For over a week now the right side of the front page of Daily Kos has been taken up with diary after diary after diary after yet another diary about Anthony Weiner's wiener. There was much digging into the backgrounds of the people who were supposedly responsible for breaking into Weiner's twitter and yfrog accounts and attempting to smear him. A thorough, close-up examination of the wiener pictures was had from every possible angle in an effort to prove that the wiener in question could not have been Weiner's own wiener. Meanwhile Weiner himself was issuing non-denial denials that rank right up there with what the meaning of is is on the walking-a-fine-line list of denials by politicians when they get caught with their pants down.
And now it turns out that the whole thing was true, it was indeed Weiner's wiener, and he was doing some decidedly unfortunate things with it for a man who lives in the public eye and doesn't like to talk softly (I'm not touching the ten-foot-stick thing with a ten foot pole, y'all.)
Which begs the question...why was this the most important thing on the right side of the front page of this site for an entire week?
I mean, come on.
First of all, the fact that so much time was spent digging on this, with various diarists taking credit for disproving the thing that has now been not only proven but admitted to in front of God and the Traditional Media TM and cameras and everybody, has only caused a more powerful light to be shown on the whole incident. Sure, Breitbart, sleaze that he is, would have made this a huge scandal anyway. But those that continually wrote about this on this site and elsewhere, as well as those who kept reccing up those diaries and commenting like their very lives depended on it, have given Breitbart the opportunity to squeal "Vindication!" That is so unattractive.
Moreover, Weiner looks like an even bigger dick now than he would have had this played out without so many people trying to prove he didn't do what he now says he did, and those that felt this just had to be wrong and spent so much time trying to prove it look foolish, too. He should have fessed up, save face, as it were.
But most importantly, was a week of sceencaps of twitter feeds and lame pictures of Weiner's wiener the very best use for anyone's time? I think not. I know I had more pressing issues to worry about. I have a son with no insurance and a family to support who was injured ten days ago severely enough that he required surgery to keep him from losing the use of his hand. He has no insurance, he's a self-employed mechanic and that hand is his livelihood. How can this be handled to keep him and his family from drowning in debt, how can we keep his bills paid and deal with the huge medical bills and get him back on his feet as quickly as possible? So the healthcare crisis has hit home. How can my son's job hand possibly compare to Weiner's hand job? The wiener obviously takes center stage.
Mother Nature is pissed at us, she's tired of the destructive little parasites that are humans, she's got a fever and she feels like it's time to have a good cleansing and flush away the toxins we leave in our wake. We should be paying attention, we should take action, we should be shouting about this to the rafters and the rooftops and making people listen up now before it's too late, if it isn't already. But how can we possibly tear ourselves away from our computer screens when there is such an intriguing wiener waving in the breeze in our general direction?
Wall Street has literally robbed us, and they just keep on doing it. Even economic slackers like me can see where we're headed. We're headed for the ditch, man, and the powers that be just keep smiling, slapping the backs and stroking the likes of "I'm doing God's Work" Blankfein as though it doesn't matter that the number of families living in tents is rising in direct proportion to the number of homes being wrongly foreclosed on. There are people out there that haven't been able to find a job for three or four years now, they've lost hope and have given up the struggle. But that will have to wait while we're turning pictures this way and that to see if they somehow look less creepy if the wiener is pointed east or west.
Our country is still fighting multiple wars to the tune of trillions of dollars while the Very Serious People TM are saying that's just dandy and by the way, shouldn't we push granny out of that nursing home she's partying it up in order to cut that scary deficit? Meanwhile, Breitbart gets the unlikely opportunity to say "I told you so" and have it be a factual statement. And show us even more pictures of wieners like we've never seen them before!
So let me get this straight. What this all boils down to is that all of the things listed above (and so many more) that keep me up at night are languishing in obscurity while half this site and a good portion of the blogosphere in general has been chasing a shiny, left leaning, wiener-shaped object and crowing about proving false that which is true (or vice versa).
How can we concentrate on that stuff when there's a wiener on the rise?
Wow. Is this country great or what?