SEX SCANDALS

One of my former students comments on my post yesterday about Weinergate:

I agree the coverage this story is getting is diversionary, but earlier today I did feel my own political bias. Had he been a righty, I would have called it typical, and reaffirmed the convictions of my political leaning. Truth is, Anthony Weiner is one of my favorite acting congressmen. I feel a little hypocritical for my willingness to dismiss accusations against him last week , and the ease with which I dismissed the whole story as irrelevant to his job and capacity for moral judgment after his admission. After all, the guy did fuck up. To err is human but at the least, accidentally tweeting your dick to the world shows a discouraging level of incompetence.

My response:

I hear what you're saying, but I think my deal is that I just don't take sex scandals where there's no victim too terribly seriously. I mean, I guess you could call his wife a victim, but marital infidelity is so amazingly widespread that it doesn't really seem to be anybody's business to wag the finger at someone over what is essentially a personal issue. Gingrich was at the forefront in going after Clinton, but he did it while he was cheating on his own wife. I don't even think anybody in Washington actually gives a shit; rather, this is all about political opportunism meeting the media's lust for sex and violence. Politicians don't want to talk about issues, but they still want to score points. Sex "crime" serves as a handy surrogate for issues, for both politicians and journalists.

And as for wanting to give Weiner a pass because he's on our side, I certainly feel the temptation myself. But I've been writing about right wingers caught up in sex scandals for some years now, and I've forced myself to be careful about it because, like I said, sex scandals without an actual victim aren't really scandals. So I went after that Senator Craig when he tried to solicit gay sex in a Minnesota airport restroom, not because of what he did, which is a relatively minor crime, but because he's one of those family values assholes: it is really fucking lame to preach Christian sexual morality in the political sphere, but to live your own life in total contradiction of it. What a scum bag. I've railed away against my own Senator here in Louisiana, David Vitter, for essentially the same thing, although in his case it was prostitutes. (Full disclosure: I waited on Vitter and his cuckolded wife a few weeks ago at the restaurant where I work; he's a good tipper and a nice guy, but nonetheless a hypocritical scum bag.) Mark Sanford, however, the former Republican governor of South Carolina who got caught having an affair on his wife, I just felt sorry for. He never really was one of those family values guys; I mean, he apparently used public money to fly to Argentina to see his mistress, which is definitely not cool, but the affair itself was and is his personal business. I don't think I wrote about the scandal at all.

And remember NY state's Democratic Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace? He really was one of the good guys, going after corrupt bankers and businessmen on Wall Street when Bush's feds refused to do so. He, too, got caught up in a prostitute scandal. Thing was, he had used his office to crack down repeatedly on prostitution! So I blasted him, too, for the corrupt hypocrisy that is usually the domain of the Republicans. I didn't like doing it, but felt duty bound to hold liberals to the same standards to which I hold Republicans, and Spitzer just didn't hold up.

So bringing this all back to Weinergate, I just don't know what it is we're supposed to be angry about. Yeah, he lied about it for a few days, but I can totally see myself doing the same thing. I mean, I would be freaking out, too. But in the end, he came clean. It's all very human, the fear, the breakdown, and then the recovery and reclamation of dignity. So how does this affect his role as a Congressional representative? It probably makes him look, like you said, incompetent, but that's not a crime, or even a Congressional rules violation; if New Yorkers want to vote him out for incompetence, that's their call.

But sending out pictures of your crotch to people who are cool with it is just fine. I mean, we have such a sexually unhealthy culture that Americans are ready to froth at the mouth about it, but that's all so much misguided latent Puritanism. There may be smoke, but there just isn't a fire. But apparently it doesn't matter. The GOP operatives who pushed this story into the salacious mass media are now toasting their success in bringing down one of their fiercest critics.

And the amazing thing is that these very same operatives very likely have no personal problem at all with Weiner's actions. They just wanted to take him out, and a sex "scandal" is a good way of doing it.

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