Let’s Burst the Bubble by Mark Steyn on National Review Online

American Republicans have much more boring sex scandals than British Tories

Literate, amusing article:

"In its heyday, Brit sex was about the action — Lord Lambton’s three-in-a-bed bi-racial sex romp; Harvey Proctor’s industrial-scale spanking of rent boys; Max Mosley’s Nazi bondage sessions, with a fine eye for historical accuracy and the orders barked out in surprisingly accurate German; Stephen Milligan’s accidental auto-erotic asphyxiation while lying on a kitchen table wearing fishnet stockings . . . With the exception of the last ill-fated foray, there was an insouciance to these remarkably specialized peccadilloes. By contrast, American sex scandals seem to be either minor campaign-finance infractions — the cheerless half-hearted affair with an aide — or, like Governor Sanford’s pitiful tale (at least as recounted at his press conference and as confirmed by the e-mails), a glimpse of loneliness and social isolation."

"We have the governor of South Carolina resorting to subterfuge worthy of one of those Mitteleuropean operettas where the Ruritanian princess disguises herself as a scullery maid to leave the castle by the back gate for an assignation with a dashing if impoverished hussar garbed as a stable lad. Perhaps some enterprising producer would like to option a Carolinian update of Prince Bob, the hit of the 1902 theatrical season in Budapest, in which the eponymous hero, a son of Queen Victoria, escapes 'the bubble' of Buckingham Palace by getting out on the streets and wooing a Cockney serving wench."