…and says she was essentially correct, I guess we can finally believe it.
The stupidhead.
Breitbart keeps a little something behind, just in case: sex scandals then and now
Apparently, Andrew Breitbart held a little something in abeyance in Weinergate, just in case he might need it. I watched Breitbart on the Hannity show last night, and he made it fairly clear what that “something else” is: a nude photo of Weiner at the ready, as it were. Breitbart also made it clear that he doesn’t intend to release the picture unless Weiner and his forces try to smear any of the women involved, or Breitbart itself.
It occurs to me that this may mark the first time that a salacious photo has been used to blackmail a public figure into not blackmailing others. It also occurs to me that Weiner’s behavior makes Bill Clinton’s look sedate, and makes Mark Sanford seem like a real family guy.
The fact that the Weiner crotch photos, sent to strangers, could have been used in any number of ways to blackmail him never seems to have occurred to the sender. Or perhaps he thought there was no jam he couldn’t wriggle out of. It puzzles me that he thought this behavior would never come back to bite him, even if it had never done so before.
When adolescent girls send nude photos to the boys in their cohort, they may not think of the consequences. But they are practically kids. What’s Weiner’s excuse? His failure is not only of morality and prudence, it’s of intelligence.
The whole thing makes me nostalgic for the days of the old-fashioned sex scandal. Wilbur Mills and Fanne Foxe come to mind, a story in which the motivations of the main players are at least comprehensible. We had a very powerful older guy and a sexy young Argentinian stripper (what’s up with these Argentinians? I guess I need to ask Sanford). The older guy was an alcoholic, and he ultimately dried out and spent the rest of his days speaking up about alcoholism and its consequences.
To refresh your memory:
Mills [Arkansas Democrat and long-time House Ways and Means Committee chairman] was involved in a traffic incident in Washington, DC at 2 a.m. on October 9, 1974. His car was stopped by U.S. Park Police late at night because the driver had not turned on the lights. Mills was intoxicated, and his face was injured from a scuffle with Annabelle Battistella, better known as Fanne Foxe, a stripper from Argentina. When police approached the car, Foxe leapt from the car and jumped into the nearby Tidal Basin in an attempt to escape…
Despite the scandal, Mills was re-elected to Congress in November 1974 in a heavily Democratic year with nearly 60% of the vote…On November 30, 1974, Mills, seemingly drunk, was accompanied by Fanne Foxe’s husband onstage at The Pilgrim Theatre in Boston, a burlesque house where Foxe was performing. He held a press conference from Foxe’s dressing room. Soon after this second public incident, Mills stepped down from his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, acknowledged his alcoholism, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and checked himself into Palm Beach Institute at West Palm Beach. He did not seek re-election in 1976, devoted his time to counseling individual alcoholics, and raising funds for alcoholic treatment centers, including one founded in his honor at Searcy, Arkansas, the Wilbur D. Mills Treatment Center for Alcohol and Drugs.
Note that Mills—like Weiner so far—did not resign. I guess resigning is just for Republicans.
[NOTE: It also occurs to me that Weinergate is the very model of a modern sex scandal in being primarily computer-driven.
The sex involved was cybersex. The offenses were publicized online, rather than by any news agency. And the story would have gotten lost but for the blogosphere’s pushing it.]
Three people who might be pretty happy about Weinergate are…
…Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and John Edwards.
Speaking of John Edwards, I’ve got a question: isn’t he really really wealthy? And if so, why didn’t he use his own money to placate Rielle Hunter?
Weiner: Yep, I did it
Well, I guess Weiner’s confession calls for some commentary on my part. So let me just say that:
—I still think the original offense[s] itself, although exceedingly smarmy, is a matter between Weiner and his wife (that is, assuming all of the women involved were consenting adults).
—Weiner’s denial was worse than his original offense[s]. As usual, it’s the coverup, stupid. And Weiner was very stupid indeed to not think this was going to come out eventually.
I feel bad for his wife, not even married a year! However, I have a feeling that Weiner may not even lose his seat, if no crimes are found to have been committed.
I also think that if, when this first hit the news, Weiner had confessed immediately, he would have defused much of the ruckus. Some statement to the tune of, “Yes, it was me, I was drunk when I sent it, I’m a sex addict, I’m going into treatment, I apologize to my wife and family whom I’ve hurt so badly, I will spend the rest of my life making this up to them, yada yada yada…” would have gone far. Yes, the right would have trashed him, but the whole thing would have remained in the realm of a guy thinking with the little head.
