Has anyone seen my governor? (His Argentinian mistress has)
 

FOUND HIM

I mean, he's really been missing for 7 years, but still:


I'm glad he needed time away from his kids on father's day

Maybe he went to the corridor of shame to tell them personally he sees no need to accept money for their schools, everything in SC is fine.

Sounds like a real douche. His wife didn't seem concerned either. Interesting.

That's because Jose the Gardener was plowing her.

i'm sure he's either in the hospital for secret surgery or holed up with a hooker

Maybe he was banging a dude on a closed beach and he ended up breaking his leg during the trip.

Oh wait, that was my state's governor.

Well as a resident of south carolina, I'm thinking he's probably holed up writing a book on how to lose re-election in one easy step.

As a South Carolina resident I wouldn't mind if nobody ever found him.

Maybe he was hanging out with my former Gov Blago.

Maybe this is Armageddon and they're going to slowly sneak all the governors to the secret bunker so as to not cause a panic.

Probably just working on new campaign shirts. Nothing to worry about really.

Seems like folks can breath easy on this little ado about virtually nothing.
Sanford, missing since Thursday, reportedly located - Local / Metro - The State

But Sanford’s office told the lieutenant governor’s office Monday afternoon that Sanford has been reached and he is fine, said Frank Adams, head of Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer’s office on aging.

Well, there go his presidential ambitions.

I don't particularly buy his "Appalachian Trail" excuse. I also like how this isn't his first time eluding his security detail.

yeah. didn't his wife say he was holed up working on his book away from the kids?

they need to get their stories straight.

father's day also seems like a very strange time to pick for that. so much for the "family values" part of your plank.

This story is fascinating, given that the amount of ambiguity in the various statements and information means any sort of speculation is possibly true.

Given what we've read, Sanford could have been doing anything from:

With his wife's blessing/encouragement, after a draining session with the legislature, took a few days off to spend hiking and gathering some thoughts for his book. While his wife didn't know exactly where he was, she knew generally where he was, but didn't want to give the press that info. As for the security services and him eluding them, well, it's not like he's POTUS or something. And he has a 3rd cellphone/pager that no one knows about except for his wife so she could reach him in dire emergencies.

to:

Telling his wife he was tired and wanted some time alone, especially from his kids, all of whom are older, more sullen, and less fun now, Sanford went AWOL without thinking up a decent cover story to shack up with another woman/man/small penguin somewhere in Atlanta. His wife figures this comes with the territory and doesn't give a shit as long as he's out of her hair and his kids are used to having an absent father anyway. Oh, and the security services are dumber than rocks.

Good times.

eh - but if he's the governor of the state then he is responsible (in a macro-sense) for the people of that state, and part of the responsibility that comes with that job is being available in case there are emergencies (major or minor). That means you have to stay in contact. You don't get to take time off and dissapear.

What if there was something that didn't qualify as an "emergency" that needed his immediate attention and couldn't wait several days? What if 3 more spotted woodpeckers died because he didn't sign the environmental act (hypothetical and also ridiculous because i'm sure he's pro-woodpecker genocide)? He's responsible for that. He doesn't get to choose to take vacations spur-of-the-moment and go "off-the-grid" WITHOUT DELAGATING AUTHORITY TO DO HIS DAY-TO-DAY JOB TO SOMEBODY ELSE.

(key clause of rant in caps. if he wants to go off and go hiking for 4-5 days and be unreachable by anyone but his wife that's fine, but he needs to turnover authority to run his state to somebody formally before he does. it's called being responsible. i hope the voters in SC throw him out on his ass for this stunt.)

If I had to put up with some of the idiots he has to deal with, the Applachian Trail would probably look pretty good to me to. Those who recall my previous comments about my hatred of being outdoors for any significant length of time will realize how dire a statement that is.

One of the more obvious things that I didn't see getting much play in the stories I read was whether he was truly out of contact with the entire world or whether his whereabouts were simply unknown to people who had no real need to know & weren't being revealed/acknowledged by people who did know. Notice that even the articles reference several examples from people described as his political enemies, of course they're going to be critical, that's the nature of the relationship.

I wish Governor Doyle would go missing for 5 days. At least then I know my taxes wouldn't go up for almost a week.

Could he take the Georgia general assembly & the Athens-Clarke County Commission with him please?

