This basic idea actually came up in a couple of different comedy sources I saw recently -- in one,
Jon Stewart is talking with Jim Lehrer about television's impact in choosing Presidents, and at 6:15, Jon says with this approach "you really do imagine, throughout history, losing great leaders".
Meanwhile,
a College Humor video, animated by Dan Meth, asks "What if political figures had always been forced to resign for being sexually inappropriate in private?"
For this thread, what I'm interested in is -- what are some potential answers to these questions, or to similar experiments of holding rulers of old to modern standards? How might history have been different* had any of these examples (individually) been so judged in his (or her) time?
*and please, ignoring the question of how the standards are applied in the first place
which is admittedly ASB.
Also, let's see if we can't keep this away from Chat...