It may not be important in the larger scheme of things. What with one hundred people being killed in Iraq yesterday and Michael Moore about to inject his sick propaganda into the heads of too many naive and unsuspecting Americans (let alone providing ammunition our enemies don't even need). But I'd like to take this opportunity to say that what happened to former U.S. Senate candidate Jack Ryan this week just plain sucks.
I don't know Mr. Ryan. I don't know his opinions and I don't know his politics and I don't much care. I certainly don't know if he actually pressured his former wife to go to a certain kind of club and perform whatever he allegedly asked her to perform.
But the fact is that hardly anybody else knows either and, more to the point, they don't seem to care. It's enough that the Chicago Tribune and TV station WLS, in an effort to make a partisan impact on a political race, managed to convince a California court to unseal records of an old child custody dispute. It's enough that the records contained disputed and unproven allegations in the context of a nasty legal battle in which, God knows, people never fabricate or distort the truth in order to "win."
It wasn't enough that both Mr. Ryan and his ex-wife tried their best, for their own sakes as well as for the sake of their young son, to keep their dirty laundry private. It wasn't enough that they'd managed to put all of that behind them and wish each other well. After all, whatever foibles or peccadillos this man may (or may not) have indulged in the past are certainly everyone's business and central to his ability to represent the people of Illinois, right?
An excerpt from Mr. Ryan's statement in the court records themselves, which has received much less publicity than Jeri Ryan's allegations, is instructive:
I feel very badly for Alex that his mother would mischaracterize our activities and try to libel me and our relationship in this manner. Jeri Lynn knows I have political aspirations, because I had them throughout our marriage. She attended many political functions with me and testified about them at her deposition. In addition, Jeri Lynn is a celebrity and it is extremely likely that the press will go to our public divorce file. Apparently, Jeri Lynn did not consider how Alex will feel about his parents or himself when he learns of this type of smut.
I certainly won't speculate as to who was telling the truth here, though in such matters it's not uncommon for both sides to embellish and obfuscate. But I will cast blame. It was despicable of the media to try to scrape up this story and it reflects poorly on our judicial system that they were successful.
Ryan is correct. There's no way he could have conducted a campaign on the issues with this garbage floating around. So we'll never know what kind of a politician he might have made or what impact he might have had. And that's a shame. Maybe not of monumental importance in the big picture, but a shame nonetheless.
Shabbat Shalom.
