Ronnie Polaneczky: These tools have trouble remembering their kids

NEW YORK State Assemblyman Rory Lancman sponsored a bill yesterday that calls for hotels to provide staff with electronic "panic buttons" to alert security in an emergency.

Lancman thinks that such a button might have halted the alleged pounce by International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on an unsuspecting chambermaid.

While I'm all for whatever keeps hard-working hotel workers safe from French pigs, I'd prefer such attacks don't happen in the first place.

But how do you keep the bloated egos and entitled libidos of rich, powerful men from doing damage, whether it's in a hotel with a chambermaid or, a la Arnold Schwarzenegger, in your own house with the woman who's been scrubbing your toilets for two decades?

Obviously, in the heat of the moment, these dopes aren't worried about losing their wives. Besides, they know they can replace their pissed-off partners with new ones faster than you can say "Newt Gingrich."

Nor does concern about legal repercussions prompt them to keep their junk in check. Do you think former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer cared that he risked arrest each time he bought sex from that hot hooker? Or that former Nevada Sen. John Ensign let fear of a federal probe keep him from diddling the wife of his top aide?

Clearly, concern for their wives or their own hides isn't enough to overwhelm their lust.

You know what might give them pause, though? Thoughts of their children. By most accounts, these philandering fathers have been decent dads. That's why, after the fact, they appear to be genuinely horrified by the pain their stupid sexcapades caused their kids.

Schwarzenegger is a junkyard dog, but I still winced for him when I heard that son Patrick Schwarzenegger changed his last name to "Shriver" on his Twitter account last week. How much does your kid have to hate you to do that? And how devastating must it feel, as a father, to know you hurt your child that deeply?

That's why I think these jerks ought to get tattoos of their kids faces - on their penises. It would remind them just who gets screwed when daddy's wee-wee wanders.

If disgraced former presidential candidate John Edwards had seen the trusting eyes of children Cate, Emma Claire and Jack staring up at him as he was about to bed goo-goo-eyed Rielle Hunter, he might have avoided becoming a National Enquirer cover boy.

If former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford had seen the inked smiles of sons Marshall, Landon, Bolton and Blake after secretly sneaking off to Argentina to be with lover Maria Belen Chapur, he might've limped back to the Appalachian Trail he was supposed to have been hiking.

And if Eliot Spitzer had remembered, by looking at Li'l Eliot, that hooker Ashley Alexandra Dupree wasn't much older than his daughters, Elyssa, Sarabeth and Jenna, he might have aborted that initial hotel tryst before being outed as Client No. 9.

As for Schwarzenegger baby-mama Patty Baena, where was her regard for her kids when she fluffed the boss' sheets? Her older daughter has referred to Baena as "a great mother," but Baena's mother-bear instincts must've been in hibernation when she let herself get knocked up. Unless she somehow believed that her love child would be thrilled to be at the center of a sex scandal.

Because, gosh, doesn't every 13-year-old boy want the world to imagine his mom doing it? And to have the world point to the similarity of his jaw line to The Terminator's as proof that his mom's a skank?

Oh, that poor, poor kid.

If Arnold and Co. need their penises tattooed to remember who they'll hurt the most if they let their little heads do the thinking, Baena and other would-be mistresses need a similar device to keep their lust in check. I suggest a tiny microchip, implanted in their ears, which would play a continuous loop of children crying in shame - a sound that can snap most women back to their senses.

Unless they let the cash-register sound of a paternity suit drown it out.

Email polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

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