Congressman Weiner

[DarthTom]

Sexual behaviour doesn't have anything to do with the ability to govern. Thats like saying someone who can't drive shouldn't be a particle physicist.

Leadership and more importantly integrity does. These people aren't guilty of being sex fiends but rather a chronic and have a borderline psychotic inability to tell the truth.

I find it funny and telling that some public figures have no problem in dealing with questions they don't want to answer in difficult circumstances and others seem to think an obvious lie will get them off.

Recently for example, Piers Morgan on CNN asked Ann Coulter [another controversial figure] to talk about her personal life. When asked she said, "my personal life is my personal life and I intend on keeping that way." Morgan tried to rephrase the question and she replied, "....you can rephrase the question as many different ways as you'd like Piers, but I'm not going to talk about it."

Wiener instead of lying about this whole incident could have said from the outset that the whole thing was a personal matter and that he wasn't going to answer any more questions about the matter no matter how many different ways people want to pose the question. He didn't obviously - he lied and that's the problem IMHO.

 

[DarthTom]

For one thing, elected leaders are held to a higher standard than people in other disciplines. More importantly however, these episodes (the sexting, but more egregiously the lying) show the congressman to have very poor judgment. I don't know about you but I think congressmen should be people with good judgment.

Exactly. Right or wrong, martial fidelity is often used as a litmus test to judge people's character. Personally I think it's a fair one because if you cannot be honest with the person you claim to love how can voters expect an elected official to be honest with them as well?

Thank God we didn't get John Edwards as either the Democrats candidate or as President. He's someone that is an extremely flawed person on a number of levels and his ability to be honest with his own family was the start of it.

 

[Roland Deschain]

Sexual behaviour doesn't have anything to do with the ability to govern. Thats like saying someone who can't drive shouldn't be a particle physicist.

Leadership and more importantly integrity does. These people aren't guilty of being sex fiends but rather a chronic and have a borderline psychotic inability to tell the truth.

I find it funny and telling that some public figures have no problem in dealing with questions they don't want to answer in difficult circumstances and others seem to think an obvious lie will get them off.

Recently for example, Piers Morgan on CNN asked Ann Coulter [another controversial figure] to talk about her personal life. When asked she said, "my personal life is my personal life and I intend on keeping that way." Morgan tried to rephrase the question and she replied, "....you can rephrase the question as many different ways as you'd like Piers, but I'm not going to talk about it."

Wiener instead of lying about this whole incident could have said from the outset that the whole thing was a personal matter and that he wasn't going to answer any more questions about the matter no matter how many different ways people want to pose the question. He didn't obviously - he lied and that's the problem IMHO.

Yes he shouldn't have lied but put yourself in his position and then you can see why he did. Also we have to consider what he lied about, being a porn star, this is a less serious lie than saying lying about WMDs in Iraq. Also someone can be very honest but have many terrible personal qualities that will appeal to the mob and they'll get voted in, even though the may be authoritarian, narrow minded, bigoted and prone to running up a huge deficit. In any case I feel some sympathy though not all that much for Weiner, hes really in the shit now and its no ones business, except his wife's.

 

[DarthTom]

Yes he shouldn't have lied but put yourself in his position and then you can see why he did. Also we have to consider what he lied about, being a porn star, this is a less serious lie than saying lying about WMDs in Iraq.

No one ever proved that Dubya or his administration lied about WMD's. Bad information was provided. But that's a red herring to this discussion.

We are talking about Wiener's integrity not others.

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:

1. Topic A is under discussion.
2. Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
3. Topic A is abandoned.

In any case I feel some sympathy though not all that much for Weiner, hes really in the shit now and its no ones business, except his wife's.

When you run for office and use the cameras to get elected and stay in the public spotlight you cannot just will them to turn off because all of a sudden you get yourself into a very public conversation about personal matters.

Anyone in my opinion that doesn't realize that Twitter isn't 'public,' is an idiot and deserves what they get if they post their personal life online.

Shit, this website is public - and anything I post ya know with my real name I'm intelligent enough to realize is up for scrutiny about my real life. And I'm not even an elected public official.

Wiener is a moron - he deserves all of the scorn he's getting for his behavior.

 

[Roland Deschain]

Yes he shouldn't have lied but put yourself in his position and then you can see why he did. Also we have to consider what he lied about, being a porn star, this is a less serious lie than saying lying about WMDs in Iraq.

No one ever proved that Dubya or his administration lied about WMD's. Bad information was provided. But that's a red herring to this discussion.

We are talking about Wiener's integrity not others.

In any case I feel some sympathy though not all that much for Weiner, hes really in the shit now and its no ones business, except his wife's.

When you run for office and use the cameras to get elected and stay in the public spotlight you cannot just will them to turn off because all of a sudden you get yourself into a very public conversation about personal matters.

Anyone in my opinion that doesn't realize that Twitter isn't 'public,' is an idiot and deserves what they get if they post their personal life online.

Shit, this website is public - and anything I post ya know with my real name I'm intelligent enough to realize is up for scrutiny about my real life. And I'm not even an elected public official.

