Oh, the hypocrisy. No, not his but ours.
In the media, the common wisdom is “if it bleeds, it leads.” That is, as news organizations have increasingly had to compete commercially, there is a thirst for the shocking and attention-grabbing topics, and a tendancy to want to portray things in ways that emphasize these qualities, distorting our concept of reality.
Such has been the case for the Anthony Weiner story. In my view, the US media secretly knows that sex is an even more powerful attracting force than blood, but they’re disallowed from leading with it because they would be instantly called out for being gratuitously tawdry, so they lie in wait of stories like this that compel them to speak of sex.
Yes, compel. Were they expected to use self-control? Surely not. It’s a free country after all, and after all no laws were broken.
And what was the story about? Ultimately, it was about lecturing a man over the failure to use self-control in his private life, even though no laws were being broken. And there the hypocrisy takes root.
Of course, since no one in the media has had the will to seriously ask the question “would this have been an issue at all if not for the media?” we are assured it will happen again. Because the media sees itself as the champion here, having ferreted out the scourge of sexting.
Yes, they are shocked, shocked to find out there are sex-related interchanges transpiring among myriad consenting adults via the Internet. And they are shocked, shocked to find out that one of those many has been allowed to take office without being asked to renounce his ways.
Okay, they’re not shocked. They’re delighted to be able to gab about it in the open with an air of plausible deniability. They wanted it as much as Weiner did, and their joy in it was probably as great.
Pardon me for thinking that people are elected for more important things and that they are entitled to a private life—even one many of us wouldn’t understand or agree with.
Yes, it involved a marital problem, and some coarse conduct with people outside the marriage. But such matters have been routine among politicians—and the general population—for years and I daresay will not go away with this event. What made this commentworthy was the media’s access to pictures. Talk about compulsions needing an intervention. The pictures were an irresistible draw to the media even though irrelevant to our serious problems of jobs, health care, wars, environment, and so on—things about which Anthony Weiner was a solid representative.
And also pardon me for thinking that it’s the people who elected him who should decide if he adequately represents them, not the people he works with (many of whom are his political opponents) nor the people of America who are watching these stories on TV (most of whom are not in his district).
It is an oft-cited truism that lots of people don’t like Congress but fewer of them don’t like their own Congressman. That’s just how the system works. And this mess was just the same, except the reason everyone cited didn’t even have anything to do with politics—it was private. Or what passes for private in the modern world. If that troubles you, I suggest you have more of a problem with the modern world than with this hapless scapegoat.
Chris Rock once said of President Clinton “Know why I like Clinton? Because he’s got real problems. He don’t got president problems, he got real problems like you and me, like running out of money, his wife’s a pain in the ass, all his friends are going to jail. I know Bill Clinton, I am Bill Clinton!” Rock understood that the people who are our best representatives are just like us, flaws and all.
Anthony Weiner has been a tireless and effective champion of real people problems. But the Republicans talked the Democrats into saying all that didn’t matter, and that what mattered is that Congress should be filled with people who purport to be virtuous—like they are? It seems clear to me that all they really wanted was people who are not as effective as Anthony Weiner was. They wanted him out of there and this was their golden opportunity. And they got it. Score one for morality? Pardon me for thinking not.
Larry Flynt recently said “if you can fight two wars and balance the budget at the same time, you should be able to sleep with whomever you want to.” And that’s really what this is about. The Republicans do not want people to sleep with whoever they want to. That’s an actual policy they push—that they should be able to disqualify you as a legitimate person, not qualified for marriage, not qualified to serve in the military, not qualified to serve in government, if they don’t like your morality.
And now the Democrats have bought into this dangerous premise.
And they’re veritably celebrating.
