You seem to have completely misunderstood my opinions and you’re making this personal for reasons that escape me. In this thread I’ve called Weiner a liar a couple of times and I also called him a dick who didn’t accomplish much in Congress. But no, national likability and respectability aren’t particularly important qualities in choosing the mayor of a city. If a guy or gal does a good job, I don’t much care what people who live elsewhere say about him or her. People around the country have made jokes about the soda ban thing and it doesn’t bother me because I think Bloomberg is actually right on that one. For the record, Rudy Giuliani cheated on his wife in a very public way and you seem to have forgotten about it or factored it out of your assessment of him, and I think that supports my point. And saying he and Bloomberg have made the city more polite is a little weird because they’re both really rude and condescending.
Weiner’s actions make him unacceptable in my opinion from public office. Giuliani’s shameless exploitation of 9/11 for personal political gain make him equally unacceptable.
No, they had no such good sense. They benefitted from one combination of:
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A society that did not care about their personal peccadillos
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Even if they did care, the personal or institutional power to insulate themselves from any blowback
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A society in which the technological level made it difficult or impossible for the public to track or discover their personal activities
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A society in which the witnesses to such behavior were motivated to help keep it secret
Now we live in a society in which all these things are tremendously unlikely. And that’s largely a good thing. We are able to hold public servants accountable, far more than in the past.
Bit we have reached a point at which we are choosing as a society to hold them accountable for the wrong things and we are limiting our choices. An official is far more likely to go down for betraying a purely private trust and is likely to get away with betraying the public’s trust.
Even greater is the irony that it’s the opposite for non-office holders. We can get away with all kinds of stuff either because it’s not illegal or no one cares. I think our public officials shouldn’t be held to any higher standard than we as ordinary citizens are held.
We can’t get away with shrunken driving, so an official should also not get away with it. That’s a good thing. But officials should have the same right to purely private foibles as the rest of us do.
True. But we’re living in different times. The media is bigger now than it ever has been. You can’t even take a shit with out at least one blogger or news reporter taking notice.
Anthony’s shenanigans is a distraction and an easy target for the GOP. We don’t need that shit.
Yeah, those tiny cars are a bitch to see and sometimes get stuck in the grille.
Virtually every serious major candidate, regardless of affiliation, stands up on a podium with their spouse presenting themselves as a whoesome stereotypical family.
Eliott Spitzer’s wife stood next to him on the podium looking like she wanted to drive an ice pick, fashioned from the Manhattan Madame’s collagen injection needles, right into his fucking medula oblongata. But they stood there.. presenting themselves as the wholesome American family vowing to see this through. Weiner’s wife did it, as well as did Mrs. Clinton.
Is it hypocritical from both sides? Absolutely, no question. Just don’t try to use this “family values” drivel as an excuse to deflect the shitty behavior of your favorite party’s scandal ridden candidate du jour.
I don’t recommend heroin to anyone, but you have to admit: it hasn’t hurt your record collection.
[QUOTE=Upton Sinclair]
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
[/QUOTE]
The same principle applies to one’s tribal allegiance, even when no money changes hands.
What possible relevance does that statement have?
Actually Mrs. Weiner (Huma Abedin) did not take part in this ritual the first time around.
Zakalwe argued that candidates who take a ‘protect the family’ stance are bigger hypocrites when they cheat than politicians who take a ‘consenting adults can do what they want’ stance. Until a few years ago almost nobody took the ‘consenting adults can do what they want’ stance, so they weren’t any less hypocritical.
Not trying to be snarky, but did you see the front page of cnn.com? She is doing it today.
I watched the speech yesterday. She is taking part now; when Weiner admitted to his behavior in 2011, she did not.
Again, how is that at all relevant? Insofar as the voting booth is not marked “POLICE CALL BOX”, nor is it larger on the inside, the merits and demerits of past generations of politicans are irrelevant to the question of which ones to choose in the present.
It’s a fair cop, not sure what it has to do with the overall point.
Absolutely. But the key difference is that Candidate A wants to take steps to make you conform to his stated ideal (mostly by closing down other options). And I don’t really recall ever defending either Edwards or Weiner. They’re both shits. So I don’t get where I’m saying anybody’s behavior is acceptable.
See above. Fighting against legally enshrined moral/religious restrictions is, at least minimally, supportive of the “an ye do harm…” attitude. One that evolves over time, but at least it’s open to evolution as opposed to “well nothing like that was allowed in my great-granddaddy’s day, so fuck that.”
The distinction Zakalwe is talking about didn’t really exist until around 2008, so it’s not a very good explanation of why it supposedly doesn’t matter when some politicians cheat.
Just clarifying a minor detail.
Yeah, they’re not running for mayor of Wiccatown. The moral restrictions are wrong and cheating and lying are wrong; it’s not worse depending on what group you’re part of.
OK, so I’ll keep that point in mind the next time I’m asked to make a direct choice between a politician who last ran for offfice before 2008 and a politician who is running for office now.
Even setting aside your irrelevant temporal quibble, that’s ridiculous. Are you trying to seriously assert that there’s no difference between (for example) a war opponent evading conscription and a gung-ho superpatriotic war advocate evading conscription?
Again, it’s not worse for either group, it is, however, more hypocritical for one group.
A major televangelist and a strip club owner both get divorced for infidelity. They’re both culpable, but I would argue it certainly LOOKS worse for the televangelist. He’s made his career out of trying to convince people infidelity is wrong.
Close. Very close. 
OK so the next time a candidate shows up to a news conference and his wife has dollar bills hanging out of her g-string , we can revisit this.
The point is they virtually all sell the same image. Loving, devoted family man/woman/husband/wife. It’s as hyporcritical for one as the other.