That is, unless there are worse acts in his past, things that would be even more important to cover up.
One thing that seems pretty clear is that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Here’s Weiner’s Wiki entry:
In July 2008, The New York Times printed a front page story on Weiner’s demanding treatment of his staffers. The piece reported that Weiner frequently resorted to verbally abusing his staffers when he believed they had failed to perform their duties adequately, in addition to physically abusing his office furniture when upset. As a result of Weiner’s demanding and intense nature, the Times reported that a “sizable number” of his staff members had resigned following “abbreviated stints.” According to Congressional data at the time, Weiner had “presided over more turnover than any other member of the New York House delegation in the last six years.” Additionally, at the time of the report, about half of Weiner’s staff had been his employee for less than a year and since early 2007, he had gone through three chiefs of staff.
Weiner was an accident waiting to happen. He’s been getting away with really lousy behavior for years, and not just in the sexual sphere. As I wrote about Strauss-Kahn before him, it seems as though the guy “has been spinning out of control for quite some time, and has only been emboldened (as perps often are) by the fact that he’s been getting away with it.”
[ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that, if Weiner had been a fat slob (not that there’s anything wrong with that), he might not be in this particular trouble today, because he wouldn’t have been quite as irresistibly tempted to send photos of his body to young women he barely knew. Pride goeth before a fall.
I didn’t watch the press conference, but Ed Driscoll points out a conspicuous absence: Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin. Perhaps her former boss Hillary Clinton, who sort of knows how it feels, is consoling her.]
[ADDENDUM II: Ann Althouse discovers that CNN is not the go-to station for this story.]
[ADDENDUM III: It will be an interesting parlor game to see how those who reviled Andrew Breitbart for leading this story (and even accused him of being the hacker) will deal with the revelation that he was right all along. Weiner himself offered Breitbart a tepid apology. But Charles Johnson isn’t eating any crow.]
The music you know
Last night I was looking to order some music from iTunes to replace an old favorite in my archaic record library. Unfortunately, that particular recording was obscure enough that it hasn’t been reissued in an iTunes selection, or even on a regular CD or audiotape. It seems to have gone into the dustbin of history.
So now I have a choice. I can liberate my ancient records and dusty record player from storage, find a place to put them, and try to listen to them that way, scratches and all. I could even get one of those gizmos or software (for example, this) that converts records to MP3 player format and spend a ton of time driving my technically-challenged self nuts trying to do so.
Then there’s the most practical and sane approach: buy a new version of the same piece done by different artists, one that’s available in MP3 or CD format already. What stopped me? Listening to samples of those versions at the iTunes library and at YouTube.
It’s not that they were so bad. It’s just that they sounded terribly wrong to me, because my ear has become totally accustomed to the renditions I have already listened to so many times that I know every nuance, every pause, every inflection, every place the rhythm speeds up and every moment it slows down, every time the singer increases the volume to give emphasis or lowers it to a hush to convey solemnity.
Apparently that particular music in all its details has become embedded in my brain, so much so that, when I listen to previews of other versions, they almost always sound terrible to me. It might be the tempo, or the timbre of the voices, or the emotions conveyed, or any number of other things that keep shrieking “wrong, wrong, WRONG!” to me in a series of jarring surprises that register as shocks.
In the past, when I’ve ordered the new version anyway, I’ve sometimes gotten used to it over time. Once I even found I liked the new one better, after a suitable mourning period. But more often, absolutely not; I seem to lack an “override” button. I keep hearing the original in a ghostly accompaniment that follows along simultaneously with the new in my mind.
Here, by the way (and now you might think me completely mad), is the piece I was looking for last night, sung by people I’ve never heard of who do a credible job but are nothing whatsoever like my originals. I had originally bought my record—which featured the New York Pro Musica—in error, about forty years ago.
It was most decidedly not the sort of music I like. But the familiarity of repeated listenings bred not contempt, but something akin to love:
[NOTE: I did finally end up buying a new version at iTunes this morning. Aren’t I flexible?]
Historians: well, Palin was right but it was only an accident
The right side of the blogosphere has been busy digging up evidence that Sarah Palin’s remarks on Paul Revere, for which her opponents had derided her in their usual manner, were actually correct (I did my little part here).
