Mo’ scandals, mo’ problems for Henry Mac

In Atty. Gen. Henry McMaster’s first salvo as a gubernatorial candidate, he based his platform on the taxpayers’ distrust of government. Mainly, he said, because of “too many scandals.” It may have been an easy cheap shot at a floundering sitting governor, but he said it and opened himself up. And now, another scandal involving him and his office crawled right in.

The other day, Asst. Atty. Gen. Roland “Not the Headless Thompson Gunner” Corning was caught with a barely-legal stripper in a cemetery with a car full of sex toys and Viagra. A married man. A top lieutenant and a cog in the state’s highest law-enforcement agency.

McMaster fired him. Good for him. But this scandal will not go away.

This is now a pattern.

A few years ago, when he was railing against online predators, all the while McMaster failed to notice that his own children were involved in scandalous activity online. A group of his son’s fraternity brothers made a Facebook page of his daughter, who was then in high school. The comments from his son’s friends about her were lewd and the picture they used of her was certainly not tame.

As attorney general, McMaster did several public service announcements about underage drinking, all the while pictures of his son passed out drunk at parties were being passed from one political consultant to the other.

And now this. After his failed PR stunt against Web giant Craigslist over prostitution, one of his assistants is caught with a sex worker.

Psychologists have a name for this: they call it “projection.”

Also, let us not forget the flip-flopping on accepting contributions from attorneys who were hired, with no-bid contracts, to work the Eli Lilly case. First, his campaign was steadfast that he did nothing wrong, while the State Ethics Commission said differently. A week later, McMaster’s campaign did an about-face and refunded a portion of the money. Sources close to Wolfe Reports, not to mention the Wall Street Journal, say that there was a lot more money involved.

With this fresh scandal — and all its intrigue being so close to Halloween — we are left to ponder two things: Is McMaster just blind to what is going on around him, too busy to deal with real life while preaching in the abstracts of political vote-getting — or is it something worse?

We are reminded of the old saying: Some wonder why tornadoes are always hitting trailer parks, but no one ever asks if the trailer parks are attracting the tornadoes.