Anthony Weiner’s disgrace goes from tragedy to farce, as he finds himself absurdly defended by Alec Baldwin:
He exists under a constant pressure cooker of self-analysis and public appraisal. Like other politicians, he needs something to take the edge off. For some people, regardless of occupation, that could mean booze, drugs, gambling, food or shopping. For high functioning men like Weiner and other officials who have lived through such scandals, who are constantly on the go, that leaves one tried and true source of a reliable high. The affirmation that comes when someone lets you know they want to sleep with you. Or even cyber-sleep with you.
This is sex for many people now. No time for Mateus and cheap spaghetti. No time for slowly moving toward one another with a combination of hope and caution, lust and integrity. One can push a button and get something beyond porn. Porn is essentially two dimensional. One sees and hears. Internet sexting can be perceived as three dimensional by adding the component of “feel”, regardless of how cheap and unearned those feelings are. That person on the screen is doing whatever they’re doing… just for you.
Weiner is so busy, he forgot the important rule that everyone you interact with on this plane becomes a co-conspirator. You rely on them to remain confidential.
Weiner is the modern, high functioning man. The fact that he is married is just one, albeit a huge, factor.
Let’s stop for a minute, first, to consider the character of the man offering this defense of Weiner: Alec Baldwin, who had these cheerful thoughts for his own 12-year-old daughter:
“Once again I’ve made an a– of myself getting to a phone to make a phone call … I’m tired of playing this game with you. You have insulted me for the last time …You’ve made feel like sh– and you’ve made feel like a fool over and over again … I’m going to straighten your a– out … You are a rude, thoughtless little pig.”
Baldwin is a profoundly flawed human being and therefore defends the profoundly flawed Weiner as a comrade — a defense that liberal Baldwin would never offer to any Republican similarly exposed, but let’s go ahead and admit that conservative bloggers are loving this scandal precisely because Weiner is a Democrat.
Yet the partisan parallels are not perfect. One cannot merely say “tu quoque.” Why? Because liberals repeatedly assert that conservatives are stupid, ignorant, unsophisticated, etc., which makes it incumbent upon liberals to justify their pretensions to intellectual superiority.
This is why Joan Walsh is so risible. So long as Weiner stuck by his denials, Walsh continued to insist that this was just a phony scandal ginned up by Breitbart and “his army of political sewer workers.” You might have thought that, endowed with the insuperable mental excellence inherent to liberalism, Walsh would have been able to examine the available evidence and conclude, “Hey, maybe there’s something going on here.” But that didn’t happen, did it?
Nor did Alec Baldwin, before publicly empathizing with Weiner as a “modern, high functioning man,” hesitate long enough to examine the full extent of the suspicions swirling around the embattled congressman.
But that disturbing topic, which others recently have developed in some detail, deserves a post of its own. I will, however, ask if you think that a majority of Weiner’s constituents — who told a pollster the congressman should not resign — are more fully aware of the facts than Alec Baldwin. Because I don’t think they are.