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Jonathan Wolfman, who I've no doubt is every bit as liberal as you and me - perhaps more so than me - also has a handle on the concept "realpolitik." His post today laments what happened with Weiner, but asserts that it's good that he's gone. Now he is no longer a political liability on the Democratic Party. The party doesn't need any liabilities. Jon also said he could care less that hypocrites on the right are enjoying the Weiner fiasco. I don't care either. Let them laugh. Weiner got caught. His name made it worse politically than it might have been had his name been, say, Hamburger. But, sadly for us liberals, it's Weiner. He's gone. Good riddance. Now, can't we stop the hand-wringing and move forward?
Matt, the “liability” here is hidden in the meta-message—that it's legitimate to disqualify a candidate based on criteria other than the law and the voting rules. Republicans have been trying to push a moral agenda forever, but the significant aspect of this is that they finally got the Democrats to agree that morality is an allowable reason to make someone step down. Not violation of law. Morality. Now that means we get to find that moral leaders get dominance over elected leaders. And that's the Big Bad Thing. Much worse than anything happening “in the small” with Weiner.
I think the big problem here was mainly Weiner's choices - he's not a stupid man, and he had to know that that single mistweeted photo would inexorably lead to a slow cascade of additional evidence of his social activities, particularly given his apparently indiscriminate choices in correspondents. Had he gotten out in front of the root incident rather than flailing about with claims of "hacking" and Photoshopping, and silliness about whether he could say with "certainty" whether the first image was Little Weiner or not, he might have survived this. As it was, though, only his most partisan supporters bought it, and in the end the Republicans really didn't have to do much to shove him towards the door - when Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, and Barack Obama tell you to quit, you're going to quit.
The moral? Modern life is what it is, but it's not really very different from anything that we've dealt with in the past. Weiner's predecessors in bawdiness had to worry about which hotel clerks knew of their assignations; he should have paid more attention to the difference between the 'd' and '@' characters.
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Okay, Republicans, we'll exile our own when they do something as bad as yours did. That is what should have happened.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that Breitbart took the opportunity to appear sanctimonious while burying Weiner in the process. I wasn't thrilled with the guy before; now I despise him.
I hope his move next election is to run for the seat from which he resigned. If the people in his district want him to respresent him...the hypocrites in Washington should shut the hell up.
What he did to his wife sucks. But I do not want to judge him by what his dick leads him to do...or the fact that his small brain makes him stupid. I judge him on the issues...and his stand on those issues.
I hope the people in his district feel that way also...that he runs again...and that he is re-elected. I also hope he stops being stupid.
I try to imagine how JFK and Martin Luther King would survive in the 21st century media and I shudder,
In fact I agree with everything you said until the part about the Democratic party being somehow better than the Republicans regarding toleration of human sexuality beyond extremely rigid constraints.
The Republicans have a fairly large [15%?] Libertarian element - and more than a few of them want the government out of the bedroom.
A little thought experiment. Grover Cleveland. Arnold Schwarzenegger. 19th Amendment.
Arnold couldn't be elected as county sewer commissioner now.
That's all I have to say on the matter. People can connect the dots or not, as they wish.
Poetess, thanks for visiting and for the support. Your visits are always appreciated.
Thanks, Sheila. That's one reason I blog. I feel like sometimes the writing I do tries to articulate things I perceive others feel but can't quite put to words. I don't always succeed at that, of course. But it's nice to know when I do.
You're wrong on the matter of whether his being married matters to me. It does not. This is a discussion about a man's public persona and whether his private life should matter. I don't expect my boss to give me a raise or not based on whether I'm good to my wife. Weiner's job does not involve his private life and I am not about to ask his private life to find out. And if someone noses in or blurts out something inappropriate, why should I assume he treats his wife badly but that someone who has not been examined does not. Maybe they all do. Must I now examine them all? I don't want to examine any of them other than those who try to legislate home life. They elect investigation. But normal legislators who stick to things that are public matters do not. As Cranky Cuss notes, JFK and MLK and surely many others would not have survived this scrutiny.