Now come the historians to say that yes, she was right (and not just as opposed to “left;” as opposed to “wrong”):
Boston University history professor Brendan McConville said, “Basically when Paul Revere was stopped by the British, he did say to them, ”˜Look, there is a mobilization going on that you’ll be confronting,’ and the British are aware as they’re marching down the countryside, they hear church bells ringing ”” she was right about that ”” and warning shots being fired. That’s accurate.”
Patrick Leehey of the Paul Revere House said Revere was probably bluffing his British captors, but reluctantly conceded that it could be construed as Revere warning the British.
But all is not lost, at least as far as the left is concerned. Leehey added, “But I don’t know if that’s really what Mrs. Palin was referring to,” and McConville said that he would call her “lucky in her comments.”
In other words, her errors probably just happened by wild chance to reflect the details of the real Revere history.
It’s sort of the flip side of that old mantra of the left, where it doesn’t matter if someone they support happens to lie or be inaccurate, because it serves a greater truth. In this case, it doesn’t matter if Sarah is correct, because the greater truth is that she’s stupid. So, like a stopped clock that’s right twice a day, any sign of intelligence on her part must be a fluke.
And of course one can’t prove for sure that she knew what she was talking about. It’s certainly within the realm of possibility that she happened by chance to hit on a narrative (love that word!) of Revere that (a) runs counter to what most people believe to be the truth; and (b) is the truth. But how likely is that? Not very.
However, my prediction—and I think it’s a safe one—is that Sarah won’t be hearing any apologies from her mockers any time soon.
The case against John Edwards
I never could see how anyone could support Edwards for president.
There was always something slick and smarmy about him, although I can’t say I had an inkling of just how slick and smarmy he really was. There was also nothing he offered politically that other candidates didn’t offer, and better. If I’d been a liberal Democrat I would never have voted for him in a primary.
When his private life was revealed as sleazy and dishonest, it seemed like the end of a sordid story. His career as a politician is effectively over. His mistress and the mother of his child has gone on Oprah to talk about their sex life and the videotape that documents one of their encounters.
So when Edwards was indicted by a grand jury for the felony of misusing campaign contributions to keep the mistress out of sight during the 2008 campaign, I didn’t pay much attention. And I probably won’t pay a whole lot of attention as the case goes forth.
But I noticed today that there’s a spate of articles about the weakness of the case against Edwards (see this and this). The consensus seems to be that yes, he’s a scumbag extraordinaire, but that it’s a stretch to define the monies used to deal with Rielle Hunter as campaign contributions. And that, after all, is what he’s accused of in the case, not of being a heel. There’s a difference.
Some details of the case:
Justice Department officials decided that the hundreds of thousands of dollars that two Edwards donors gave to help keep his mistress in hiding were contributions that should have been reported publicly by his campaign fund because they aided his bid for the Democratic White House nomination.
From the article, I gather that two wealthy donors gave Edwards money for the purpose of shutting Hunter up and shuttling her around. The monies may have been specifically targeted for that purpose, rather than as general campaign contributions. Now the prosecutors are claiming that, because they were designed to help Edwards’ presidential bid by protecting his reputation, they should be labeled as campaign donations for the purposes of the law.
That may indeed be too elastic a definition of campaign contributions. However, Edwards’ ex-aide Young has said that one of the donors was unaware of what the money (which was labeled a personal gift to Edwards) was being used for. This may indicate that perhaps it was a campaign contribution after all, just by another name. Another problem with the case is that this donor is now a hundred years old and cannot testify for health reasons, and the other donor is deceased.
How the sort-of-mighty have fallen.
Anti-Semitic drawings and the San Francisco anti-circumcision campaign
Zombie illustrates that an anti-Semitic cartoon has been pressed into service in the San Francisco fight to ban circumcision.
It was only a matter of time. And, lest you think this is some sort of fake, the San Francisco Chronicle has reported on it as well, with a statement from the cartoon’s creator, the aptly-named Matthew Hess:
A lot of people have said [the cartoons are anti-Semitic], but we’re not trying to be anti-Semitic. We’re trying to be pro-human rights.
If this isn’t “trying,” I’d hate to see trying:
Actually, I have seen “trying.” Anti-Semitic cartoons have a long history. They were one of the most potent tools of the Nazis, often via a newspaper known as Der Sté¼rmer, published by Julius Stiecher. Stiecher was executed at Nuremberg for his efforts, which included an insidiously evil little book for children called Der Giftpilz (“The Poison Mushroom”).