The Lt. Governor didn't know where he was-ya know the guy who is supposed to step in and run things if the governor can't be reached/something happens to him. I don't have a problem with him going off to "recharge his batteries"-it was probably quite a strain on him fighting the stimulus with all the extra media attention that gathered. But not telling anyone where he was going/having a way to contact him if things were dire is just irresponsible.

And I can already see the political ad from the Democrats-"He wasn't even at home to celebrate Father's Day with his kids." :)

You mean the guy who has already exhibited a tendency to be overanxious to assume control in the past? He seems to be SC's answer to Alexander Haig, so desperately wanting to be in charge.

well I wasn't saying I wanted him in control of the state govt :D but he needed to know at least the governor wasn't likely going to be reachable if something should happen.

meh....thee guy took a break.
it's SC for God's sake...nothing major has happened here since the first shots from the Confederacy....BTW i strongly support Sanford and wish Washington had a few more like him....

Seems his story might not be adding up. I don't really give a shit about what he was doing, but seems weird you'd lie about a vacation.

Sources Question Governor's Story - Greenville News Story - WYFF Greenville

Sounds similar to what brought Kirk Fordyce's political career to an end in MS.

I find it amazing that in South Carolina they even noticed he was missing.

I was looking for a create a milk carton "missing person" thingy to make a lame-ass attempt at humor, when I found this:



Pumpy, Jr.?

I think that's supposed to be the guy from this semi-(internet)famous pic...

It's not a big deal. But he and his family made it a much bigger deal than it needed to be by not getting their stories straight and/or not delegating authority to the right people and/or not just telling the truth or giving a no-comment when asked.

They do. Washington's full of rich former businessmen with potential infidelity issues.

Found him. He was in Argentina, "driving the coast", "clearing his head."

Here's what I want to know. Per the timeline, he went missing. The media asked his staff where he was. His staff tracked him down, then told the media he was on the Appalachian trail. Media says huh? He returns from Argentina.

So either he lied to his staff, his staff lied to the media, or he and his staff are complete idiots.

The third option is a given, and I would bet the first two are true as well.

This story is pretty bizarre.

I never begrudge anyone a reasonable amount of time off, and 5 or 6 days is clearly within that threshold. I don't even begrudge him his privacy. If he wants to keep where he is going a secret, I don't care. But he needed to be a big boy and let folks know he is taking some time off so there was someone able to make decisions while he is away.

Wait a second... what?! *reads NY Times article*

Argentina?! Ok, now that's really freaking weird. Really hurts Sanford, not because he left, but because his staff seems to be a bunch of idiots.

Argentina? this just gets more and more weird

Is it possible that this is just a story he's given everyone, and he was actually kidnapped by a drug lord named Tuco?

+1

I'm waiting patiently for the outrage over the money spent so he could go on a trip. Isn't there anywhere in SC this elitist could go?

Since his staff didn't know where he was, I'm guessing Sanford spent his own money on this ;)

Appalachia. Argentina. It's easy to confuse the two ;)

SI

You just left out the "in Argentina" part.

I think we can set our watches by the time the word "prostitute" enters the story.

Colbert badly needs to update us on better knowing your governor ;)

SI

I wish our gov would go MIA, permanently.

If our governor went MIA, I'm sure we'd have a prayer on the capital steps to find him. I'm not really exactly sure what he does though, other than pray for rain and make shady land deals. I guess his approval rating is high, but then again we are in the bottom 5 for education.

I do have to give Sonny credit for vetoing the capital gains bills.

Yeah, it was tacked on to a bill to give companies a tax break for hiring unemployed workers. Though even that bill seemed a bit odd.

Umm, with whom?

The people who didn't vote for him still don't like him & the people voted for him are disappointed by what we got from him.

If he wasn't term limited, I'm not sure he could win a primary battle in his own car much less the state.

This just gets stranger and stupider by the moment. Good thing he is having a press conference at 2 pm to explain it all. So who will the Republicans turn to now for 2012? :)

And yet somehow the state survived the guy going on vacation.

Will wonders never cease?

He's late to his own press conference.

Also, I love the potential double meanings of "wanting to do something exotic". :D

I'm just waiting to hear more details now. It's going to turn out he was hunting Nazis in Argentina ;).

Apparently its an affair with an Argentine woman.

Wow. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

just amazingly dumb.

Have the affair if you want, but think about having a cover story in case someone notices you falling off the face of the earth for a week and decides to look into it.

Apparently this has been quite the press conference, according to the Twitterati. Very brutally honest is what I'm reading.

