Jim Austin

His previous columns are archived HERE.

JIM AUSTIN

What 'is' is

Why would a turkey-necked 53-year-old Baptist politician with a wife and kids have an affair with a 24-year-old woman? Because he is a Congressman and therefore immune to the rules of society, that's why.

Did Gary Condit's little dalliance go sour? Did his paramour threaten to go public? Did Condit hire a hit man to rid himself of the annoying evidence? Who knows?

Condit dissembled, tap-danced, procrastinated, and prevaricated while police were searching for a body and parents were presumably frantic to find their daughter.

Rather than help in the search for the missing young woman, he stonewalled and delayed hoping that evidence of his sleazy affair would not become public.

In other words he cared not one atom for Chandra Levy, with whom he was intimate, he was too busy covering his butt.

For once I agree with our almost legally elected President. When asked what his thoughts were on the scandalous behavior of Condit he replied that he didn't care about Condit, he cared about Chandra Levy and her parents. He cared about the victim, something that Condit did not.

In his interview, granted to Connie Chung, Condit oiled around questions, used euphemisms to describe his relationship with Levy, and invoked the feelings of his wife and children to avoid telling the truth. He gave the impression of a man who would hold up his newborn baby to shield himself against gunfire. Not once did he express concern about Levy or her parents.

What a repellent liar he is.

This feeling that politicians are above it all has been around forever.

Ted Kennedy was responsible for the drunken-driving episode leading to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne under a bridge at Chappaquiddick. Before that he was expelled from Harvard for cheating. Voters forgave him. His nephew raped a woman after a drunken night on the town and now he is predicted to run for office. He'll win.

Apparently Massachusetts voters are so nostalgic and obsessed with former President JFK, himself a philanderer, that they are willing to elect any sociopath as long as Kennedy is tacked on after his name. How sad.

Jackson, Hyde, Gingrich, Hart -- the list goes on and on.

Isn't it also absurd and depressing that the media becomes fixated on items like these? Like nasty little maggots, the press feeds off the gangrenous flesh of our body politic. Of course the bottom line is that we are the ones that elect the bastards and we are the ones that buy the prurient rags that gleefully display their indiscretions.

How the media must have wept on the final day of Bill Clinton's Presidency. He was surely the most openly pornographic President. He could broker a deal with Middle Eastern leaders but he didn't have the brains to control his galloping libido.

Bubba set the gold standard as a lying degenerate when he said in answer to a prosecutor's question about his sexual behavior: "That depends on what your definition of 'is' is."

I'll be happy to tell you what 'is' is. Trust is. Loyalty is. Honesty is.

The 2500-year-old words of Plato strike a prescient tone in the midst of this slimy affair: The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.