Ordinarily, I use my blog as a forum to write articles. I was very busy this week, so don't have time to write any of the several articles I'd really like to do on the Anthony Weiner matter. Maybe I'll get to some of it this weekend, maybe not. I'm going instead supplement by just posting my notes. That's what most people do with their blogs anyway, I suppose, just think aloud. So this is me thinking aloud. I reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks, as they say.
And note, this is not a defense of Weiner. I don't know what he did. It showed poor judgment in various ways, but not because I think anything I've heard so far is immoral. And people, even good politicians, have lapses of judgment. I think it's something he knows he can work on. But it should be kept in perspective.
This is a defense of the notion that elected officials must not be hounded from office for reasons of morality. For related reading, see also my article Diplomatic Immunity for our own Presidents?
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Hounding people from office because they've been embarrassed must not become the order of the day. It bypasses the consent of the governed. My saying this is not a defense of Anthony Weiner or his actions. I still support him, unless I hear he's violated a major law. But it's not about him just now—it's about the precedent it sets. If this hounding is successful, expect to see lots more of it to neutralize all of our best champions of social justice. That must not happen.
Were this to become the new standard, it will be just a matter of money. The people with the most money are capable of orchestrating the biggest embarrassments, or even just the greatest doubt. Too many people believe that where there is smoke there's fire, and Big Money is capable of creating a lot of smoke. So the people with truckloads of money will have final say on who can be in office. No one is squeaky clean enough to escape. Anyone who is clean enough is suspect for other reasons. I want to be represented by people who have lived life and made mistakes, not people who think it's possible to live life without making mistakes.
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Here here are excerpts from an email I sent to Ed Schultz, host of The Ed Show on MSNBC. There are some typos in it, and I abbreviated perhaps more than I should have, so some of it may not make as much sense as it seemed to late at night when I wrote it. I'll try to expand my meaning when I write a better version of this blog post later.
Note: I had stopped watching Ed while back, and wrote about that. After many months, I had peeked back in and decided he was back on track, so started watching again. As I noted above, people make mistakes and need learn from them. I disagree with him on this topic, but I don't find his position unethical—just incorrect both as a progressive advocate (which he plainly is) and even as a reporter.
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Private matters should not be asked about. Private matters will always be embarrassing. People who lie to get around having to answer should probably be saying "You have no right to ask." But the public doesn't accept that. The public wants politicians to lie, they just want them to lie successfully. No one wants to know another's sex life.
The guy you interviewed was absolutely right. Weiner is right on the issues. Let him do his job. If he's hounded from office, it will be partly your fault. And he will be replaced by someone who less well represents the interests of that constituency, as well as America itself.
[...] you're like the Republicans questioning the morality of who may serve. Your objection is the same as the objection to gays in the military. You want people to lie successfully and not tell you they have sex lives. But people who get elected to high office almost always have just a little more testosterone running than they should. This guy is a very passionate person on the floor of Congress-maybe that's related to his passion in the bedroom. Maybe the reason so many others in Congress are not adequately demonstrative on the floor of Congress is that they're wimps in the bedroom. Who knows? The point is that politicians make indiscretions. All we ask is that they keep them small and do their jobs. There is a reason that Presidents, for example, cannot be removed for mere breaches of ethics. There's a reason that they have to have commited "high crimes and misdemeanors". It's because otherwise good men can be nipped by mosquitos. And, frankly, the issues they do by day are just more important.
Jimmy Carter was as moral as they get, and no one liked him because he was ineffective. Morality is not all it's cracked up to be.
And the guy you interviewed as right on other things as well. A politician does work 24 hours a day, so talking about "on government time" is nuts.
Moreover, you talked about him taking time away from constituents, but it may take less time to do an online affair than to satisfy his wife. Or maybe he just can't be with his wife. Or maybe his wife doesn't like him or he doesn't like his wife. That's absolutely none of our business no matter the reason. But it's far from clear that his doing these things takes time away from the public.
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Get back to reporting news and stop helping the Republicans remove a powerful and effective Democrat for reasons they are not entitled to remove him for. It just offers them a strategy for going after others. We don't need that. They don't go after their own that way, and neither to the Democrats. So there is a gross asymmetry already. Don't aggravate it.
