Year: 2011

America’s Cultural Elite

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“Anthony Weiner deserves to be supported and hopefully he will be mayor of New York one day. I’m serious. He is a Democrat [who] actually fights for the things liberals and progressive and rational people care about. I don’t know why he’s being thrown under the bus. He hasn’t done any — he hasn’t broke any laws.”
— Janeane Garofalo

“Appearing on HBO’s ‘Real Time,’ the so-called comedian and actress claimed Weinergate is caused by the media and ‘hypocrite Republicans.’ “
— Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters

UPDATE: Nancy Pelosi, “hypocrite Republican”!

‘Moral Fascists’?

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That phrase is used by Dave Brockington of the liberal blog Lawyers, Guns & Money, to describe people offended by the behavior of Anthony Weiner. Brockington endeavors to dismiss the whole thing:

I’m not going to elaborate on the irrelevance of his behavior beyond the effect on his relationship with his wife and family in moral or governance terms.

Brockington has a Ph.D. in political science, which means he assumes himself to be the intellectual superior of anyone who might disagree with him — especially any of you “moral fascists” who find Anthony Weiner’s behavior disturbing.

Rather than arguing with Herr Doktor, then — because he knows absolutely everything about political science, including such scientific categories as moral fascism — I suppose we ought to consult those whose expertise lies in other fields of endeavor, such as law. Patterico holds the juris doctor degree, has examined the available evidence and concludes:

So this guy knew he was talking to a high school girl, and he used a grooming line that had been successful with an older woman.

You should read the rest of that, including the link to Verum Serum. Last night I offered the word “grooming” to characterize Weiner’s communications with the Delaware teen, apologizing for the tendentiousness of that word.

Certainly, as a mere journalist, I am unqualified to offer a psychological diagnosis of Weiner’s condition. What we need here, I would suggest, is the authority of an expert in such matters — perhaps a forensic psychologist — who can tell us (a) whether Weiner’s behavior appears consistent with known forms of psychosexual disorder, and (b) what significance there might be in Weiner’s communications with this 17-year-old Delaware girl.

Not being an expert as deviant psychology, I’m not fit to judge such matters, but I know what’s newsworthy. And the latest developments certainly are:

Weinergate took a lurid new direction with the disclosure yesterday that Rep. Anthony Weiner invited a “hot sexy baby” to an X-rated date via the Skype network, which provides text, talk and video chats.
Racy new e-mails — sent just a month ago — detail exchanges between Weiner and Traci Nobles, the 34-year-old Georgia teacher and cheerleading coach who has surfaced as his fifth sexting partner. . . .
Weiner suggested they take it to another level:
“So i will make sure to keep some time open so we can have a cyber session via skype. Does that make my hot sexy baby happy?”
Hours after the e-mails were unearthed, Delaware cops descended on the home of a 17-year-old high school junior to ask her about online communications she had with Weiner.
“They were made aware of an alleged contact between Congressman Anthony Weiner and an area teen,” said New Castle County police spokeswoman Officer Tracey Duffy.
“The teen has been interviewed and disclosed no information regarding any criminal activity.”
She said the probe was continuing.

Read the whole thing. The connection between these two events — the revelation of Weiner’s cybersex sessions with the 34-year-old teacher, and the Delaware police investigation of Weiner’s communications with the 17-year-old — is probably entirely coincidental, except . . .

Well, except that Weiner did both things: He was seeking cybersex with his female online friends and he was privately communicating with a minor girl.

And if you think that’s skeevy, you’re a “moral fascist.”

UPDATE: Nancy Pelosi, Moral Fascist!

Minor Disagreement With VodkaPundit

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by Smitty

In an otherwise agreeable post on the possiblily of Texas Governor Perry running, Iron Liver remarks:

. . .good candidates can be dismissed for trivial reasons. Ask Jeb Bush about that some time.

Not to say that Jeb is a bad candidate in the slightest, but the anti-dynasty sentiment is non-trivial.
As good as Jeb may be, I just don’t see him as so overwhelmingly better than the other possibilities as to overcome the dis-interest in YAB (Yet Another Bush).
More, not less variety is key to recovery.

Quantitative Easing Is Not Default!

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by Smitty (h/t World’s Only Rational Man)

I am nearly tempted to defend the Federal Reserve in the strongest terms. If I felt any more strongly that making money appear by piles of half a trillion was not theft, I would lay down a firm argument. Clearly, ‘Quantitative Easing’ has six syllables; ‘default’, a mere two. Look at Ben Bernanke:

thief
How can a face like this be less than honest?

