That double standard

I have reserved comment on this through all the sordid details, and I’m not going to rehash the particulars now, either.

But it’s clear that Rep. Anthony Weiner has violated the trust voters placed in him since he first won election to Congress in 1998. And unlike his New York counterpart, former Rep. Christopher Lee, he didn’t immediately resign once he admitted those Twitter pictures were his. (Lee left office after sending a shirtless photo of himself to a woman he met through Craigslist.) In the end, this cost the GOP a Congressional seat as a liberal Democrat won the special election to fill Lee’s 26th District seat.

In this case, it’s doubtful the Democrats would lose the Congressional seat since Weiner has won elections handily since his first one in 1998. While his closest brush was 2010, where he won 60.8% of the vote, no Republican has represented the area in decades.

So why is Weiner staying on? One can only speculate, of course, but perhaps it has something to do with that old adage, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And he’s going to stay in the news because it was learned his wife, who he married just last summer, is now pregnant with their first child. (He’s married to an aide to Hillary Clinton.)

Yet it’s a sad statement on American life that this sensationalized story became front page news. Otherwise Weiner’s a relatively obscure back-bencher from America’s largest city who is as liberal as the day is long. And perhaps that’s the biggest problem – many of the liberal persuasion can’t understand what all the fuss is about. They equate it with the saga of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

The issue in both cases, though, isn’t what these men did in the privacy of their own lives – the issue is that both men denied the facts at first before finally admitting the truth. In other words, they lied to save their hide but didn’t need to because their hide was saved anyway and their behavior excused.

No one, including me, is perfect. But when we place people in a position of public trust we should expect them to be leaders and set an example. The only example Weiner has set is what not to do on Twitter.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.

11 thoughts on “That double standard”

  1. I find the whole double standard thing most frustrating. If Weiner had been a conservative, he would have been drawn and quartered long before now. The MSM didn’t even touch this story until weeks after the blogs were talking about it.

  2. Really? A double standard? Two words: David Vitter.
    Also, the liberal Dem won the seat as a direct backlash to Paul Ryan’s anti-Medicare proposals. He may be a Tea Party favorite, but I will put my money on the old folks voting in greater #s than tea partiers in 2012.

  3. ” If Weiner had been a conservative, he would have been drawn and quartered long before now”

    I guess that is why Vitter is still in office and Gringrich is running for the Republican nomination for POTUS?

    Joe H.
    Stevensville, MD

  4. Actually, the liberal won the seat because of a fraudulent “TEA Party” candidate who had ran for the seat before as a Democrat.

    Besides, I thought the TEA Party was a bunch of geezers who scream about not taking their Medicare away, so wouldn’t that defeat your assertion?

  5. No, the tea party is a bunch of reactionaries who scream “small government, small government” except when they want services. Those, they believe, are sacred. It is theother guy’s benefits that must be cut, not their own.

  6. As opposed to wealthy liberals who scream “tax the rich” but do their utmost to cut their tax bills when it’s time for them to pay. Ask yourself: how many people voluntarily cut a check to the government?

    The TEA Party has the right idea. Your side has had almost eighty years to perfect things and we’re nowhere close.

  7. Your side had 8 years do do something, and almost succeeded in destroying the country. I’ll take my side’s eighty years any day.

  8. If you call eight years of growing government at a slightly slower pace, federalizing even more control of local education, and creating a new entitlement program in Medicare Part D as “doing something,” well, then you and I are going to disagree.

    When we get around to dismantling the welfare state then you can complain – but we’re nowhere close to slowing down the train let alone reverse course.

  9. slightly slower pace? bush turned the clinton surplus into a 1.6 trillion dollar deficit and borrowed unprecedented amounts of money to fight two unnecessary wars, and create a new federal bureaucracy, DHS. your solution to the conservative problem of “borrow and spend” is to destroy medicare in order to pay for more tax cuts to rich people that tanked our economy. liberal is right: I’ll take our view point over yours any day.

    and you love to bash on bush now. too bad you didn’t do any of that for 8 straight years. oh, that’s right, it’s because he was a republican. you don’t care about solutions to problems. you care about getting republicans elected. just admit it.

  10. Listen pal, I care about my country and getting conservatives elected to lead it back to prosperity and sanity, if it’s not already too late.

    Let me destroy your most egregious arguments one by one; I’m in a sporting mood.

    First of all, the ONLY reason we had a surplus in the late 1990’s was because a Republican-controlled Congress actually exerted its power of the purse and created the situation. If Bill Clinton had his way we would’ve spent up a storm in those years as well. (Conversely, Reagan’s deficits were caused by a Democratic Congress who termed his budgets “dead on arrival” and wouldn’t cut spending. The Reagan tax cuts actually helped revenue because there was more economic activity.)

    As for “unnecessary” wars, well, these are still going on two years into a new administration while Obama is now involved in a third (Libya.) I saw much less benefit for going there than I did for Afghanistan or Iraq. I believe DHS was simply a merging of a number of federal agencies; much of the problem with it lies with its unionization. The concept made sense, as I seem to recall it was supposed to be lean and flexible to address pressing issues, but instead has become another bloated bureaucracy we don’t need.

    I think that Medicare indeed needs to be phased out over a period of time – as it stands now it may not be there anyway in a couple decades because costs are unsustainable. The government needn’t be involved in our health care. That’s more of a conservative or libertarian viewpoint than a Republican one.

    Nor do I accept the premise that tax cuts are “paid for” because the money belongs to us. We earned it, the government did not. All they do is take an increasing share to pay for services we don’t necessarily need. Personally I would prefer a consumption-based tax so that if rich people want to pay for an opulent lifestyle, well, then I guess they are paying their “fair share.” Of course, your side doesn’t like that idea because it eliminates much of the control you can exert over our behavior through the tax code. Oh well, sucks to be you.

    You might want to look back into my archives and see how I felt about these things while Bush was in office. If he deserved a ripping I gave it to him.

    I certainly care about solutions to problems, but I don’t believe government can provide them. If they truly solved problems they would eliminate their own jobs and that rarely happens in government.

    On a strictly political basis, I care about getting conservatives elected. And I’ll take the correct viewpoint over yours any day.

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