Jimmy Carter said it best by saying something along the lines of "I have committed adultery many times in my heart". That's certainly an adage I wish people in political public life would take to heart, although perhaps our politicos have been studying history more than the would like to let us know...

Having a mistress in the White House does have lots of historical precedence:

1. Bill and Monica.

2. John and Marilyn, John and a girlfriend of Sinatra's....shoot...anything that wasn't nailed down (provided his pain pills and steroid shots weren't causing him "other problems"). And who shares a girl with your brother? Ooky.

3. Thomas Jefferson had a black mistress (How do you think those bi racial children of Jefferson and Sally Hemings came to be? Osmosis?)

4. LBJ had Madeline Duncan Brown and Alice Glass.

5. George Bush senior reportedly had a long standing relationship with Jennifer Fitzgerald.

6. I find nothing on Ford. He seems to have been a good guy all around. And he owned a Golden Retriever.

7. Nixon, in addition to being a poor television debater, a bad wearer or makeup, and an even worse liar, DID have a mistress, but I'll be darned if I can think of her name.

8. Warren Harding had a relationship with Nan Britton during his campaign, his election, his tenure in the White House.

9. Franklin D. Roosevelt had most famously Lucy Mercer almost up until his death, I believe.

10. James Garfield canoodeled with the very married Lucia Calhoun.

11. Kay Summersby and Dwight Eisenhower.

This is a small sample, of course. If you disregard the Thomas Jefferson example as an oddity that exists today only because there are heirs, and DNA, and money, and press (TJ was a slave owning, sperm implanting bigot! - someone, somewhere is looking to cash in), you will note that most of these stories are from the last centurty, and from the last part of the last century, when the media really lost all respect for what should or should not be reported as news. What someone does in the bedroom is not news, no matter who important they are, unless they are raping children (and then it's a crime). We all watched Bill and Edwards lie about their extra marital affairs (really a simple "I'm sorry, that's a personal matter between my wife and I" would have been much more elegant..I think at some point, you have to refuse to play the game in order to get off the merry go round).

I guess that's my point; take your bedroom antics out of the press. Keep your fly and your mouth zipped. Practice the art of public grace and deflection. I don't want to know your business, and neither does the rest of the world. If you say "I did it" and move on, the rest of the world would too.