Would you trust a face like this with protecting the value of your currency? Trick question! You’ve got no choice. Somebody else decided, by Progressive fiat, that in order to keep the Federal Reserve free of tawdry politics, they’d just, you know, appoint him. OK, that notion is a trifle whiffy when set beside the U.S. Constitution proper, but when has the Congress ever blown off the Constitution?
We really have to help these humorless Chinese. Note what a real thief looks like:

small potatoes compared to the Federal Reserve
A real thief

Is not he difference between good and bad blatantly obvious to even the most casual observer? Bernanke is wearing a necktie. The good guys always go that extra fashion mile.

Washington had already defaulted on its loans by allowing the dollar to weaken against other currencies — eroding the wealth of creditors including China, Guan said. 

See, now, that sounds like something Ron Paul or Sarah Palin would say. And have they not both been declared hopelessly out of touch by The People Who Matter?
It’s high time for all these grouchy, pedantic Chinese and conservatives to just relax. Trust your Federal Reserve. Let them run stuff. We should thank Ben Bernanke for sparing us the gory details of, say, bailing out his chums in Greece. We really have been relieved of a lot of stress there. Thanks, Ben!
It really is cool of him to permit us to retain the fiction of sovereignty and valid currency. Let’s not make Mr. Bernanke mad. Who wants to see Mr. Hand turn into Mr. Fist? Not me.

CNN’s Toobin on May 31: ‘What Andrew Breitbart Was Insinuating About [Weiner] With Young Girls Is Outrageous’

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There’s no possible way Breitbart could be right, right, right, while CNN’s “senior legal analyst” was wrong, wrong, wrong — or is there?

“This is a silly little thing that happened”? “Not a big deal”? Yeah, idiot: Tell that to the cops who just interviewed the teenage girl in Delaware!

Maybe some of the numbskulls at CNN should go read what “senior legal analyst” Ace of Spades has to say tonight — Ace doesn’t have a network contract, but he’s been right, right, right all along.

UPDATE: Jennifer Preston of the New York Times actually has a pretty solid story about the latest development:

Representative Anthony D. Weiner said on Friday that he had exchanged at least five private messages on Twitter this spring with a 17-year-old Delaware girl who became an admirer of his after hearing him speak during a high school trip to Washington.
Mr. Weiner’s spokeswoman, Risa Heller, did not provide copies of the messages, but said they were not inappropriate.
“According to Congressman Weiner, his communications with this person were neither explicit nor indecent,” Ms. Heller said.
A member of the girl’s family who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her identity characterized the messages as “harmless” but expressed concern that Mr. Weiner had communicated privately with the teenager, a high school junior.
The family was aware that there had been exchanges between Mr. Weiner and the girl but assumed that all of their conversations had taken place on a public Twitter feed. Then a scandal erupted last month over a photo Mr. Weiner sent of himself in his underwear to a college student.
Last week, Mr. Weiner acknowledged that he had sent other explicit photos and messages to at least six women he met over social media.
The family member said: “I am angry. This is surreal and unbelievable. It is absolutely crazy. We are just regular people who go to baseball games and basketball games, as ordinary and plain as can be.”
In the past few days, the girl and her family have become subjects of intense interest in the news media. On Friday afternoon, the local police arrived at their home and asked the girl and her mother to bring the girl’s phone and computer to the police station so they could be checked to make sure no crime had occurred.
The family member said the family complied, and did not expect any further action to be taken.

The important thing here is: Weiner admits he sent this teenage girl “at least five” DMs.

Does the phrase “grooming” ring a bell?

OK, that last sentence was probably not what you’d call responsible, professional, ethical journalism. But I have sources I could contact, experts in such matters, and I’m reasonably sure that if they were to take a long, hard look at the available evidence here, their responses would include something like the phrase “warning flags.” Here is Weiner, recklessly cybersexing with complete strangers, sending photos of his junk to people he’s never met — clearly driven by some sort of wild sexual compulsion — and this man is sending DMs to teenagers?

Like I said: “Warning flags.”

URGENT: Police Visit Delaware Teen in Connection With Weiner Twitter Scandal

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* * * BREAKING NEWS * * *

NEW CASTLE, Del. — Police on Friday afternoon came to the home of a 17-year-old high school junior to ask her about direct online communications she has had with Rep. Anthony Weiner.
Two officers from the New Castle County Police Department arrived at the girl’s home around 4:30 p.m. and asked to speak with the girl’s mother about the daughter’s contact with Weiner. Another officer appeared at the home a short time later. A FoxNews.com reporter was at the home when the police arrived.