Wiener is a moron - he deserves all of the scorn he's getting for his behavior.

No we were talking about Weiners integrity initially. Then you mentioned leaders should have integrity. So now I'm talking to you about the integrity of other leaders. Yeah even though it wasn't proven beyond all reasonable doubt its fairly clear that they were either lying to themselves or the public or both. There was some serious bullshitting going on with the forged document containing extracts taken from a students PhD thesis which was meant to prove Saddam was harbouring WMDs. And not forgetting the sexed up dossier in the UK its clear that both administrations wanted the public to believe something which was false!

Saddam was America's bitch in the 80s. Guess who helped him develop internationally outlawed chemical weapons to use on Iranian soldiers? He was a muscleman in the Middle East and had worked for America's interests, thats why they didn't finish him in the gulf war, they tried to bargain with him in the following ten years, didn't work, so they invented a pretext to go to war and finish him off that way. Its the same old tired story, with Gaddafi too, Britain sold him weapons and riot control gear to use on his own people. First he was portrayed as a monster, then as a lovable buffoon, now he's a monster again because he's no longer suitable to have in power for the Western elites. The media is just another arm of the corporate/state system.

No Weiner is intelligent, thats obvious if you see him talk. He's a smart individual, but I agree that posting pictures of his sausage on twitter was baffling. However sex often makes people mindless. I have to love the hysteria about it though, people always go for the laziest things to get worked up about. If they want to talk about integrity they go for sexual shennanigans, if they want to pin the blame for the economic mess the West is in it'll be immigrants or dole fraudsters, those nearest to them on the social totem pole and therefore the easiest to beat up on.

 

[DarthTom]

snip the attempt to divert the conversation to the Iraq war

I don't want to discuss leadership qualities related to the Iraq war. This is very old water under a very old bridge in comparison to Wiener's truth telling problems.

No Weiner is intelligent, thats obvious if you see him talk. He's a smart individual, but I agree that posting pictures of his sausage on twitter was baffling. However sex often makes people mindless. I have to love the hysteria about it though, people always go for the laziest things to get worked up about. If they want to talk about integrity they go for sexual shennanigans, if they want to pin the blame for the economic mess the West is in it'll be immigrants or dole fraudsters, those nearest to them on the social totem pole and therefore the easiest to beat up on.

I don't think he's intelligent at all. Anyone who's a member of the US congress who posts a picture of himself that outlines his penis in his underwear on his public Twitter account is a moron. We will have to agree to disagree on that point.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

But that's a red herring to this discussion.

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:

1. Topic A is under discussion.
2. Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
3. Topic A is abandoned.

Are you an imposter, sir? Have I taken a wrong turn into the Mirror Universe?

 

[Roland Deschain]

snip the attempt to divert the conversation to the Iraq war

I don't want to discuss leadership qualities related to the Iraq war. This is very old water under a very old bridge in comparison to Wiener's truth telling problems.

No Weiner is intelligent, thats obvious if you see him talk. He's a smart individual, but I agree that posting pictures of his sausage on twitter was baffling. However sex often makes people mindless. I have to love the hysteria about it though, people always go for the laziest things to get worked up about. If they want to talk about integrity they go for sexual shennanigans, if they want to pin the blame for the economic mess the West is in it'll be immigrants or dole fraudsters, those nearest to them on the social totem pole and therefore the easiest to beat up on.

I don't think he's intelligent at all. Anyone who's a member of the US congress who posts a picture of himself that outlines his penis in his underwear on his public Twitter account is a moron. We will have to agree to disagree on that point.

The Iraq war has had very serious reprecussions based on sheer dishonesty and if thats built on a lie, or even possibly self deception on the part of ideological zealots which bred further lies, its of far greater significance than some dude posting a picture of his crotch on the internet. You talk of integrity and I show you an example of the greatest lack of it. Of course you don't want to acknowledge this because you don't want to admit you're making an unnecessarily big deal over the Weiner fiasco.

I mean thats what people get upset about! Pictures of crotches... but think about the bloody economic fallout, where is the sustained mass hysteria for that?! Where is the sustained political pressure to reform broken institutions? Where are the waves of protests, the community organizations, the refusal to participate in a broken society? Very little and its not surprising, its just easy to get riled up about the sexual picadillos of a congressman and say you're politically engaged.

You still haven't answered my question, imagine your Weiner. Imagine you have say something like sex addiction and you can't help posting pictures of your underpants on the internet. You're running for election, the pinnacle of your career and you get called up on the underpants pic. What do you do. Shit has hit the fan, all your hard work is in jeopardy including your marriage. What do you do? Come clean? Is it that easy? Or do you wait, neither confirm nor deny that its your crotch on the internet, ride out the storm and see what happens, and if absolutely necessary come clean, because essentially the furore is about your embarassing secret shame which is separate from the duties entailed in your elected office? Its just another stupid media circus with the mob riled up into ecstatic self congratulatory condemnation while consuming the salivating details.

