The Politicians’ Wife-Swapping Club

It seems that ever day another politician has cheated on his wife . Anthony Weiner is currently in the public eye, due to his Twitter malfeasance, but he’s not the first, nor will he be the last. The pandemic of unfaithful husbands in “Washington” is covers the city like one of those deadly flu strains that newspapers are always warning us about.

This is not a new problem. Political philandering has been around from the very beginning, when Amen-Hotep, may he live forever, had a fling with a young priestess of Isis that was leaked by his grand scribe, Breit-Bart. Amen-Hotep, may he live forever, denied the affair, apologized, held a lot of press conferences and eventually found Ra. The cycle has continued to this day.

Because of its long history and continual presence, almost no one has thought of a way to solve the problem of political infidelity. Nevertheless, it must be solved. For one, if we cannot trust our leaders to manage their own marriages, how can we trust them to run our country? More importantly, political infidelities attract a massive amount of media attention. This distracts us from more important things, such as food, Sharknado, and a Joe Biden look-alike contest. So it is important to solve this problem. How can we keep politicians from slippin’ around when their wives aren’t looking?

One solution comes from Plato’s Republic. In that work, Plato’s mouthpiece Socrates outlines the ideal city, under the rule of the Guardians. The Guardians do not partake in traditional marriage; instead, they live in something more of a commune. Plato writes, “These women are to be all common to all these men [i.e. the guardians of the city]; no one must have a private wife of his own, and the children must be common too, and the parent shall not know the child nor the child its parent.” (255) This was known as the “community of women;” Marx mentions it ironically in The Communist Manifesto.

This idea seems good at first, but it presents too many problems. Plato was writing in the days before feminism. If a “community of women” were established today, it would almost instantly become an “empowered” and “supportive” community of women. Copies of Lean In would be passed around, careers would be started, lives changed, stereotypes demolished, awareness raised, and the original purpose, viz. satisfying the carnal desires of our elected officials, would be cast to the wayside. And we end up back where we were.

I propose a better alternative—a Federally-funded, politicians’ wife-swapping program.

The traditional idea of wife-swapping involves primarily swapping the physical affections of marriage without any of the attendant duties. This is not what I propose. I propose that the politician in question actually swap wives. Instead of having an affair with some cute young thing, he instead will have to marry said cute young thing.

I’ll put it another way: Whenever some politician has an affair they always, always tell the girl things like “My wife is a scumbag. I’m going to marry you as soon as I can get a divorce.” It’s part of the “I’m-Having-An-Affair” playbook. Under this new program, the politician would actually have to marry the girl he tells this too.

Under my proposed Federal Wife-Swapping Initiative, whenever a politician wants to have an affair, he and his prospective lover will be required to fill out a seventeen (17) page Federal Wife-Swapping Form. The politician will agree to enter into a marriage contract with the woman for a total of five (5) years, after which he can choose to continue, to seek an annulment, or to run screaming into the arms of his first wife. The politician will further agree to give to the lover all the rights and duties that a wife is entitled to under the law, including rights of interior decoration, event planning, home management, baby names, and all other sorts of stereotypically feminine things. (The politician in question is not likely to be bothered by the hegemony of traditional gender roles.) Finally, the politician will sign a written agreement that he will send all children that contain his genetic code to the high school/college(s) that the lover attended/is currently attending. The politician will mail this form, along with copies of his tax returns, both to the Federal Office of Wife Swapping, The Department of Justice, The Argentinian Embassy, and the New York headquarters of Fox News.

At first, this may seem like it gives politicians a license to have affairs. But let’s follow this out to its logical conclusion. Let us suppose that a Senator, we’ll call him Andres Catastrophe, was having a fling with Susy Q. Under this law he would be forced to leave his first wife (Sophy Stand-by-your-man) and actually marry Ms. Q.

We can predict with reasonable accuracy what will happen. Immediately following the marriage Ms. Q realizes that Senator Catastrophe had used Instagram filters to make himself look more attractive on Twitter. By month five Ms. Q tells Senator Catastrophe that she’s pregnant, and that she wants to name the son Pumpkin if it’s a boy and Britni if it’s a girl. Senator Catastrophe realizes that Ms. Q comes from the shallow end of the gene pool. By the middle of the second year, Senator Catastrophe is having to change diapers and hand-feed the child (Pumpkin Catastrophe) that Gerber baby food that looks like vomit, in accordance with subsection C-12 of the Federal Wife-Swapping Form.

By the end of that same year, Ms. Q has come to the belief that Senator Catastrophe leaves his underwear everywhere, spits on the faucet when he brushes his teeth, and spends most of his spare time sitting on the couch watching “Monday Night Football.” She is wrong about the last part: Senator Catastrophe spends his spare time looking through the Federal Wife-Swapping Form for loopholes, unaware of subsection A-9: “Searching for loopholes in the FWSF is punishable by repeated viewings of Paint Your Wagon in an unironic way.”

By year 3, Senator and Ms. Catastrophe are having heated arguments about whether to paint the master kitchen “Hazy Dawn” or “Courtyard Tan” These fights escalate so much that they decide to go to a marriage counselor, who happens to be John Edwards in disguise. The marriage counselor charges them an outrageous amount of money to listen to his advice, most of which consists of quotes from Deepak Chopra taken out of context. Senator and Ms. Catastrophe realize that “they truly value each other, despite their differences. They have a good cry, hug each other, go home and then fight about how much the marriage counselor cost.

Year 4: The fights continue to get worse and worse. Andres Catastrophe, realizing that his wife’s white-trash upbringing has made her stronger and more dangerous than he is, flees to a battered women’s shelter. Susy Q holds a press conference at her home, talking about how hard it is to go through such trying times, but she will continue to “carry on.” Baby Pumpkin begins to look around for a publisher for his memoir. Random House jumps at the chance to publish a political book that has a baby’s face on it.

Year 5: After spending six months in a battered women’s shelter, Andres Catastrophe is considering becoming a Carmelite monk, so that he will never again have to see any women. This plan never materializes and he ends up drunk in a bar in New Jersey, frantically calling his first wife on his cell-phone. Susy Q is planning her political career—she describes herself as “kind of like Sarah Palin, but with a tongue-ring.” Pumpkin is hard at work on his next book, a tag-team effort with Dick Morris. Tentative title: Taking Candy From a Baby. Ms. Q begins making guest appearances on Meet The Press and Morning Edition. Mr. Catastrophe starts making guest appearances on Cops.

Year 6: Senator Catastrophe is arrested for a convenience store heist masterminded by himself and O.J. Simpson. There is heavy media coverage of the event until it is eclipsed by the coverage of the murder trial of the woman who ate her own children (Gloria Denise Kindall). Pumpkin’s books are a smash, and he begins making the rounds of the talk shows, adding important insights to the debate such as “ooh goo goo.” Pumpkins’ appearance on the O’Reilly Factor is notable because host Bill O’Reilly’s pugnacious questions makes Pumpkin cry, creating a backlash of internet outrage. Pumpkins’ appearance on The Daily Show is notable because it is one of the few moments when John Stewart met someone more immature than he is. Ms Q’s campaign for the senate heats up, as a video of her saying “Mitch McConnell is really hot” goes viral. Mitch McConnell is rumored to appear on the cover of American Spectator’s “Sexiest Conservative Men Alive” issue. Senator Catastrophe, watching the coverage from a cheap bar, begins to second guess his entire life.

Under this program, no politician would dare have an affair. Period.