sex with people who need a paycheck or a letter of recommendation from them are doing wrong, regardless of how skanky the politician’s friends can smear the intern as being. When you are the boss, you don’t have sex with your underlings. Period. You cannot be sure that they are willing. You cannot know if they feel they have to do this in order to keep your favor.  You cannot know how the other people who work for you feel about it, if they feel like the undering you’re fucking is treated special by you.  It creates a toxic work environment.

Now, I have been repeatedly accused of standing in the way of love, of not understanding these poor awkward men, who need to be able to awkwardly flirt with or fuck these young women, or else what will happen to true love?

Because it’s so difficult to say, “Darling intern, I am falling in love with you, but it wouldn’t be right for us to carry on. Could I see you once your internship is done?” or “Darling intern, clearly our relationship has crossed over into something serious and true and lovely, the best thing which two people can share. So, it turns out that I happen to know of another legislator who has fallen in love with his intern. Let’s talk to the intern coordinator about the two of you switching jobs so that you don’t work under me, so that I can quickly get you working under me. Wink wink nudge nudge.”?

Folks, I am not even a skeevy politician old enough to be someone’s father, and I can think of that in two second. You’re going to tell me that folks who want to sneak around and carry on can’t come up with a way of doing it that doesn’t cross clear ethical lines?

Shoot, maybe I should become a lecherous politician. I’m going to start auditioning fine-ass twenty-year-olds this afternoon.  If you want to apply, leave your contact information in the comments.