PS your using a very narrowly defined criterion for evaluating intelligence, its actually ridiculous, someone is somehow an idiot if they post a rude pic of themselves on the net. How does that add up? I mean someone can be an absolute idiot in the practical matters of life but still be highly intelligent. Unless you can come up with some miraculously convincing arugment to the contrary I'm just going to dismiss this completely as utter nonsense.

 

[SmoothieX]

Cockshots available on gawker.com!

I don't care what he does in his spare time as long as he does his job.

 

[DarthTom]

Cockshots available on gawker.com!

I don't care what he does in his spare time as long as he does his job.

It doesn't bother you that until Wiener was backed into a corner with the facts about this he was claiming that his Twitter account was hacked which would have been a Federal offense?

 

[PurpleLady]

What's sad is the trend. Politicians both elected and those running should be held to a higher standard, but they are human so they get involved in stuff they shouldn't. I think you can liken it to a film or tv star groupie mentality. People who wouldn't have dreamed of doing some of this sexual stuff prior to being involved in politics, now find that they are appealing to certain types of groupies. Of course, it could just be him living up to his name. Once a wiener always a wiener.

 

[Yevetha]

I think it was just Weiner being Weiner.

Politicians barely have young groupies.

 

[SmoothieX]

^That's why he's sending pics of Weiner's Weener out to young woman, to get young groupies. Duh!

I've always thought the term weener was a great nickname for a penis. It sounds so juvenile, yet so raucnhy at the same time.

 

[DarthTom]

What's sad is the trend. Politicians both elected and those running should be held to a higher standard, but they are human so they get involved in stuff they shouldn't.

I've noticed a lot of men make this argument. "Guilty but innocent by virtue of his XY chromosomes."

Doesn't fly with me. Unlike the animals, human animals don't stumble upon Twitter and somehow accidentally post a picture of their penis.

 

[Dorian Thompson]

I'm waiting for the day when a female politician, 40ish, a little mid life crisis happening, tries to explain publicly and to her husband why she felt she just had to send that crotchless panties shot of herself to the local college QB.

Somehow....I feel it just won't fly.

 

[DarthTom]

I'm waiting for the day when a female politician, 40ish, a little mid life crisis happening, tries to explain publicly and to her husband why she felt she just had to send that crotchless panties shot of herself to the local college QB.

Somehow....I feel it just won't fly.

Married women [especially married female politicians] seem to have a lot more success at either keeping this kind of shit quiet or not engaging in extramarital liaisons / chat on the net then men do.

The 'all men are dogs,' excuse / "we are only human" ones are a way to give men a free pass on bad behavior and down right stupidity IMO in Wieners case.

 

[beamMe]

I'm waiting for the day when a female politician, 40ish, a little mid life crisis happening, tries to explain publicly and to her husband why she felt she just had to send that crotchless panties shot of herself to the local college QB.

Somehow....I feel it just won't fly.

Married women [especially married female politicians] seem to have a lot more success at either keeping this kind of shit quiet or not engaging in extramarital liaisons / chat on the net then men do.

The 'all men are dogs,' excuse / "we are only human" ones are a way to give men a free pass on bad behavior and down right stupidity IMO in Wieners case.

What's that got to do with his work?

 

[Kestra]

Of course, it could just be him living up to his name. Once a wiener always a wiener.

You may want to skim this article.

What's sad is the trend. Politicians both elected and those running should be held to a higher standard, but they are human so they get involved in stuff they shouldn't.

I've noticed a lot of men make this argument. "Guilty but innocent by virtue of his XY chromosomes."

Doesn't fly with me. Unlike the animals, human animals don't stumble upon Twitter and somehow accidentally post a picture of their penis.

Well, PurpleLady did say "human," not "man." As to this sort of behavior, it does seem odd on the surface. But I also think about how politicians, celebrities, etc. all have lives that our different from the average person in certain ways. A "normal" husband and wife may find other outlets if they are having trouble in their relationship. Maybe they go to a party and flirt a little more than they should with someone, or whatever. I wonder sometimes if these public figures are on lockdown so much in terms of controlling their public image at all times that they end up venting their feelings and emotions in more unusual ways. Like tweeting pics like this. There's also the power angle. Maybe they all just feel like teenagers where the world is theirs and nothing can touch them.

 

[DarthTom]

What's that got to do with his work?

What do Weiners marriage photo's have to do with his work? What about his wife's associations with the Clinton's? He hasn't been shy in using those affiliations and occassions to promote his political career.

You cannot have it both ways. "Butt into my private life so long as it's framed exactly as I'd like it and published preciously as I'd want it in a positive way that spins my career as nothing but I'm a wonderful family guy who's a good guy in the House of Representatives."

Sorry - life don't work that way - you gotta take the ups with the downs if you're going to make your private life public.

 

[beamMe]

you gotta take the ups with the downs if you're going to make your private life public.

Making your private life public is something that is required of American politicians by the public, even though it has nothing to do with a politician's actual work.
I guess it's much easier to look at pictures of an attractive family than to try and understand what actual politics these people stand for - and probably still stand for even after such a "scandal".