The State!
The State, a 100,000+ circulation McClatchy paper in South Carolina that I’d never heard of till this week, is owning — OWNING — the Mark Sanford story. The State was first with the news that South Carolina’s governor had been missing for several days. Then, even after the national media swooped in, it was the only news outlet to catch Sanford at the Atlanta airport with his tail between his legs on his way back from Argentina (after his staff had lied that he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail). Then, after he admitted an affair with “a dear, dear friend from Argentina,” The State gets photos of the other woman’s apartment in Buenos Aires and then, somehow, managed to score hilariously incriminating e-mails that Sanford wrote to her.
| You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that so fitting with your beauty. I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light – but hey, that would be going into sexual details … |
Un-be-lievable. Somebody give that paper a Pulitzer.
(In related news, during the same week that it dominated coverage of Sanford’s fall, The State announced that most of its employees must take a week-long unpaid furlough by November and that it’s cutting six jobs. Nice.)
Hold on there, boy wizard. We still don’t know if the staff was lying about his whereabouts or if he lied to the staff. You feel me? Unless, The State has uncovered some more dirt…
The bright side to this sordid tale is that we can all stop thinking about Iran for a second.
You’re right, mostly. We know for sure that Sanford’s staff said several things that weren’t true. We don’t know whether staff members knew at the time that what they were saying was false. Maybe they’d just been duped by the boss.
There’s a language-parsing argument, however, that they lied either way, regardless of whether they knew their statements were bogus. According to Merriam-Webster:
lie: 1 a: an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive b: an untrue or inaccurate statement that may or may not be believed true by the speaker
Still, I think you’re right. Generally the word “lie” implies an intent to deceive — something that hasn’t been proven yet, and may never be. So I apologize, Sanford staffers. For now.