Do your job. Report news. Do not MAKE news where there was none. If you don't think the only news here is the media circus, you're not seeing the matter objectively.
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Comments
I heard someone last night say that lying about an embarrassing sexual matter does not automatically mean that a person is going to lie about anything else.
I look forward to reading an expanded blog about this if you get around to it.
aka, it's funny, I actually thought of that case the other day. Even people in other countries are not all in agreement, I bet. Many European countries would probably see it as either no news at all or a sign of power.
Matt, Mother Theresa and Gandhi are moral leaders, not political leaders. Render unto Caesar what is due Caesar and all that. As I noted, Carter was moral and it didn't help him govern well. I really like him, but there's a difference between really liking someone and getting the job done. See the article I pointed through to above about diplomatic immunity for Presidents.
I GET that Weiner never claimed to be a saint and some Republicans do just that and then get caught with their pants down, but that's the kind of parsing we don't have time for.
Rated because you always put your money where your mouth is.
no moral hazard in so claiming unreserved
thanks,
rated with love
Mary, thanks for visiting. I'll write more about the lying later. Thanks for flagging the concern.
Nikki, thanks for the vote of confidence. And I'll have more to say later for sure, as you've probably noted.
Jane, there's a lot I could say about what you raise as well, but I'm going to bite my tongue because there's already so much on the table.
if you wish to make your sexual adventures public, then
simply be
publically sexual without the
silly foreplay sexting or the adolescent
flirting or even the mysterious double entendres
nor even Romantic poetry
or
especially
dishonesty. kills the mood.
for the guy. later the girl.
Clinton got into trouble for lying under oath. He actually gets some sympathy from me, since everything that led up to that was a waste of time and taxpayer dollars, and barring a sexual harassment suit from an involved party, was nobody's business except for Hillary, Monica, and Bill. Even if he lied about it.
Yet, there you have it, he lied under oath. Impeachment was overkill, but I can't say we ignore it.
Weiner? I don't know if he's committed any crimes. The issue I see it is honesty. When lying becomes a way of life, to get power over others, then I start to think "sociopath" and start to consider whether this is a person I would trust with the job.
In other words -- we should generally ignore these things, but there are limits.
But beyond that, there's the question of stupidity. Perhaps I view it differently, but for a public figure, in this day and age, to tweet, text, email, or otherwise let out of his personal close possession of an image of himself nude, partially clothed, in an embrace with an "inappropriate" person -- well, I have to suspect stupidity.
So it also comes down to -- how stupid do we want our politicians to be? Why not give the job to someone a little less stupid?
So, discrete is OK -- even if it comes out by a fluke. Open is OK, too. Neither one should be newsworthy.
But I have a problem with stupid people, and sociopaths, and especially stupid sociopaths.
And it has nothing to do with the sex. There are plenty of stupid sociopaths lurking around DC who don't happen to involve sex. We need to get rid of them, too.
Don, your response is a bit cryptic, so I don't know what to say. Feel free to elaborate. But in any case thanks for visiting.
James (I'm skipping Poetess, but will return to her), you speak as if this were an error of choice rather than of failing to exert choice. I think its nature is different, both in the original offense and in the later response upon having it made public.
Bob, I think you can't make the case for this being sociopathic without implicating almost everyone. When a bad thing happens, we as a public like to console ourselves by thinking we would not be like that. But the ways in which we might be different might rely on hiding the close axis of a multi-dimensional space. Perhaps we'd not do that very thing, but everyone has their aspects they'd rather not hold up to public scrutiny, and faced with doing so, many are not quick enough on their feet but to compound the injury with babbling. To call that sociopathic seems unduly harsh. I'd call it more human. To be overcome? Sure. But saying it's sociopathic seems to implicitly suggest that there's no way “we non-sociopaths” could do that... well, ...You know, I almost don't have to go on because I feel so much more comfortable conversationally now having set myself so much apart from him, knowing that you and I are fundamentally of the class Good and that he is fundamentally of the class Bad and that this is what distinguished his actions from any we can conceive in ourselves. :) We all have our passions, and if caught... Well, there's a reason Jesus offered the suggestion that the person who is without sin throw the first stone and it's not because he had some theory about how weak or strong the throwing arm was on the many sinless people he imagined he'd find in the crowd.
