The following statement, an unwelcome echo of an oldie but goodie from the Clinton Presidency, sets off an ethics alarm that sounds like fingernails on a blackboard. Kathryn Casey Quigley, an aspiring leader of the Suffolk County Democratic Committee, said that the photos were irrelevant. “They’re his private life,” she said, “and what matters are the policies he will advocate for and how he’ll fight to make life more affordable and fair for Suffolk County residents.” Gallant argued the same position, naturally. He wrote in a text to supporters saying of the photos, “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed — I have always been unapologetically me.” Adding that the photos “don’t make me less qualified to pilot a Blackhawk helicopter” and “don’t affect my ability to safely traffic commercial airliners.”

That text makes me more dubious of Gallant than the photographs: He’s not running for air traffic controller or helicopter pilot, he’s running for Congress. He’s ducking the issue and deflecting. The response is cowardly and dishonest. Is that the kind of weasel voters should want to represent them in Washington DC?

“I have always been unapologetically me” also makes me want to barf.

As for the “private life” refrain that we heard so often when Democrats and Clinton enablers argued that a President lying about getting blow-jobs in the Oval Office from a White House intern while he posed as the champion of feminists was merely engaging in “private personal conduct,” how can any Democrat or progressive or citizen not wearing a paper bag on his or her fool head have the chutzpah to argue that in 2021? Private life choices are as important indicia of character as public life choices (“Ethics is what you do when nobody’s looking”), and character is not only crucial to leadership, it often is leadership. The Left’s main attacks on Donald Trump since he first announced his candidacy in 2015 to this day have been based on his alleged character or lack of it, along with his hair, his skin color, his weight, his romantic life, what he said to Billy Bush backstage at a TV interview…and the list rolls out like Ko-Ko’s “little list” in “The Mikado.”

I might make the argument, if I were on the Democrat defense team, that as when Gallant was a model, what Gallant modeled is no more relevant than the roles Ronald Reagan played in films before he was a politician, and he played some really bad guys. Quigley’s defense, however, reminds me, as did their attempts to rationalize running Graham Platner, of the well-worn retort, “If Democrats didn’t have double standards they would have no standards at all.”

[WordPress suggests that I tag this post “poetry.”]