Oh, and he should have learned a lesson from Clinton. There is no reason that you even have to leave your office, let alone the country, in order to have an affair.

On the one hand, you have the opportunity to perhaps become President Of The United States, The Most Powerful Man On The Planet.

And on the other, you have the chance to get some Argentinian poon-tang.

Easy choice, I guess.

*shurg*

That's kind of the sense I'm getting from the little blurbs. The full transcript might be an interesting read.

What I can't tell is whether he clearly intended to fess up from the beginning of the press conference or if he just sort of got rolling and ended up doing so.

Either way, almost seems like he just kind of said "fuck it, I'd rather be doing this (or her) than what I'm doing".

Called it, bitches! :D

Not a good couple of weeks for the party of "family values". If this kind of news comes in threes I'd expect to hear that Sarah Palin's been banging another man real soon.

Longer versions & a couple of blogs and I guess that was his intention all along.
But it would have been more entertaining if it wasn't.

bye bye presidential aspirations Governor. man what an embarassment

hahaha

awesome

i was so right

did his wife know about it? or did she honestly think he was hiking in the woods?

It's probably Letterman.

:D

His wife has known about it for months, apparently. I don't understand how a woman could live like that.

LEAVE HIM!

Period.

that's messed up. a lot of the time i think these politician's wives are more ambitious and power-hungry than the men themselves.

So I guess he decided to give a stimulus package, instead of receiving.

Winnar!

To be fair, he could have given and received some stimulus, just on different trips...

He was there like four days. Even a man of his age could manage both during a trip that long.

At least we now know why his wife was so unconcerned about his absence.

All joking aside, I think the only mature response at this point is to reserve judgment until pictures surface. Only then can we comment intelligently.

This guy's already resigned? Weak sauce.

Kawme Kilpatrick was found to have had an affair with his chief of staff, paid a $9 million settlement for wrongfully terminating two police officers who knew about this affair with city money, lied under oath about all of this, was charged with something like 15 different criminal offenses and he STILL refused to resign as mayor of Detroit for like 10 months.

Having an affair with an Argentinian mistress? That's nothing.

Well, really, did anyone in the thread guess anything other than affair? I think we all had it in the "Where in the World was Mark Sanford" pool. I saw that headline when I came back from lunch and said "yup".

SI

This whole thread is comic gold. This is just one of my favorites :D

SI

Hell, in France, they just go to press conferences with the mistress ;)

SI

Resigned as the leader of the Republican Governor's Association, not as governor itself, unless there's new news I've missed

Ah. Good.

Cartman, FOFC is worth it for your one-liners alone. :D

Sanctity of marriage crowd takes another hit.

Assuming that isn't a photoshop, I honestly think that FoxNews just does stuff like that on purpose now--not because they think it will fool anyone, but because they know that it will piss the liberals off.

or because they're just that incompetent

Another strike against the party of moral superiority :(

Fred Sanford says: You big dummy!

An Argentinian Nazi perhaps? Meh, she is probably a double agent.

Maybe. I think they've done it so many times now that it's hard to believe it's an accident.

Or in NYC, they just move in.

I wouldn't fault a woman for that decision, but if they genuinely want to save their marriage I don't fault that either. The parents of my daughter's best friend went through adultery and spent quite a while working on their marriage. In the end they stayed together and now do a lot of marriage counseling for other couples in trouble. I don't think they'd choose to go through it if they could go back in time, but they've stayed together and turned a potential tragedy into a hell of a lot of good.

Nicely done :)

SI

So the affair went on for 8 years?

honestly, I thought he was going to say he was gay, and/or he was having sex with Lindsay Graham. Straight adulterous sex was the last thing I expected.

it's probably going to be really obvious, but what am i missing here?

D

took me a minute too - Sanford is a (R) not a (D)

no pics of the mistress yet?

Maybe hunting Nazis in an Argentinan.

Apparently he's very lucky that the South Carolina legislature is out for several months. The rules state that when the governor leaves the country, he MUST turn over power while he's outside the US to the Lt Gov. I guess it's an impeachable offense..

“I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally (to resign). I come from the business side. If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.” [Sanford on Clinton, The Post and Courier, 9/12/98]

“The issue of lying is probably the biggest harm, if you will, to the system of Democratic government, representatives government, because it undermines trust. And if you undermine trust in our system, you undermine everything.” [Sanford on Clinton, CNN, 2/16/99]

Here she is...