You guys, it's totally NO BIG DEAL that the Governor of Alabama, a deacon with the First Baptist Church of Tuscaloosa, was recorded telling an advisor that he wants to put his hands on her breasts. That's just showing normal executive leadership affection for a staffer! Totally non-sexual!

"When I stand behind you and I put my arms around you, and I put my hands on your breasts, and I put my hands on —" and here the recording gets muffled for a moment, so try not to think about what might be happening to the Governor's mouth to produce such a noise "— and pull you real close ... Hey, I love that too, putting my hands under you.”

Nothing to see here! Just a normal workplace phone call! "I love many members of my staff," Bentley explained yesterday. "In fact, all the members of my staff. Do I love some more than others? Absolutely." Well, that certainly sounds reasonable.

He added in the off-color recording, "Lemme tell you what we’re gonna have to do tonight: Start locking the door. If we’re gonna do what we did the other day, we’re gonna have to start locking the door."

Naturally, Bentley's politics are exactly what you would expect: "I support the Defense of Marriage Act, affirming the right of states not to recognize same-sex marriages licensed in other states ... Alabamians should work together to protect traditional marriage."

And also: "Abortion is a fundamental assault on the sanctity of innocent human life."

He moved to cut off all state funding for Planned Parenthood.

I'm going to skip further itemization of all of his socially conservative moralizing, because we've heard it all over and over and over and over and over. We know exactly who this man is, so there's no particular reason to be shocked that he likes to put his hands all over his staffer's breasts and "under you."

So now we get to enjoy watching him twist and squirm in the grasp of exposure, like Jack caught by a indignant internet-giant. One one hand, it must be super-embarrassing to have your sex life suddenly dragged out in front of the whole country. Most of us have limits about what we want people to know about us, and I for one would be mortified if you found out what my partner did to me a few nights ago at my insistence.

Most of us can all sympathize with the humiliation of a private conversation being exposed out in the open. But on the other hand, most of us aren't the Planned-Parenthood-defunding governor of Alabama.

Bentley's wife filed for divorce a few months ago, so God only knows what sorts of conversations are happening in his home. In a nicer parallel universe, they have an open marriage, free to fool around with anyone they like, and because he doesn't have a crazy cooped-up libido he no longer feels the need to tell everyone else what to do with their genitals.

But that's not the world we live in. Instead, Bentley and his aide/beloved staffer have built their careers by putting handcuffs on everyone else's genitals but their own. And not in a fun spanky way.

"I made a mistake. Two years ago I made a mistake," he said at a press conference yesterday. "I am truly sorry and I accept full responsibility."

A reporter present asked him what, exactly, he was apologizing for. "For whatever has been reported," he said.

Fuck this guy.