Coverup FAIL

Late last week, the day before a certain celebrity death took over front pages all around the world, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford 's face adorned the front pages of Chinese-language newspapers here in Taipei.

Like everyone else in the world, Taiwanese people do not follow the ins and outs of domestic American politics with the interest of an American political junkie. And this is as it should be. I doubt the average East Asian can name a single American governor with the exception of Schwarzenegger (and possibly Palin, maybe).

But Sanford's story is compelling. Why? Sex? Not just sex, I think. The Sanford story broke just a week after Senator John Ensign admitted an extramarital affair, and frankly I'd be gobsmacked if many people outside of the US even know who Ensign is. Or even people inside the US. Ensign's story just didn't make that big of a splash.

It's because Sanford made a great big idiot of himself. He tried to keep everything under wraps, he failed hilariously, and now he's ensured that his tenure as governor will be remembered for this one thing above all else. John Scalzi's got the situation summed up nicely in a LOLcat picture.

And so he dominated the front pages for a day in a country where the people have absolutely no reason to care what the governor of a US state is doing or who he is sleeping with.

This makes me very happy about my prospects for one day writing fiction. My idiot plotting seems so much more plausible now that I know I live in a world where Sanfordian incompetence is going on in the highest levels of government.