As for the 17-year-old, I've heard they were in contact but I've seen no formal charges of impropriety and I assume that if there had been any they would have been made. So we'll judge that if and when it happens. But even then, that may cause me to change my opinion of Weiner and whether he should stay in office at that point, but it won't cause me to revise my opinion of what should be done in the absence of such knowledge. There's a long tradition in the US of innocent until proven guilty.
And Weiner was absolutely right when he said that we all rely on the representations made on the net. I have gone to a couple of OS gatherings and have certainly sent messages to people here I believed were adults saying that if I were in their town or they mine that I'd like to see them. It could turn out one of them was underage. That should not make me a predator. If I heard it later summed up that I had tried to get an underage person to meet with me, that would utterly misrepresent the situation. The world simply cannot withstand that as the judging factor. And I think it's fair for Weiner to get at least that much benefit of the doubt.
As for “being groomed,” I admit that's a tough concept but just because it's tough doesn't mean I have to yield to overly invasive notions of government. I again don't know how to draw any bright line between that situation you describe, even if the fact pattern were as you say, and some random guy chatting up a 17-year-old living next door knowing she'd turn 18 later and perhaps be someone he could date, while some other neighbor might just be showing neighborliness. Who can say? The laws in this nation are about what one does not what one might plan. It's possible to change that, but it would be no small change to our system. Perhaps The Minority Report describes the kind of world you'd like to live in. It doesn't work for me. Freedom is a scary thing sometimes, but the alternatives are not pleasant either.
Roper: So, now you'll give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Alice More: Arrest him!
Sir Thomas More: Why, what has he done?
Margaret More: He's bad!
Sir Thomas More: There is no law against that.
Richard Roper: There is! God's law!
Sir Thomas More: Then God can arrest him.
It goes on from there. It's a classic scene. Anyone not familiar with the movie or this scene should put the movie on their “must see” list.
To that I would add, though, something I said in my previous post on this topic, A Quickie about Weinergate, raising the question of whether this was driven by an excess of testosterone: “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.” I guess the thing I mean is not just that sometimes people are human, but sometimes the very essence of how they are human is what makes them useful. On Star Trek there was this transporter accident where the good side of Kirk gets separated from the bad side, and for a while there is a good Kirk and a bad, but they quickly find out that you can't just have an all-good Kirk and that only by synthesizing both do you get a normally functioning human. There's great insight in that.
neilpaul, thanks for visiting. Yes, I think what they'll find is that they are now forever under the thumbscrews of the Right. The way cognitive dissonance can control one is when the controller is able to say not “I want you to do x,” but rather “You need to do this thing I want because you told me you wanted to do x.” Once that line's crossed, it's bad news for someone (or some group, in the case of the Democrats) wanting to retain both sanity and independence at the same time.
Nick, there's just no question that the Republicans have made a mission of persecuting gays and that the Democrats have not. I do know that there are Republicans who support strong privacy rights, but they don't control the party right now. I didn't mean to speak of the whole party as individuals. But the remarks I made do characterize the prevailing leadership.
Lefty, it's a way of allowing those other big things to run unchecked, I think: distract the masses on trivia. It seems to work every time.
"and that little girl of 17 was being groomed, she'd be 18 soon enough. he wasnt trying to be FRIENDS with a 17 year old girl. i know you know that."
And you know this...how...?
Groomed for what? Congress? Ah yes, now I see. What we really need in Congress is people with a better understanding of Twitter. Twits! Yes, that's it.
Thanks for pointing out that there aren't enough Twits in congress. I can't wait to read the rest of your insightful posts.
These people, our reps, speak for whole societies and to some extent their individual fates just really don't matter an iota. It's necessary to talk about all the places mistakes are made, and the worst mistakes are made under cover of something else being “obvious.” That's why I keep alluding to the Patriot Act because the just-plain-obviousness of the fact that there's a real threat hides a great deal of wrongs that have nothing to do with the threat. It's like saying “there's an enemy after us” completely suspends all rationality and the Government may then suspend literally any freedom in the name of keeping our freedoms safe (if that even means anything).