First, I don't drag it out for desire to talk about the indiscretions. The main reason I mention it is that there is suggestion the man step down. I don't see that as even remotely appropriate. I wanted to offer reasons, and will continue to.
But the other is that it offers an opportunity to talk about our own hypocrisies in this, which are many. What this thing really turns up (and I somehow imagine from your poetry that you'll see this easily) is the way the way people want to believe our own nature is different than it is, and this brings us all to uncomfortably close to that. To put it another way, “methinks the public doth protest too much,” as if we have some inner need to say strongly by our protests that we are not what we realize sometimes we are.
To say we can't brook a lie makes us not liars ourselves. And we feel so much better. On another day we might say we are not killers, yet given occasion, I don't doubt we're all that as well. And we don't want someone endorsing lying or killing because we don't aspire to that, so it is uncomfortable for us to too publicly forgive it, even when we know it's human nature.
Even Jane's lament above, so strongly offered, acknowledges unwillingly that such urges are common. The question becomes whether the crime is to have had the urge or to have failed to overcome it. And if only the latter, the former being our nature, how different is that than the crime of having eaten a hamburger when we know a salad would do or... Well, I could go on. And I will in another forum.
My point is also partly that we don't like our nature and we'd rather not face that overcoming it is a day-to-day struggle. We'd rather just say “I am not that kind of person.” I think that makes less of us. I have a whole blog to write on this last topic alone.
Thanks for visiting and commenting.
He is an elected representative. He is tweeting shots of his genitals to women all over the U.S. and some who are minors. He will resign or get kicked out. We're just not buying it.
I suggest that it would do you a lot of conversational good to avoid such phrases to avoid pinning yourself into self-elected but unproductive conversations with people where you've set a bad framework from the outset.
My concern here is not to defend men. Incidentally, I'd have the same opinion if it were a woman. It's not gender-related.
Personal life is very different than professional life. There are many laws on the books that attest to a general societal belief that this is a good standard. Most people believe you should not be able to be fired for your religious beliefs, for your choice of spouse, nor presumably even who you choose to date or what your favorite color is or whether you eat meat. You can't even fire someone for being a boor, or a bore, at a party. Of course personal life is separate from professional life.
See also my home web page, which has an essay in the left column about the separation of my personal and public persona. I don't offer personal details about myself online. I reserve the right to a private life. And not because my home page is some sort of secret member of a society of men conspiring to reinforce other men making a bogus distinction. Rather because personal privacy matters.
And you allege this has been with people who were underage. I certainly believe him when he says he hasn't sought out any such person. He makes an extremely valid point that everyone on the net relies on the representation of everyone else about their age.
Let's ignore sex for a moment to underscore this. I know any of a number of people on Open Salon that I've proposed having lunch with if I'm in town. I haven't asked their age, but maybe I've relied on their statements of having a family or having a certain photo that makes them look not young. If it turns out they're not of age, am I suddenly a predator? That would be pretty much the end of social media if that were the standard.
That's the big hypocrisy in this. If it's just adults talking to adults, it should be private. Period. I don't see anything in the Constitution that says elected officials must yield up the right to a private life. Nor do I see a claim that this guy is a so-called family values guy who has voluntarily sworn off a private life. This is just third parties claiming they can dictate private lives. I don't like it in the Republicans when they do it, and I don't like it in the Democrats when they do it either, even if the way they do it is different.
In the 4 years I have lived in Mexico, I have been approached by many who have asked me, "Why are gringos so preoccupied with the sex lives of their politicians?!" This question has been presented by people of all political persuasions. It appears that in Mexico as long as a politician is doing right by the people they could care less if he/she is being unfaithful to their spouse. In fact, I would venture to say that if the media in Mexico wanted to do an expose on any politician's philandering, the people would say, "So what! They all do! What I really want to know is if he/she is gonna deliver on their promise of paved roads, cleaner water, improved public school education, etc."
I was surprised years ago as I was visiting cousins in Ireland that they too found it peculiar that Americans got all up in arms about the sex lives of their politicians.
I have no first hand experience with other European countries or Asia, so can't say how they feel about it, but it does appear to be a uniquely American concern.
I look forward to further posts from you.