Until now, I had neither joined nor rejected my fellow Democrats’ Weiner-must-go bandwagon. I simply needed time to listen to the arguments and think about it all. More importantly, it was the perfect time to reconsider what constitutes moral bankruptcy in elected office. Do we define it as a guy who pulls down his pants on Twitter or a guy who pulls healthcare access from sick children?
That the false piety of Republicans would be accompanied by feigned shock in their collective craw was not surprising, nor was the abandonment of Congressman Weiner by his own party leaders. As for the latter, few Dems can boast the Weiner bulge when it comes to standing up for anything – right or wrong. As for the former, my friend Paul hastened to remind me that when it comes to Republicans and government, they tend to lean towards the "smaller."
In somewhat weak defense of Congressman Weiner, a few Progressive pundits have pointed out the absurdity of Senator Vitter’s continued job preservation and the too-long-preserved jobs of Senators Craig and Ensign. Still, more foretelling of Mr. Weiner’s future is the fact that no elected Democrat has dared come to his defense and none have the cojones to be photographed in his presence.
Of course, Craig, Vitter, and Ensign all committed criminal acts, and Coburn’s assistance in the Ensign cover-up was equally illegal. If “sexting” is a crime, we’ll need room for another fifty million inmates in our already over-crowded prisons – an idea that would make the Right damp until they calculate that thirty million of those sexters probably vote Republican. Yet, Republican operatives continue to serenade our ever trash-starved media with the controlled release of even more salacious Weiner pictures and tweets. This deliberate manipulation of material has the effect of amplifying the “crime,” not unlike what Christopher Hitchens would call “the egregious padding of evidence.” Did the story really get much worse or is somebody in charge of stretching the public flogging?
But other than revealing holier-than-thou two-faced pandering and the occasional criminal cover-up, how important are any of these sexploits to our lives - or the function of government?
Bob Herbert believes Mr. Weiner should resign, arguing that the political survival of scandalous Republicans is not the issue, but rather, it is critical for Democrats to cling to a higher moral ground. I would agree with Mr. Herbert that comparisons really don’t matter, but see irrelevance for a very different reason. I don’t vote for candidates based on their personal sexual proclivities with other consenting adults. Bob Herbert’s call for Congressman Weiner to step down may be a reasonable expectation considering outside pressures, but Mr. Herbert’s personal definition of public turpitude and obscenity is not necessarily universally shared. While I have always admired him for his intelligent arguments and moral positions, I would not delegate the power to define that line to the purest among us. Personally, I would have chosen the mistress-keeping Roosevelt over the missionary Hoover, the philandering Eisenhower over the pious Bradley, the womanizing Kennedy over the duplicitous Nixon – and the list goes on, including the choice of Anthony Weiner over any other Congressman.
Perhaps America should widen its definition of moral bankruptcy beyond sex scandals. In that effort, I would ask one simple question:
Who is more contemptible, the elected official who tweets a picture of his private parts, or the one who sends thousands of his countrymen to their deaths on a deliberate lie?
One of those officials is probably on the verge of losing his job.
The other was recently honored with a library in Austin.