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trof

(54,255 posts)
Thu Jun 23, 2016, 07:55 PM Jun 2016

The Love Song of Robert Bentley, Alabama’s Horndog Governor



Burner phones! Secret tapes! The sex scandal currently engulfing the governor of Alabama has it all, except a typical villain. Robert Bentley was a kindly old grandpa and Sunday-school teacher. Then he got into politics and found that new temptations come with the keys to the governor’s mansion.

His announcement in 2010 that he was running for governor was greeted with laughter. The first poll he commissioned put his support at 2 percent. But then the two leading Republican candidates began savaging each other and Bentley's numbers improved. The more his opponents fought, the rosier Bentley's outlook became, until he locked up the Republican nomination. In a one-party state like Alabama, that was all he needed to win the governor's mansion. Bentley seemed to be a political version of his fellow Alabamian Forrest Gump—blown into office like a feather. He was dubbed “the accidental governor.” And yet, as time made clear, Bentley's unlikely path to power seemed to precipitate an equally unlikely change in character.

The temptations of the flesh that surround a politician are so common we're practically inured to the idea of a public official caught up in a private tryst. The intrigue that makes an incident memorable, rather, comes in the details—in the mysteries of how these relationships start, how they are discovered, and whether anything like love can be detected in the wreckage. Of course, the clues to whether these scandals are survivable—personally or professionally—also linger in these very same details.


Read more: http://www.gq.com/story/affair-robert-bentley-alabama-governor

LOTS more at link.
This is a bad (and really laughable) soap opera.
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