Here’s a typical sample from Der Sté¼rmer. This illustration appeared in 1935, with the title “Legion of Shame” and this caption [translation]: Ignorant, lured by gold/They stand disgraced in Judah’s fold./Souls poisoned, blood infected/Disaster broods in their wombs:
The book The Poison Mushroom was a pedagogic device for children, to teach them how to recognize Jews and their insidious evil. Examples abound of the book’s illustrative bile; here, for example, is its lovely cover:
And here’s some instruction on how to recognize a Jew (“The Jewish nose is bent. It looks like the number six…”
Wading through this stuff to select illustrations for this post was like tromping through a cesspool (here’s an archive if you’d like to research it yourself). Even now, these images have the power to make the hair on my arms rise in alarm, although they’ve lost their immediate power to kill. Compared to them, it’s true that “Monster Mohel” is tepid stuff. But it disseminates the very same poison.
[ADDENDUM: More Nazi art, this time resembling the Mohel in the Foreskin Man cartoon to a T. See this and this (and note, in the comments section of the latter link, the number of commenters supporting the foreskin ban who state they’re Jewish. I’m almost certain they are trolls/sockpuppets.]
James Arness, RIP
Another icon from my youth gone.
I’m not so sure I understood the plots of “Gunsmoke,” but I’m quite sure I enjoyed them, as well as characters Mr. Dillon, Chester, Miss Kitty, and Doc; the saloon, and all those storefronts. I was actually a little bit in love with Arness, or maybe with Matt Dillon (hey, I was a little bit in love with Chester).
But I had no idea at the time that Arness was 6’6″ tall. Nor did I know that Miss Kitty started out in the series as somewhat of a loose woman; all of the following was completely lost on me:
Miss Kitty, who in the radio series clearly engaged in prostitution, began in that role in the television series but transitioned to saloon proprietor in later years. Although early film episodes showed her descending from her second-floor rooms in the saloon with Matt, or showed her or one of her girls leading a cowboy up to those same rooms, these scenes disappeared later on, and viewers were guided to see Miss Kitty just as a kindhearted businesswoman.
Here they are, looking pretty good:
Spambot of the day
Can’t exactly disagree with this spambot:
I wouldn’t believe we should be with loincloths made of dingo skin, more so than we’ve been effective at calculate. Whenever we realize it happens to be worthy of establishing, will probably be astonishing.
Palin: history and Paul Revere’s ride
Palin commits an Obamaism and mispeaks on history:
[Paul Revere] who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed.
Nope, not especially articulate. And of course it was the colonists Revere warned. And although Obama has also been both inarticulate and historically inaccurate so many times that it would support a small cottage industry, and the MSM continually covers for him while attacking Palin, that doesn’t make her correct.
But how wrong is she, anyway? One of the main goals of the British regulars was to seize armaments the colonists had stored in Concord. And there were bells:
A few minutes later, they were all startled to hear the heavy crash of an entire volley of musketry from the direction of Lexington’s meeting house and then the Lexington town bell began clanging rapidly! Jonathan Loring, a Lexington resident captured earlier, turned to his captors and shouted “The bell’s a’ ringing! The town’s alarmed, and you’re all dead men!”
What’s more, the colonists were British at that time, and considered themselves to be so (although I don’t claim that’s what Palin was referring to). But there is more historical accuracy in her admittedly disjointed statement than most people are aware of, since most of the facts have been lost to the public in legend, myth, and ignorance.
But hey, it’s so much more fun to trash Palin than to actually try to learn anything, isn’t it?
Love and cynicism
Here’s a touching column on lasting marital love by Tim Muldoon (hat tip: the Anchoress).
He writes “But no less intense is the feeling of radical security we have built together: the knowledge that through all things we can count on each other, and not feel a need to compete or fear loneliness.”
I’m happy for Muldoon and his wife. But as a person who was in a deeply committed and seemingly secure marriage for a very long time and is now divorced, I’ve got a question: what does a person do when that “radical security” turns out to be an illusion (or perhaps a delusion)? I’ve not only seen it happen in my own life, I’ve observed it way too many times in the lives of others.
Does the power of religion as the foundation for marriage (which is where Muldoon is coming from, as a Catholic theologian) matter? I think it helps, but it certainly doesn’t protect.
And how do we learn to trust anew? Is it merely a matter (as Churchill said in a more general context) of success being the ability to go “from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm?”