And similarly here, once we've uttered the Weiner did something wrong accusation, it's like there's no possible thing that can be done in the quest to vanquish him. But there is. Vanquishing him is not that important. We'll survive his errors. Keeping the right to due process is important—we will not survive the loss of that.
So yes, he did something wrong but so did Pelosi and Wasserman-Schultz. Thanks for raising this because I saw Wasserman-Schultz on some talk show last week and usually I think she's got a lot of good to say, but I was very unimpressed with her allowing herself to be a willing agent of the Republican narrative.
That said, I am also not a utopian idealist. I'd rather get results from a womanizing drug addict, than bullshit from a puritan.
At the end of the day, we need to be concerned with POWER.
If a patrician has a skeleton in his closet, the media never knows, because he pays off the right people to hide or spin it the right way. The media can't "chew on the issue," as a result.
If a common, middle class or upper middle class guy takes on causes or issues that the Establishment doesn't like (generally, progressive issues), they will want to destroy him. And the best way to destroy somebody in Washington is NOT to address their policies or voting records, but to score Ad Hominem attacks on personal issues, to drench up dirty laundry and air the skeletons in their closet.
A very wealthy patrician can resist this sort of thing. He has the money and network and well-placed friends in the media and politics such that effective top-down, hierarchical firewalls can be made. This ensures that even if a low-level reporter has a story, it never gets approved by the "big brass" and it dies an early death.
But if the "big brass" dislike you, because you are a progressive, the story WILL percolate up to the top.
This all, at the end of the day, comes down to class and economics.
Much of what Richard Nixon did in the Whitehouse, consisting of hiring ex CIA and FBI folks for domestic Opposition Research is COMMON these days. I was once a very, very, very conservative Republican in college and law school and I met some VERY SKETCHY people in many campaigns. Alot of folks with prior intelligence community experience go into GOP opposition research and investigations. The Dems have nothing. I repeat, NOTHING, like this.
Most dems don't even know this is going on.
With media centralization, Hit-Jobs like this are so much easier to accomplish. More than you would believe.
If the Corporate Heads of FACEBOOK ever go political, or if major shareholders are, then WATCHOUT, all future politicians (who are currently 16 years old). Regardless of your privacy settings, FB will drench that stuff up for their interested shareholders, and your career as a public servant will be OVER.
r
As for the ostensible subject of your post -- Weiner -- I have no feelings. He has become, as Matt pointed out, a punch line. And I agree with you he'll probably run again and win re-election because his constituents like him.
But there are a few points I think could use some clarifying. First is the use of the word "media." It's a very loose term these days. Did you use it to mean the news media? Or social media? Or the dear old blogosphere? I ask this because Weiner's mistake wouldn't have been possible without Twitter and wouldn't have made headlines without the blogosphere (I first caught sight of it in a Joan Walsh column well before any mainstream papers wrote about it (on paper or pixels). Since I make my living as a newspaper reporter, I may sound defensive here, but I think we're well past the point where we need to define the word "media" when we use it.
A second point about the "privacy issue" politicians always invoke when they're caught with their pants down. I have little sympathy for either the "victims" or for the argument that they should be treated like Regular Joes when they behave badly (I would argue, the vast majority of real Regular Joes don't and would never behave as stupidly as Weiner did). Elected officials like Weiner are supposedly public servants -- a role that's actually acknowledged legally when it comes to libel and slander laws. You may have noticed that even Weiner at his tearful worst didn't claim to have been libeled by anyone -- not even Breitbart. And that's as it should be. Public servants are responsible to the public. They give up certain aspects of their lives to work on behalf of that public, and they're only too happy to remind everyone of their service to the common weal when it redounds to their credit. That's why newspapers, for example, are expected to hold politicians' feet to the fire when ethical or behavioral questions arise. And that's as it should be.
