Mexico is the most tolerant nation for sex scandals on earth

Pay attention Anthony Weiner, Tiger Woods, Brett Favre and others caught up in public, sexual indiscretions.

Sex Scandal Tolerance Level

• Mexico – 57%
• Belgium – 55%
• USA – 48%
• France – 33%
• Japan – 28%
• Average – 44%

When politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrived in France last week, cleared of a New York sex scandal, he returned home smiling despite facing a frosty reception. Maybe he should have gone to Mexico, instead.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday shows 57 percent of Mexicans would be either very likely or somewhat likely to tolerate the sexual indiscretions of stars and politicians.

They were followed by Belgians at 55 percent. In the United States, the tolerance factor was 48 percent. France, in fact, was way down the list at only 33 percent, while Japan was the least forgiving country at only 28 percent.

Remember: No Fooling Around In The Land Of The Rising Sun – Japan

In total, 44 percent of some 18,700 respondents in more than 20 countries said they would likely tolerate a scandal.

The Reuters/Ipsos survey also asked if behavior exhibited in sex scandals was reflective of people’s true personalities, or if fame and power led them to think they could get away with their acts.

General Consensus In France (80%) – FAME Is The Root Cause Of Sex Scandal

In France, some 80 percent of respondents said fame was the root cause, while Mexico was about equally divided: 49 percent on the side of power and 51 percent on personality.

Throughout all the world, the decision was roughly split with 46 percent saying power and 54 percent citing personal characteristics. In the U.S. the percentages were 43 percent power, 57 personality.

“There is a Jekyll and Hyde issue here, and in some places the behavior is just more acceptable,” said John Wright, managing director at Ipsos.

In recent months Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund and a presumed candidate for the French presidency, faced a possible trial in the United States for allegedly attempting to rape a hotel maid.

Last week, New York City prosecutors dropped charges, allowing him to return to France where he faced a mostly chilly public reception and unease among his political allies.

Former U.S. congressman Weiner, golfer Woods and football star Favre faced their own sex scandals in the last two years.

Women Are As Likely As Men To Engage In Sexual Indiscretions

A slight majority of the respondents around the world, 51 percent, said women were just as likely as men to engage in sexual indiscretions but less apt to get caught in the act. Perhaps it’s no surprise, Mexicans agreed, at 51 percent.

The full poll can be found at http://www.ipsos.com.

Meanwhile, something not so politician friendly: -

Anthony Weiner of 'Big Weiner' Sexting Scandal Fame

Twitter = zero tolerance

Why the rules have changed

Yes, the footage is horrible, and the vulgar confrontation it depicts deeply discomfiting, but the truth is that Anthony Weiner got what he deserved yesterday in a resignation event almost as gross as his personal and public conduct.

Having sent unsought text messages about and photos of his private parts, Weiner found himself facing hecklers screaming questions at him about their size.

That was bad. This was worse:

Having spent days insulting those who sought only the truth, having lied in the most blatant manner and having instructed others to lie for him, Weiner then had the astonishing lack of grace to stand before the world and thank his parents for “instilling in me the values that got me to this point.”

That choice of words — which seems nice at first glance but which, in effect, unconsciously puts the blame for his behavior on his own mother and father — may represent the most disgusting thing he’s done so far.

But enough about him. Seriously. The question really is what this entire event says about American political life.

The answer: Zero Tolerance.

This is no good. We propose Congress to pass a bill to ban Twitter the Snitch !

No politician is going to survive a sex scandal any longer. No one. Not after Eliot Spitzer’s 2008 humiliation was followed by South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s extramarital “walk along the Appalachian Trail” in 2009, which was followed this year by the revelation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child, which was followed in turn by the indictment of 2004 vice-presidential candidate John Edwards.

Read: No Politician Is Going To Survive A Sex Scandal Any Longer

Consider this: Weiner is the third married member of Congress to resign his seat this year due to behavior resulting from sexual peccadillo. He follows Rep. Chris Lee (who went trolling for exotic partners on Craigslist) and Sen. John Ensign of Nevada (who resigned before the Senate Ethics Committee could bring him up on charges of having bought the silence of the husband of a staffer with whom he’d had an affair).

Like Ensign, whose misbehavior first became public knowledge in 2009, Weiner thought he could tough it out until the spotlight fixed on something else, or until his defenders became as vocal and powerful as his opponents.

That’s what Bill Clinton did back in 1998. More recently, it’s what David Vitter, the Republican senator from Lousiana, was able to do after getting enmeshed in a prostitution scandal in 2007. Vitter apologized with his wife standing next to him in humiliating subservience to his ambitions, and was reelected last year.

But the truth is that Vitter would not have survived if he’d been caught four weeks ago, instead of four years ago, and I doubt Clinton would have survived a day after the revelation of the blue Gap dress if he’d been president in 2011 rather than 1998.

Twitter is the reason. The citizenry’s disgust with political misbehavior has an entirely new kind of populist outlet, one that is uniquely resistant to mainstream-media efforts to choke off the oxygen of a story.

We all know Weiner was undone by Twitter, the same social-media system he misused when he mistakenly exposed a soft-core-porn photo of himself intended for a college kid in Washington state to the entire Twitterverse.

But Twitter didn’t destroy Weiner just because he’d done his dirty work on the site. It destroyed him because of what Twitter has become — a kind of national town hall of a sort and on a scale we’ve never seen before.

When the Vitter scandal hit in July 2007, Twitter was in its infancy; only 20,000 people were using it regularly. Those of us who weren’t had great difficulty understanding what it was and how it worked.

In the years since, Twitter has become the closest thing we’ve ever seen to a national town hall — a cacophony of voices that merges every now and then into a banshee wail.

That wail penetrated Weiner’s thick hide and overwhelmed the whiny protests of his ludicrous defenders. It could not be stilled or quieted, and it got its man.

Weiner won’t be the last.

You know, I used to think being a Politician is the best job on earth … Power, Fame, Money … especially in the third world … Judging from this report, guess I need some rethinking … the Universe is after all an ever changing entity.

By the way, where is FaceBook and Google in term of Sex Scandal Tolerance ?

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