Let's be clear on this. Your blogger has a strong connection to the district Congressman Weiner represents, but he does not live or vote there. The Congressman's value to those who see the New Deal as an irrevocable compact between the government and the citizenry, has been long apparent, but his interminable press conference on Monday and its shocking revelations about him, led to this post on Daily Kos:

Truly a jackass... (2+ / 0-)

He went from being considered a bit of a jackass, to a really brave teller of truths in a place where truth is rarely seen, back to being a jackass.

Obviously the press and broadcast interest in this junior high school cafeteria type story is ridiculous, but as a judge once explained to me when enormous numbers of reporters showed up to cover a fairly run of the mill case, they get interested when something is about sex. (Had she not told me this, I think the judge thought, I would not have known this.)

Still, Congressman Weiner: once you decided to represent ou[r] interests, and I don't mean just your congressional district, you owed us much more than you have shown this week. Going back on Rachel's show and lying to her!!!! You are truly a jackass.

Not a hypocrite, just a jackass. The reason Republicans (and Spitzer) have to resign for crap like this is that they hold themselves out to be arbiters of right and wrong in our personal lives. I have never seen Congr Weiner do this.

He will not be Mayor, but maybe he gets a prime time television program.

If so, it should be called "Jackass."

With all due humility, that is all that need to be said on this supposed "subject." Whether the Senate Majority Leader, House Minority Leader (and Speaker-in-exile-and-waiting), or the chair of the DCCC think so or not, it is up to the voters in Forest Hills, Kew Gardens, Sheepsheads Bay, the Rockaways, and the several other colofully named neighborhoods he represents who get to decide. Those of us who think Michelle Bachmann is an embarrassing fool, or Joe Barton a disgrace to the planet have had to put up with them given the votes of their constituents. Mrs. Pelosi can manage to tread water even where her tiny flock includes a Congressman who thinks he is in middle school.

You don't like lying politicians? Neither do any of us. Listening to Congressman Weiner tell Rachel Maddow flat out lies as a guy uses the podcast of her program to make a brutal commute almost tolerable is really more than that guy should have to endure. As political lies go, though, there have been worse in relatively recent memory:

TIM RUSSERT: Do you still believe there's no evidence that Iraq was involved in September 11?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last
talked, Tim, of course, was that report that--it's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack. Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point, but that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue.

---Meet the Press, December 9, 2001, almost two months after it became apparent the claim "didn't add up."

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

----President G.W. Bush, State of the Union, January 28, 2003

Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after inspections resumed. These tubes are controlled by the Nuclear Suppliers Group precisely because they can be used as centrifuges for enriching uranium. By now, just about everyone has heard of these tubes, and we all know that there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about what these tubes are for. Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

---Secretary of State Colin Powell, to the United Nations Security Council, February 5, 2003, about six months after it became "fairly well established" that these claims were false.

Q Why shouldn't this be seen as an intelligence failure, that you were unable to predict something happening here?

DR. RICE: Steve, I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile. All of this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking

----Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser to the President of the United States,May 16, 2002 well after the precise threat was made repeatedly

I just want to say that I didn‘t send the picture. I don‘t know who did and what they were intending to do. But I consider it a prank and we‘ve been trying to move past it ever since

----Congressman Weiner to Rachel Maddow, June 1, 2011.

So, we report, you decide. As lies go, which of them, if any, do you think may have caused lives to be lost? If lies need wall to wall teeth gnashing, which of them should put our mouths at risk?

And yet, ever day, your blogger passes by huge numbers of television cameras staking out a building where Congressman Weiner maintains a district office. There there are, sitting and waiting to talk to him, to take his photograph, and to ask people about him, on the same day that a 16 year old girl, going to the beach on a stfling hot day in the first week of June, was killed when someone fired shots on the beach's boardwalk.

That murdered child was at the beach because of stifling heat which, oddly, has swept the country in the first week of June: during the season formerly known as "spring."

We are told in the Times article linked above that

In some states, including Connecticut, where children were allowed to go home early this week, school would not have been in session had it not been for storms that shuttered schools for several days in January and February

All of this comes after an "unusual increase in April tornadoes" was followed by even worse ones in Joplin, Missouri. Tornadoes even hit Springfield, Massachusetts, where few could remember any other ever arriving there, and fires ravage Arizona.

In the meantime, during the few minutes that are left after dissecting just how much of a creep is Congressman Weiner, the avatar of political thought among somewhere more than 40% of the country has decided that any candidate who says

I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer. And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that . . . so I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and the global warming that you’re seeing

is thereby disqualified from any nomination that a major political party might make as its candidate for President of the United States even if said candidate resolutely opposes almost every tepid suggestion of what to do about it.

The New York Times resolutely insists that

it may be decades before science can conclusively demonstrate whether or not human-driven warming is affecting tornado frequency

but the question is surely whether "science" will be allowed to make that determination or whether, say, Limbaugh or other politicians get to decide instead. Then again, in Arizona, it has been decided by some that the fire must have been started by illegal immigrants.

What do we expect, though? Less than three years after a culture of greed and corruption, enabled by some nonsense about how important it was to dismantle government regulation of businesses which, while unregulated, all but destroyed our economy and, frankly our nation, again almost did the same thing , various half measures were slipped past a Congress where one party has decided to block by filibuster anything that could cause one of its client contributors to lose a minutes of sleep. One of those things was the creation of a unit of the federal government to be called a "Consumer Financial Protection Bureau" which would try to assist people who might otherwise be victims of the same things that got us in the mess we were in when the Bush administration was mercifully put out of our misery.

The person who thought this up, who has explained its necessity and knows what is likely to happen without it, Dr Elizabeth Warren, is currently employed by the federal government. She cannot be appointed to the job because that same major political party that could not nominate anybody who suggests that climate change might be a legitimate something to worry about, does not want her to upset anyone. They cannot really come up with a legitimate reason for blocking her appointment or, for that matter, anyone else's to head this new unit other than, as Groucho Marx, Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar once put it, "whatever it is, I'm against it".

But, really, some creepy guy is sending pictures of what he believes to be enticing photographs of parts of his body. Who has time to cover anything else?