North Carolina: still humble but not apologizing

I had long ago heard North Carolina described as that "vale of humility between two mountains of conceit" (Virginia and South Carolina), but I never fully understood it until South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford explained it all to me Wednesday, when he returned from his quick jaunt to South America.

You see, we here in North Carolina had a guv-nuh was a bit old fashioned. He was interested in money. He wanted to take everything that wasn't tied down and fly off on fun vacations with his best pals, who were doing business with the state, and get his wife a lucrative job at N.C. State University. He also liked to drive other people's automobiles. The News & Observer got into quite an uproar about Guv-nuh Mike's excesses, and the U.S. attorney is subpoenaing everybody with a state government e-mail address. But Guv-nuh Mike was just going after a little money.

Guv-nuh Mark Sanford, on the other hand, was getting laid! Not only that, he was doing it with a foreigner, when, it has been pointed out, he could have helped the state economy by having his affair with a home-grown mistress. (What's he got against South Carolina women, anyway?) To top it off, after he finally had to confess that he wasn't hiking the Appalachian Trail (although he apparently did get a little exercise) and confess that it was all about the sex, he had the temerity to lecture the press and the whole darned state of South Carolina about morality and responsibility and forgiveness and sin and family and any darned thing else that happened to fall out of his confused mind.

(This might be a good place to ask that troubling question: What is it about Republican politicians? They can't stop playing around all the while they're preaching "family values." Sen. John Ensign just confessed to an affair last week. It's not all Republicans, though. Democrat Eliot Spitzer of New York found himself in a mess last year, too, and no one has forgotten Bill Clinton's interest in women of all types.)

We North Carolinians thought we had a pretty good scandal going with Mike Easley's free trips and his coastal real estate deal and his cars and his wife's $170,000 a year job, but we weren't even close. South Carolina just couldn't abide the thought that North Carolina would exceed South Carolina in something, even if it was a political scandal. So Mark Sanford, out of a sense of obligation to his state's pride, had to make up a cock-and-bull story about hiking when he was actually involved in a different verb altogether. And then he had to get caught in it and apologize to everybody he'd ever known.

We North Carolinians can at least take some pride in the fact that Mike Easley hasn't apologized, and he doesn't show any sign of doing it any time soon. Sanford might have had more fun doing what he did, but Easley is simply too humble, in keeping with state traditions, to confess to anything.