Memo to politicians: Just say no to dumb stuff

So Fort McMurray MLA Mike Allen says he’s here “to face the music.”

Did he not hear the strains of that music playing warningly in his head when he allegedly sought the services of a prostitute, while representing the Alberta government at a conference in St. Paul, Minn.?

Allen is the latest in a long line of politicians who never seem to think they’ll get caught doing naughty things, even though history shows that politicians’ peccadillos attract discovery the way trailer courts attract tornadoes.

And when the politicians do get caught, they read from the same script. It fools no one.

When former U.S. congressman Anthony Weiner was caught sexting pictures of himself to various women in 2011, he said he felt “deeply ashamed” of his “terrible judgment and actions,” adding that what he’d done was “very dumb.” But he’d been doing it for three years. In all those three years, did the thought never occur to him that he was doing something very dumb and might be caught?

After he told his staff he was off hiking in the Ap- palachians, but was really in Argentina visiting his mistress, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford held a press conference in 2009, apologizing to his family for “the way that I let them down ... There are moral absolutes, God’s law is indeed there to protect you from yourself. There are consequences if you breach that.”

The theology lesson about consequences and the remorse for letting his family down, conveniently kicked in only after — not before — he was outed for cheating on his wife and lying to his staff about his co-ordinates on the planet.

A politician can sprout a conscience in public faster than a lawn sprouts toadstools after it rains.

Talking to Jay Leno about getting caught in a prostitution ring that was targeted by a federal investigation, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer decried his own behaviour as “a failure of judgment in a grotesque way that is a moral failing.” Investigators reportedly thought that Spitzer spent about $80,000 on hookers over a number of years. Apparently, throughout those years, he was functioning on amoral autopilot, a state in which “grotesque” and “moral failing” were not in his vocabulary. Then, he had to face the same music whose beat is rising to a crescendo once again as Mike Allen prepares to face it.

By the way, according to the Urban Dictionary, face the music “dates back to 1850, but the exact origin is unknown. One theory is that it comes from the theatre world, where musicians were in a pit in front of the stage, so ‘to face the music’ was to turn toward the audience. Another theory says it comes from a Civil War military ceremony where an officer that is about to be cashiered is literally drummed out.”

Both definitions are delightfully apropos regarding the fate of a politician whose problems with his zipper are now part of the zeitgeist.

Allen’s downfall came after he apparently logged onto the website backpage.com, which is pretty innocuous until you look beyond the “buy/sell/trade antiq. -collectibles” to the “escorts, body rubs, strippers & strip clubs, dom & fetish” etc. That’s where undercover police placed the ad to which Allen responded, an ad that led him to a rendezvous with two female undercover officers and his arrest and booking under suspicion of engaging in prostitution.

“I apologize to my family, my friends, my constituents, my colleagues, my staff, and to all Albertans for the embarrassment I have caused in failing to live up to the standards expected of me and the standards I expect of myself,” Allen said.

Why weren’t those standards top of mind until after he’d been caught? Why didn’t he think of “all Albertans” before, not after? Why didn’t he recognize earlier his imminent alleged “profound lapse” of judgment and then decide not to do it?

Healthy cynicism tells us that if Allen had linked up with a hooker instead of two police officers, nobody would have found out about his apparent failure to live up to the standards he now bemoans not having lived up to, and he would not now be apologizing for his admitted lapse of judgment.

Wouldn’t it be so much simpler not to do dumb stuff in the first place? Like fellow MLA Wayne Cao, who attended the same conference, and whiled away his free time at a museum, where the worst trouble you can get into is maybe knocking over one of those velvet-rope things at an exhibit.

Yet, politicians keep believing that they can get away with being bad. Maybe they delude themselves into thinking that even though the record is riddled with the forced repentance of other politicians who have gotten caught, it won’t happen to them. But it always does, and then here comes the pious talk of morals and judgment, and resignations.

In his interview with Jay Leno, Eliot Spitzer said that “hubris is terminal.”

Well, politicians, this express train goes to the Hubris Terminal. All aboard!