2012: one down...
Hard to believe that Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina was once mentioned seriously as a potential candidate for Republicans hoping to take back the White House from Barack Obama in 2012.
Sanford, previously best known for trying to reject the Obama Administration stimulus money for his state's many unemployed citizens, is out in the woods somewhere as I write this. No, really. Last weekend, he ditched his security detail and headed off alone to the woods with a backpack. Apparently the pressures of idiocy finally became too much to bear, or maybe the thought of fighting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for the GOP nomination in 2012 finally made him snap.
The latest is that he's somewhere on the Appalachian Trail, which cuts across western NORTH Carolina but not South Carolina, the cradle of slavery and the Civil War that he pretends to govern. How appropriate, I thought.
Back in the early 1990s, after reading about a series of bloody murders on the Appalachian Trail, including the murders of a young man and woman near Duncannon, Pa., north of Harrisburg, I did an in-depth investigation of Appalachian Trail crime for The Patriot-News, talking to police in every state along the trail between Georgia and Maine. For this I earned the undying hatred of the Appalachian Trail Commission, which was then fond of saying, "You're safer on the trail than driving to the trail." Actually, you're not. I feel much safer in my car.
What I learned from police and psychologists was that troubled people are drawn to the Appalachian Trail. They see it as a sort of green leaf utopia that will apply balm to their souls. Which it may, for a time, but without curing their underlying ills. Serious problems can arise when these troubled souls realize that and then come in contact with real hikers on the trail. That's what happened when Paul David Crews, the Duncannon killer, met his young victims at a trail shelter on Cove Mountain.
Crews was from (drum roll) South Carolina. Need hikers worry about Gov. Sanford? Probably not, unless he has his "budget knife" in his backpack...
I'll stop now.