Yet Another McDonnell Bites the Dust

Family Christmas card 2010; Sean's back left.

Gov. Bob McDonnell pictured himself as a deeply-devoted family man with a bunch of kids and a former Redskins cheerleader wife when running for governor a couple of years ago. You know, Republican, family values. These days though, his family is looking more like the Kardasians than the First Family of Virginia.

Latest in a fast-moving freight-train of dysfunction is the arrest of one Sean McDonnell, a 21-year-old soccer-playing senior at the University of Virginia, who has just been busted in Charlottesville for drinking and cussing. Here's the story in the Times-Dispatch.

Now, drinking and cussing are what college seniors, juniors, freshmen and sophomores do. It's like brown hair. But not if you're the governor's son and not if the governor's wife and daughters are already caught up in a web of sin, stupidity, malfunction and ethics violations reaching from their toes to their eyebrows.

Sean, whose daddy, mama and sisters have already been fingered for improprieties of one sort or another, might well have done better to have laid off the booze and kept his mouth shut. But then, is his daddy in a strong enough place to even make suggestions about bad behavior? Probably not.

One old buddy of mine suggested this is not a story and I replied (on Facebook): "This one would have slid right under the rug, but for everything else going on. One kid, one too many drinks, one "fuck you, I'm the governor's son" isn't a lot to write home about but when you figure that two sisters, Mom and Dad are defending themselves from all sides (leaving one twin brother yet to be caught), it is, indeed a story. A story of the decline of one American family and of a family taking an entire state for a ride."