Zhaba Zhournal

Zhaba Zhournal

The obligatory Gov. McGreevey post
Okay, the McGreevey thing. Do I have to? Well, let's run the numbers:

You're gay (50) and you live in New Jersey (50) = 100 = You have to talk about it

You're gay (50) but don't live in NJ (0), or you live in NJ (50) but aren't gay (0) = 50 = You probably have to talk about it

I'm sort of gay* (25) and live near NJ (25) = 50 = Yeah, I guess I have to talk about it

(What would be a low score? You're not gay and don't give a hoot about gays (0) and you don't live in NJ and don't care about it either (0) = 0 = You can ignore it. Lucky you.)

So anyway. Yep, he's gay, and yep, he's resigning, but it's not post hoc ergo solum propter hoc.† I think it adds up like this (yes, I'm doing a lot of adding-up today):

"I'm gay."

Okay.

"I had an extramarital affair."

Ummmmmmmmm...okay.

"I appointed a personal acquaintance to a major government position he was unqualified for."

Oooohhh. That's not good.

"I'm gay and I had an extramarital affair with a guy I appointed to a major government position in the state homeland security office, even though he's unqualified, and now he's threatening a sexual harrassment lawsuit."

Oh. Damn. Yeah, you'd better get out.

Really, I think McGreevey made the best overall decision he could. The guy's not only threatening a lawsuit, he wanted $5 million to quash it—can you say "extortion"?—and by coming out, coming clean, and stepping down, McGreevey took control of when and how the news came out, refused to succumb to $5 million in blackmail, and prevented extremely nasty politicking in the present, by people saying he should step down, or the future, by very nasty campaign ads if he ran for reelection. By making his resignation effective in November, he spares us an interim election, and makes sure a person we all at least know of will become governor (that would be Richard Codey, the state senate president—not a household name, but at least a single person you can point to, not the God-knows-who you could end up with after an emergency election). And, as a person in the New Jersey political campaign ad viewing area, I can't thank him enough for that. Politics around here—NJ, Philly, the nearer parts of Pennsylvania—can get ugly, and the campaign ads are uglier; they're generally along the lines of "my opponent drinks the blood of puppies, vote for me." After last fall's nasty Philly mayoral election, this spring's nasty primary elections, and facing a fall of nasty presidential and congressional and local elections, knowing there's one less campaign to abide counts as a blessing, and there aren't many politics-related blessings to count.

*How can I be sort of gay? I'm absolutely 50-50 bisexual, but I'm married—monogamously—to a man; so I'm not heterosexual, but I engage in heterosexual behavior.

†Hopefully that means "After this, therefore solely because of this." Maybe it should be solus propter hoc; it's been a while since I took Latin, and it's hard to figure out declensions with the Perseus collocation lookup tool.

[ at 10:46 AM • by Abby • permalink • ]

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