Is it relevant that this Democrat pleaded guilty to stealing from the taxpayers?
Timothy P. Carney
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Megan Barry, you will learn from an Axios piece on her entry into a potentially competitive House race, is a pro-choice Democrat “with excellent name recognition” because she is the former mayor of Nashville, Tennessee, as well as “a medical doctor and former state senator from Clarksville.”
Why is she not in office now? Well, Axios has two lines about this: “She also has baggage related to her shocking 2018 resignation. … She resigned from office following the revelation of an affair with the head of her security detail.”
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This omits enough to be basically false. She resigned because she committed felony theft, to which she pleaded guilty.
She stole money from taxpayers to fund her affair. When a mayor is stealing public funds to fund her personal immorality, that’s pretty serious.
Yet, at the time, much of the news media covered it as simply a sex scandal.
And today, the Associated Press story on Barry’s run led with the sex scandal and buried the theft-of-public-funds felony conviction further down the story.
This prompted a very wise tweet from analyst Josh Barro.
I’ve always divided politicians’ sex scandals into two categories: the ones that reflect personal failings and the ones that reflect abuse of power. Former President Bill Clinton, John Ensign, and Megan Barry all abused their power in furtherance of their sexual immorality. The personal-only sex scandals are relevant since a person’s character is relevant to his fitness for office. The abuse-of-power sex scandals are very, very relevant because they reflect how much a person sees his or her position of power as a tool by which to serve his or her desires.
It’s depressing that the liberal media are willing to bury the abuse of power by Barry because people deserve to know that she wields power to serve her own immoral undertakings.