BellaOnline Forums Education History Bob Greene, Meet my Delete Key

How do you feel about the scandal surrounding the former Tribune columnist? There's been a lot of other women come forth since the story broke about the teenager he had an affair with.

As an EX-fan, I feel like he violated the trust his readers had in him also. <img src="/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" />

If he was writing about say sports, I would be upset but I suppose would just consider him one of a group of people that is dishonest. I don't like dishonest people, but they exist.

But if he's out there writing about issues of honesty and dishonesty, and supposedly writing about these things objectively, I definitely would feel betrayed. People trusted him, and he wasn't worthy of trust.

His writing featured his own viewpoints on things, and portrayed a very moral sort of person. In Once Upon a Town, he was suposed to be too embarrassed to go to a bikini contest alone. He was the star of his writing, so his character was an issue, since we were supposed to see things through his eyes. His character and personality were his product. He was celebrating the morality of this town in his book, while behaving immorally himeself. That makes his opinions pretty worthless. He didn't portray his writings through the eyes of an immoral person who admired the moral. He portrayed them through the eyes of someone who was himself moral.

Greene Cheese

What amazes me is the fact that in comments made about the incident such things are said as "the girl was of legal age." As if this excuses him for what he did with her! No one is sure whether she was 17 or 18. But that doesn't matter. The fact is that she AND her parents came to meet him at his OFFICE, because he was willing to help her with her high school project. He was "mentoring" her and he took advantage of his position as mentor.

This is not about whether anything was consensual. It is about the mentor/student relationship. And it is about a MARRIED man in his 40's (with children) sleeping with a girl young enough to be his daughter--a man who chose to build his public image as a supporter of traditional values.

When Clinton screwed up with Lewinsky, no one was really surprised because we all knew how he was. But this guy was a total surprise. Like Lisa said, if he hadn't paraded his so called morals :rolleyes: , this whole story may not have even been newsworthy.