To make a crude analogy, these organizations are a bit like going with an investment firm that is giving you advice, rather than just investing in an index fund that is tracking the whole market. The bet is that the personalized service will give you an edge, but often that bet is not good and subject to great unevenness. But those are just vague guesses on my part. I don't know. It sounds like you might not agree, so please feel free to elaborate if you disagree with this analysis of mine. I have the feeling we all have different points of view (like the blind man and the elephant), so I don't think it's bad for us to compare notes. It's not like one person's opinion negates another's.
But I saw this issue taking over the various Sunday shows, the evening news shows, etc. disproportionately, crowding out other things, perhaps because there's a finiteness to the time allocated on those shows, whereas the social media are active more hours a day and don't really have an upper bound on what they can do, so they still admit other topics and the balance is better.
As for them being caught with their pants down, I just don't care. I care about politicians who are out to dictate morality to others when I find they have questionable morality, but that's the same as being upset at one who doesn't think others need decent health care because they have health care that works for them. In the case of Weiner, I don't see him asking people to live under restrictions that are inconsistent with how he lives, so he earns a pass from me on that for remaining properly hands off about personal lives of others.
You and I are in full agreement on this matter. Regarding "process", I find it a devastating statement on the condition of America that a constitutional process for dealing with high crimes and misdemeanors was "off the table" for Bush/Cheney and yet the same individuals (Pelosi, Reid, Dems in general) who proffered that idiotic statement were now adamantly calling for Weiner to resign and offering no support for him whatsoever.
In my view, the real issue is that Weiner's more honest approach to legislation in general was the real offense to these people as he represented a threat to the dishonesty currently occurring among Dems in Congress. Weiner’s faux pas merely offered other Dems the perfect ammunition to shoot him down, get him out of their way, making one less check on conscience for them as they continue to sell out the voters who elect them.
Where do we draw the line with this kind idiocy? Should we force someone out of office for watching porn? Should we force someone out of office because they are gay? Should we force someone out of office because they believe the “wrong” religion? I find it intriguing that so many can’t see the simple clarity of the concept you have presented here. It's sadly amusing to see you accused of "missing the point".
RATED
Having lived in Mexico for a little over four years now, I have seen first hand how corrupt the Mexican government is, but there is one thing about the relationship between the Mexican government and the Mexican people that I envy that is missing in the U.S....reality. The Mexican people hate getting screwed over by their politicians, but they have never held them up to be paragons of virtue. Many of the early revolutionaries had horrendous personal lives, but fought and died to secure freedoms and rights for the indigenous people and that's what the people remember. They celebrate these revolutionaries for the freedoms and rights they brought about, not for the personal lives they led.
President Felipe Calderon, as far as I know, is faithful to his wife, but his "drug war" has greatly damaged Mexico and resulted in the deaths of thousands of Mexican citizens. Ex-Governor of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, was openly unfaithful to his wife, and his policies resulted in the deaths of ordinary citizens. Mexican citizens don't give a crap about either of these men's personal lives; they care that so many of their fellow citizens are dying without these men being held accountable. I don't envy the battle that the Mexican people face in holding their politicians accountable, but I do envy their ability to to see the reality of politics.
Maybe I shouldn't even be discussing "how things are done down here in Mexico", but I think both the U.S. and Mexico can learn from each other.....e.g. Mexico adopting an "innocent until proven guilty" approach as in the U.S. would be wonderful as would truly practicing a separation of church and state in the U.S. would be wonderful as it is practiced in Mexico. As futile as the state of politics can seem to be in Mexico, I have enjoyed tremendously the opportunity to sit with Mexican people of all political persuasions and talk about politics. We may agree or disagree on many points, but no one's moral accomplishments or failings are brought to bear on the issues and our friendships remain intact whether we are "left" or "right", "liberal" or "conservative".
Looking forward to more posts from you.