STEYN: SOUTH CAROLINA HAS A CHEATING, SELF-DESTRUCTIVE GOVERNOR BECAUSE OF LIBERALISM

Yup, that's the message from the insufferable Mark Steyn, along with (as I suggested a few days ago) the talking point that governors should be able to go AWOL for days and days, and the only reason we don't think so is that we're zombified addicts of Big Government:

...At the news conference, the governor rationalized his unfaithfulness to Mrs. Sanford by saying that he needed to get out of "the bubble." ...

Although staffers kept up his ghostwritten tweet of the day on Twitter, by Monday state senators were revealing that they hadn't heard from the Governor since Thursday.

And we can't have that, can we? ...

In a republic of limited government, the governor, two-thirds of the state legislature and the heads of every regulatory agency should be able to go "hiking the Appalachian Trail" for a lot longer than five days, and nobody would notice....

... The real bubble is a consequence of big government. The more the citizenry expect from the state, the more our political class will depend on ever more swollen Gulf Emir-size retinues of staffers hovering at the elbow to steer you from one corner of the fishbowl to another 24/7.

Yup, that's right -- it's not a problem that he was gone and incommunicado -- it's a problem that we think that's a problem.

And now here's how big government actually made Sanford cheat:

"Why are politicians so weird?" a reader asked me after the Sanford news conference. But the majority of people willing to live like this will be, almost by definition, deeply weird. So big government more or less guarantees rule by creeps and misfits....

Small government, narrow responsibilities, part-time legislators and executives, a minimal number of aides, lots of days off: Let's burst the bubble.

Uh-huh -- if in recent years we'd shrunk the government of the dominant country on the planet to the size of the Bugtussle Town Board, Mark Sanford would have remained faithful to his wife.