Republicans fall in love. Democrats get the nearest office grunt to service their vile needs.

If this kid kicks my seat again, it’s an elbow jab to the temple. And I hope he is reading this. That’s right, kid: elbow jab.

Of course, he just kicked me again, and all I did was to shoot him a dirty look. But it was a very dirty look. And prolonged. He’s going to kick my seat again, and I’m going to go nuts. I tend not to have degrees of annoyance: it’s either affability or blind rage.

I am still in Central New York, the home of Classic Rock. I love it here: if I didn’t feel such compunctions about taking my daughter away from my parents, I would stay. I could see myself here, where I grew up. They say cities are more tolerant, but I feel that it’s places like this, where everybody knows everybody by their first and last name, where I can guarantee you I can look around this library and recognize in the junior high kids shades of known quantities (The one with the nose, for example, he has to be related to the Chutes), it is in small places like this where you are allowed to be yourself. I could join the village eccentrics: the woman who only wears purple, the health food store owner and the head shop owner- who seem to be the same bald, bearded, sweaty fat man, but no one is quite sure.

I saw my junior high math teacher here in the library the other day. I wanted to weep, then to reach out to her, weeping, a spectacle she naturally would have recoiled from, not with horror, I think you need imagination to experience horror, but very quickly and neatly, as the tongue of a rain forest frog snaps back into his mouth once he’s caught the fly. She was always a very neat, fast, little, self-contained person, which made her taste for hyper-flared bell bottoms and wing-like butterfly collars all the more notable. And this was 1988. She looked like a member of the cast of “One Day at a Time.” If she had kept going, she would have hit a sweet spot in the late 90s where she was cool again.

I have to admit that I thought Sanford and his lady love were kinda romantic.

And his wife doesn’t seem that… soft.

Her reaction when she found the tell-tale steamy letter: “I didn’t think he had it in him. . . . It’s one thing to forgive adultery; it’s another thing to condone it. . . . He was told in no uncertain terms not to see her.”

On their relationship: “It wasn’t exactly love at first sight . . . It was more like friendship at first sight.”

In that same article, her friend called her, “one of those people who is always the smartest person in the room.”

As for the “other woman,” her doorman, who needs an agent because he should be writing romance novels said:

“She was never seen dating any men. She was always with her children. She always dresses really smart, and one often wondered why such an attractive woman was alone,” he said.

“Now we are beginning to understand that she was carrying on this secret affair,” he said. “That’s why there was a certain sadness to her face, like she was suffering, probably because the man she loved couldn’t be with her.”

I just read their emails, which I wasn’t going to do, but I did. They are beautiful. A lot of people never feel like this in their lives, ever, and it sounds like Sanford had never felt like that before. I found one detail very telling in one of his emails:

I have been specializing in staying focused on decisions and actions of the head for a long time now — and you have my heart. You have oh so many attributes that pulls it in this direction. Do you really comprehend how beautiful your smile is? Have you been told lately how warm your eyes are and how they softly glow with the special nature of your soul. I remember Jenny, or someone close to me, once commenting that while my mom was pleasant and warm it was sad she had never accomplished anything of significance. I replied that they were wrong because she had the ultimate of all gifts — and that was the ability to love unconditionally. The rarest of all commodities in this world is love. It is that thing that we all yearn for at some level — to be simply loved unconditionally for nothing more than who we are — not what we can get, give or become. . . . Since our first meeting there in a wind swept somewhat open air dance spot in Punta del Este, I felt that you had that same rare attribute. Above all else I love that inner beauty about you. . . . As I mentioned in our last visit, while I did not need love fifteen years ago — as the battle scars of life and aging and politics have worn on this has become a real need of mine. You have a particular grace and calm that I adore.

So, his wife, or “someone,” but he attributes it to his wife, told him his mother, who gave him unconditional love and whom it sounds like he deeply loved, had never accomplished anything of significance?

I doubt he really couldn’t have been reached in Argentina, if he needed to be.

I want this guy in the Republican party. He’s a human being. This is why I like no state interference in personal lives: they’re grey areas, and everyone has a different opinion.

Chuck Blow, who I’m learning can always be relied on for some “let’s string ‘em up” insanity, points out that Sanford voted to impeach Clinton. A love affair between two forty-something adults is altogether different from getting the insecure, overweight, college-age intern to blow you (Apologies, Chuck!) in the Oval Office. But Mr. Blow further asserts that all Republicans are hypocrites who have higher divorce rates, higher teen pregnancy rates, and higher rates of subscriptions to online porn. Aside from the dubiousness of the statistics summoned by Mr. Blow, it sounds like “red” stands for red-blooded. Unlike the Democrats, who either never bother to get married or their only relationship is with their cat.

Library is closing….