Don't look here

That video's from a CNN story about Brett McGurk, President Obama's nominee to be the new US ambassador to Iraq. To sum up, it looks like - as of my writing here on Saturday - that the man carried on an at least flirtatious if not possibly/probably consummated relationship with a New York Times reporter outside the bounds of his marriage. He has, however, since divorced and married the woman with whom he had extra-martial relations.

From my position of deep and thorough knowledge of the situation now that I've watched the whole four-minute video, I don't know that I can provide any sort of authoritative analysis of the situation. He might be a spectacular ambassador. He might know more about Iraq and the tenuous government situation there than I know about DC comics. He might sleep his way across the entire Fertile Crescent for all I know. (By the way, I'm really proud about that last sentence there. Google Fertile Crescent if you don't get the gag.)

What I'm here to announce today is the fact that I don't give a crap about the private lives of our public servants.

If a president wants to kick back and sign bills while an intern is under the desk, I don't care.

If a Congressman wants to send photos of his fully-clothed junk via twitter to a dozen media members, I don't care.

If the mayor wants to hire a prostitute and pay her with a rubber check, I...don't...care.

And pretty soon we're all going to have to stop caring because otherwise we won't have any leaders left because either they're all flawed human beings or because no one is going to want to have their lives examined at such a ridiculous level of scrutiny. We're going to have to let some of this stuff go because our secrecy and privacy are just shy of entirely disappeared. We use private companies for all of our modern communication - gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Skype - and they all have policies saying that anything we put out there is theirs forever. And the Patriot Act has given the government the rights to look at all of those as well as our phone conversations.

The concept of private life is dead, and we're going to have to move beyond that notion and stop punishing our elected officials for being human beings with the same flaws that we all have.

Or we're going to have to fight back phenomenally hard if we want to keep our private lives private.