I think he loved this other woman. I think he still does. And he won’t belittle or renounce that love because it was, and is, something real.

I feel awful for Sanford’s wife and kids. But compared with all the cheaters who have gone before him, I don’t think less of him for genuinely loving the other woman or for admitting it. It beats the hell out of seducing somebody, kicking her to the curb, and pretending she was nothing to you—or really meaning it.

He wasn’t just having a meaningless fling. He really loves her. Well, gosh, that makes it all okay, I guess. Turns out betraying his wife, the mother of his four young sons, is actually quite romantic.

The problem is, a married man isn’t supposed to be forming deep, meaningful friendships with women that can turn into something special and romantic. A married man is supposed to keep his damn distance from women he could be attracted to.

I’m not saying married people can’t have business associates or even friends of the opposite sex, but I am saying they shouldn’t have close, intimate friends of the opposite sex. The kind of friends you e-mail or text several times a day — every day. The kind of friends who become the first person you want to talk to when something important happens in your life. That kind of friends.

As far as throwing the other woman under the bus, well, doesn’t that go with the territory of being a home-wrecking slut? Smart women know that most of the time, the married guy runs back to wifey when he gets caught cheating. Once in a while the home-wrecker rolls the dice and gets lucky, and the guy actually leaves his wife and marries her, but most of the time she ends up like Monica Lewinsky — used, discarded and humiliated while the powerful man she fell for picks up the pieces of his life and tries to pretend she never existed.

Apparently Mark Sanford is a more sensitive guy than Bill Clinton, and Maria Belen Chapur is luckier than Monica Lewinsky. His bizarre disappearance wasn’t just your run of the mill, south of the equator booty call.

I realize I sound hopelessly cynical, but that’s because I’ve been studying politics and politicians for my entire adult life. My undergraduate major was political science, and I got my first taste of politicians’ sexual mores on a college trip to Sacramento to see California politics up close and personal. Real personal, if you get my drift. No, I didn’t have sex with any of them, but not for lack of a couple of them trying. A few years later, I was propositioned by a sitting governor in a Lake Tahoe casino. I won’t say which one, but he’s doing prison time now (lucky I turned him down) so that narrows it down if you’re curious.

I’ve written before about how money and power are inextricably entangled, and the same is true for money and sex — and power and sex. Especially power and sex. The sad fact is, women are turned on by powerful men. God only knows how men women Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton slept with during their political careers. If Barack Obama wanted to, he could have a different woman every night of the week. The aphrodisiac of power means that even presidents who look like Lyndon Johnson can get laid, but a young president with pecs like that? Contemplating President Obama’s options must make Bill Clinton almost apoplectic with envy.

I don’t mean to imply, however, that I think President Obama has been unfaithful to his wife. Frankly, I’d be surprised to learn that he had. He’s one cool, careful customer — a man who appears to be driven more by the lust for power than the lust for women. His wife is so popular, his daughters so adorable, that an extramarital affair would cost him far more in squandered political capital than any momentary pleasure could be worth.

Does Mark Sanford wonder now if his Maria is worth it? Worth losing what looked like a pretty good shot at that brass ring in 2012? Sex and power, power or sex. It must have driven him half mad this past year. Part of me almost feels sorry for him.

I said almost. Because, you see, I’m a wife and mother of four, just like Jenny Sanford. So you’ll understand if I can’t quite manage to find anything about this affair even remotely romantic.

The movie star who wants to be governor of my state and says Esquire misquoted him and he doesn’t really think Vietnam vets are punks. We’ll see what my fellow New Mexicans who are veterans think of that come 2010.

Nadya Suleman. How could I, a mother who blogs about both parenting and politics, have not written about the Octomom yet? And my goodness, where to begin? Of course I don’t think having a baker’s dozen plus children out of wedlock is a good thing when you’re on welfare and sponging off your financially struggling parents. But neither do I think the vicious opproprium heaped upon the woman her critics have taken to calling Octopussy is within the bounds of decency. And the self-righteous clamoring for strict regulation of the fertility business sends a chill up my spine. While I agree that implanting eight embryos in an unmarried welfare mother’s womb isn’t exactly recommended social policy, I am nervous about the prospect of draconian laws that may make it impossible for couples of modest means to avail themselves of reproductive technologies. Amid all the shouting about how “something ought to be done” to prevent more “litters” like Ms. Suleman’s, I think we ought to give serious thought as to what that “something” is, and who (or more likely, which government bureaucracy) is going to be the “someone” doing it.

William Saletin telling us in the New York Times that “This Is the Way the Culture Wars End“: we win and you lose, you stupid Republican rednecks. I’m paraphrasing, of course. He starts off with a bunch of blather about going beyond the sterile debates that aren’t getting anywhere, blah, blah. And his conclusion? On abortion: make it less common by making birth control more common, but of course keep it legal. On gay marriage: not only legalize it (marriage, not just domestic partnership) but in fact promote it, because marriage is good for society whatever the sex of the spouses. Is this really the way he thinks the culture wars end? He tells me what I’m supposed to believe, and I say, “Oh, right, okay. Now I get it. Thanks,” and do an immediate 180 on every tenet of my belief system. And leftists call us stupid!

Parents in Albuquerque being furious because instead of letting their kids go lunchless when the parents fail to pay the school lunch bill, the public schools provide the kids with free cheese sandwiches for lunch. And what’s wrong with a free lunch for kids whose parents don’t pay for lunches and don’t send sack lunches either? Well, it isn’t the same hot lunch the kids with paying parents get. And having to eat a cheese sandwich instead of meatloaf is damaging the kids’ self-esteem. So far the Albuquerque public school parents have racked up $140,000 in unpaid lunch bills, which I guess the school district is just expected to eat. Like a cheese sandwich.

That’s about half the stuff I tore out of the newspaper or bookmarked. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get to the rest. Or maybe I’ll make pizza dough and popsicles instead.