(Via Drew M. at AOSHQ — now with flaming skull alert.)

UPDATE: Just hours ago, I summarized the background on this case:

Did Anthony Weiner Send Obscene
Messages to Teenage Girls Online?

UPDATE II: Linked by Fire Andrea Mitchell — thanks! It is important to note at this point that we don’t whether Weiner actually did anything illegal.

UPDATE III: Michelle Malkin:

Nancy Pelosi doesn’t seem to care — and declines to back resignation calls from other Democrats.

UPDATE IV: Linked by William Teach at Right Wing News — thanks! As to Pelosi’s expression of seeming indifference, “Let’s see how long she sticks with that position,” says my American Spectator colleague John Tabin.

UPDATE V: Now Patterico is blogging about the story, which he pushed hard on Thursday. Allahpundit at Hot Air is also on the story, which has its own Memeorandum thread. I’ll try to provide complete aggregation, but it seems everybody is blogging it now.

UPDATE VI: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE VII: Big Government and Bryan Preston at PJ Tatler are now blogging the latest news.

UPDATE VIII: Politico got an e-mail statement from Weiner’s spokesman: “According to Congressman Weiner, his communications with this person were neither explicit nor indecent.” But Politico‘s Ben Smith adds: “Sexting with an underage girl would push the Weiner scandal out of the realm of embarrassing consensual conduct and give House leadership reason to credibly threaten expulsion.”

UPDATE IX: Linked by Ed Driscoll — thanks! I first mentioned (but did not name) this teenager on May 30. She has been named elsewhere online. Some blogs that previously named her have since redacted her name. You will see that this angle of the WeinerGate scandal was reported almost immediately (i.e., on May 28) by Verum Serum and Ironic Surrealism.

UPDATE X: New York Daily News:

“She was not targeted in any way and did not receive any inappropriate messages or photos or anything from the congressman,” a source close to the Delaware girl told the Daily News. “If she had, her family would have filed charges.” . . .
“The blogs have taken a few tweets from a 17-year-old kid and put their own twist on messages that were just kid stuff,” the source said. “Her family has gone through all her accounts and not found any inappropriate messages.”

That is a strong denial, although only a thorough law-enforcement investigation — getting access to all records from Twitter — would reveal any messages that the teen previously deleted from her account.


A Special Kind of Stupid: Only ‘Culturally Backward’ People Find Weiner’s Conduct Objectionable, Chris Matthews Says

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The Stupidest Man in TV News™ — the Ted Baxter of MSNBC — has perhaps outdone himself with his latest astonishing foray into the frontier of brain-addled commentary:

This is, to me, the stakes here. If [Anthony Weiner] stays, [Democrats] never get the leadership back. They never get the Speakership back because the people in the rural areas of this country who are Christian conservative culturally – you can say backward if you want – but they don’t like this kind of stuff at all. They’re not part of that 56 percent in Brooklyn and Queens who say, “okay, we can live with this guy.” Your thoughts, Ben? Isn’t that the cutting edge of this?

What did Ben Smith of Politico say in reply? I don’t know. But I hope when he left the studio, Ben sent an e-mail to an MSNBC producer asking, “Exactly why do you continue permitting this babbling fool to host his own TV show?”

Given the evidence suggesting that Weiner was cybersexing teenage girls, is it really true that 56 percent of Weiner’s constituents “can live with this guy”? Or is it rather the case, as I suspect, that many of them are not fully informed about what Weiner was up to online?

The weird thing here is, Chris Matthews is one of the few people at MSNBC who even acknowledges WeinerGate as a legitimate and politically significant story. Ace of Spades observes:

Most of MSNBC’s hosts . . . are on a campaign of minimziation.
See, especially, Rachel Maddow, who insists there’s nothing to see here and it’s all a laugh.

But how the hell is it, I ask, that the people who know the most about what Weiner has actually done — including Andrew Breitbart — are those who find it most objectionable? And why would Chris Matthews suggest that the “culturally backward” people in “rural areas” might be offended?

Is Breitbart a dimwitted backwoods clodhopper? Are 56% of voters in Queens and Brookly really more sophisticated than Breitbart?

Permit me to suggest that anyone attempting to “minimize” WeinerGate consider how the story has unfolded to date, and ask themselves: What new surprising revelations await?

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

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