Okay, the Kos community has some egg on its face for this one but I would like to highlight on important lesson that can be culled from this Weinergate imbroglio. The short message is to tread lightly on sex scandals but the longer message is not to wholesale condemn the Congressman as some are doing on this site.
The right has often (albeit hypocritically) emphasized “character” over candidates qualifications and used this idea that someone either has or does not have an inner moral compass to distract from more critical assessments of conservative candidates’ ties to powerful interest groups (be it the oil lobby or the Koch or whoever). Kossacks are echoing some of this character argument by proclaiming Weiner to be a lying SOB who does not deserve to be in office, despite an admirably progressive voting record and his willingness to take strong stands on progressive values.
This conflation of private and public morality is seriously distorting our political discourse and it allows for a political of distraction rather than substance. Plus, the rationale does not bear up to historical scrutiny.
JFK, RFK, MLK were all champions of social justice and all were notorious womanizers. Gandhi was a sexual deviant- http://www.independent.co.uk/...
LBJ was instrumental in implementing the great society programs and the Civil Rights act and he was by all accounts, a womanizer, a bully, a cheat, and a scoundrel in his personal dealings.
Individuals can conscientiously advocate and promote social policies that help people and promote social and ecological welfare and have checkered private lives.
This conflation of private and public morality is seriously distorting our political discourse and it allows for a political of distraction rather than substance. Plus, the rationale does not bear up to historical scrutiny.
JFK, RFK, MLK were all champions of social justice and all were notorious womanizers. Gandhi was a sexual deviant- http://www.independent.co.uk/...
LBJ was instrumental in implementing the great society programs and the Civil Rights act and he was by all accounts, a womanizer, a bully, a cheat, and a scoundrel in his personal dealings.
Individuals can conscientiously advocate and promote social policies that help people and promote social and ecological welfare and have checkered private lives.
Anthony Weiner let himself become mired in a sexting scandal. Who would want those kind of extramarital activities known to your new bride? So, he panicked and tried to cover his tracks through a whole series of deceptions that finally reached a breaking point. Yes, he displayed terrible judgment and he let a lot of his followers down. But his sexting transgressions and the embarrassment and fear which led to his lies are both signs of very common HUMAN frailties that do not honor ideological lines. Just because Weiner panicked and lied in hopes of forestalling a marital does not mean that he lies about everything else or that his progressive votes and advocacies are now somehow tainted into non-existence.
As a comparison point, Nixon was apparently a virtuous man in his family life and he was also one of the most corrupt Presidents ever. I really believe that Dubya was a born again Christian. I bet he never cheated on his wife (since his conversion) and that he holds himself to a high standard of conduct in his private life. But, he misled a nation into war, was responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqi's, decimated the bill of rights, orchestrated a reverse transfer of wealth from the middle-class to the elites and facilitated a major theft of public funds into the hands of banking buddies (events which have shattered the lives of many, many people).
So, I will take a progressive politician with some salacious quirks over a pious conservative who believes that God is on his side as he screws over the world.
Let’s turn to lesson number 2. Many in the Kos community took it as a matter of ideological principle that, if Briebart was involved, a scam of some sort had to be in the making. Certainly, this skepticism was justified by history. The Kos may have egg on its face over Weinergate but the mainstream media should be wearing omelets over its coverage of the Shirley Sherrod and Acorn edited tapes. But, I was bothered by the degree of thought policing that went on during the weekend. If there is one lesson to be learned, tolerance for dissent is very good when lots of facts are still unknown. Also, sex and lust will make men (and women) in positions of power do unimaginably stupid things.
All that aside, for posterity sake, I believe it is worth cataloguing all the counter explanations that were employed just so we can have them handy in the event that another Twittergate type event impacting an elected official on the progressive side of the ideological spectrum:
1. AW is just too smart to make that kind of mistake.
2. If AW had had a history of sending salacious photos to women, why would it just be breaking now? You can’t keep something like that secret for more than a day tops. Case closed.
3. You know those crazy birther arguments about President Obama’s long form birth certificate being a fake, well interestingly enough they Make a whole lot of sense in this case. And no, this has nothing to do with ideology.
4. Look AW, is newly married to a very hot woman. No way he is sending that tweet, Now if his wife had been ugly woman maybe it would be possible but come on she’s hot.
5. That is Russian underwear (never fully understand that one).
6. The hair on that leg just doesn’t look the way I imagined Anthony’s hairy leg looking.
7. Okay, the idea that AW accidentally sent this picture by mistake is just too, too implausible. Here is much more likely scenario. The pic did not come from his twitter account at all. Worse yet, AW only thought he was hacked. Instead, Andrew Breitbart or some related cronies faked a screen shot, then re-tweeted the forged image and then using [unintelligible techno-geek gobbly gook here] managed to have it look exactly like a tweet that AW sent, even fooling AW himself into thinking he sent it by accident. Then, just as the forgers had anticipated, AW incriminated himself by deleting the picture that was not really there. It was not a pic much like Magritte’s pipe was not a pipe. Did I mention the mind control app that had been surreptitiously downloaded to his smartphone? See, isn’t that much simpler and more sensible.
8. It is impossible that the only person to receive this compromising tweet from Representative Weiner just happened to be a conservative stalker obsessed with running the congressman’s career. (Snark off: That coincidence is indeed the strangest aspect of this story. What are the freakin’ odds that the one person who sees a compromising photo, with a very short of public visibility, just happens to be the one wing nut who dreams of catching you in sex scandal? If Lady Gaga had been the one who grabbed the image, none of this would have happened. I say we blame her. Afterall, Anthony was “just born this way.”
9. I would recognize James O’Keefe’s crotch anywhere and that is definitely his crotch (a rationale both that was desperate and deeply disturbing)
10. That is not a penis but an elbow, a dildo, a photoshopped anaconda plus the geometry is wrong because human penis possibly can’t bend that way and not only that, the picture is UPSIDE DOWN (here I believe we had hit the full monty stage of desperate explanations).
11. Look, look I did a full color spectrum analysis using some web-based program that I have no idea how it works. Now, see all these blotchy random colors and the Chiaroscuro pattern in the far corner that appears when you place the image under infrared strobe light). Well, there we have it: conclusive proof that this image is forgery. No questions please!!!
12. Another blog just repeated some arguments from my diary so that proves my theory about the hoax is unimpeachably correct.
13. See my diary which like totally explains everything. [Post repeatedly to every dissonant comment]