I’m ashamed of this hypocritical country. I just finished watching the Inquisition and immolation of Anthony Weiner, a media reveille for hypocrites for a guy who was foolish enough fall in love with his own genitals (so many do). He had consensual, non-physical, smut-chat “sex” over the Internet with women whose ages he did not check out. He committed no crime, and then stupidly—as DCJ has alleged elsewhere and earlier—allowed himself to be interrogated by blogger and mainstream media scumbags (“Mr. Weiner, are you fully erect now?” “Where is your wife?” shouted at him several times on camera) and felt it necessary to lie rather than tell them his personal life was none of their business. For this he must be pulled down and publicly humiliated. The Inquisition used to torture people until it got the answers they wanted; this is no different, and it is goddamn disgusting. Abandoned in a moment more deserving of pity and at least a modicum of absolution for a man clearly in deep pain—thanks to political sacrifice—not entirely of his own making, one wonders what is worse: a man with a weakness, or his trial by a media-stimulated mob.
“Let him who is without sin” . . . and damnit if they did throw those stones. One soi-disant woman psychologist on MSNBC opined that even an inappropriate “tweet” constitutes adultery. Line up folks, who among us, like Jimmy Carter one confessed in the pages of Playboy, has not: ”lusted in [his/her] heart.” Poor Weiner, he took DCJ’s regretted advice and passed out stones to hypocrites. They threw them in the form of inappropriate questions, and smutty innuendos and barbs. Even as Weiner stood up in public to resign—Jesus, Mary and Joseph couldn’t he just have sent out a written press release—he became a piñata for puritans. The yahoos scorned him, calling him “pervert” and more, as though this was some public execution in the 13th century. Doubtless the slavering media there, including the gloating Breitbart (trans: “bucket of feces”) playing Madame Defarge, that led the way, would have preferred an actual to a metaphorical emasculation. They badgered him as to the whereabouts of Mrs. Weiner; oh what fun to have her squirming before the cameras. Christ, this country has turned into a madman smearing itself with its own excrement.
But here’s where disgust turns to contempt. Not the scumbags of the Republicans and their media attack dogs. I expect it from them. No, it’s the Democrats who rolled over on Weiner, who joined the chorus of condemnation—Pelosi and Obama especially, and called for his resignation. The President has an abominable record on this score. Not the person to have your back in a bar brawl, he let ACORN get screwed, then took the bait and dumped Shirley Sherrod before the truth came out, and now publicly he has said Weiner ought to resign. A Breitbart hat-trick. Of course, most of the rest of the timorous Democratic Party characteristically shied away.
I get my daily email requests from the DNC and other Democrat supplications for funds by phone. For sometime now I have told them that they will not receive a single cent from me ever again, ever again. I might directly support a specific candidate, but as far as this stupid, ineffectual, wimpish, self-destructive political party is concerned, not a single cent. The Republicans are nothing but a bunch of assholes, but at least they stand up for their own, whatever their crimes might be. The Democrats throw their own under the bus. DCJ will continue to stand for the rights of women, students, minorities, the old and infirm and of course, the tenets of secular humanism, but no longer under the illusion that there is a American political party capable or willing to defend them. Indeed the outright attack on them is in full play by the Republicans and ignored by the Democrats.
Most Americans probably no, or care, little about the Cultural Revolution that China was out through in the 1960s and 70s. So they probably won’t get that we are going through something quite similar—a process of social self-evisceration. Weiner is just a symptom of the moral hypocrisy, the bullshit that we are the “land of the free” until your private life is dragged out like your entrails (most likely because you are a “jew-boy liberal”), or a woman who would like to be able to be free to choose what to do with her body tries to exercise choice, or gays and liberals who would like to be free marry, or immigrants who would like a chance to be Americans rather than scapegoats, or workers who would like to be free to bargain collectively, and people with no medical protection to have health care.
We Americans think we are exceptions to history, that, like those religious, the universe was out here for us, that we are its center. That’s bullshit, and we have been proving it for most of the past thirty years, and especially since the turn of the century. The incredible shift in wealth and political power, permuted with the dumbing down of the electorate that is incapable of perceiving what is in its own best interests, and the pervasiveness of pernicious social values rooted in racism, bigotry, greed and intolerance make a sick joke of principles upon which this country was putatively founded. The fate of Anthony Weiner is an indication of the power of a growing Orwellian media of double-speak, a media guided by the principle that “everybody loves a hanging.”
If America has a “government of the people,” and the government is corrupt and owned by the powerful elite, then what are the people? Whence comes the great cleansing? Surely it must. Should we welcome it? To paraphrase a rabbi of old: what we do to the least of our brethren we do to ourselves.
Now I will see if I can keep my pledge to write no more of this sorry affair and shame upon America. I was wrong in my previous posting (74.4) that Weiner would not resign. Maybe it was too much for him belonging to a party in which political expediency trumps sloganized principles every time. There is s sliver of hope (Jesus, that word has become tainted); at least the President, after rolling over on Weiner, must have felt pressured to follow it the next day by saying the scandalized ex-congressman could “make a comeback.” Resurrection. Now that’shope.
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© 2011, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.18.2011)