Your first post on that subject was, at best, sloppy. It wasn’t clear that you were only talking about the court of public opinion.
Uh huh.
“there’s a law against politicians making a jackass out of themselves and cheating on their spouses. Those accused are tried and convicted in the court of public opinion”.
It’s pretty simple. The first sentence was poetic license and the 2nd sentence explained it. Sorry if that confused you.
Yeah, I know, which is why I shook my fist at the Code of Ethics instead of you ;).
But it’s not a typo (which I don’t much care about), it’s clearly a confusion of terms which is what irked me, especially in what looks like official material that, presumably, got proof-read. What can I say ? I’m anal about words, in case you hadn’t picked up on it already :). Job hazard.
Quite right. “I lied to protect my wife” is uttered because it has superficial plausibility, but is basically nonsense.
Based on what a number of prominent Dems (among many others) are saying, it not only could, it absolutely has. And I’m claiming that someone a lot dumber than Weiner would have foreseen this.
(Note that the standard is not “your moral principles” but rather “highest moral principles”.)
I think when he was in “I’ve been hacked” mode, he was not thinking solely of himself - he was aware of the problems a revelation would cause both for himself and his party, and was hoping to avoid those. So I do argue that the lies represent putting loyalty to party ahead of loyalty to the highest moral principles. I don’t think that’s all they represent, but it was in the mix.
This could accurately be said about the time during which he was doing all that sexting.
Anybody thinking clearly could have foreseen it.
I think he was attempting to save his own ass. I don’t think he put loyalty to the party ahead of anything.
I think your reading of this code of conduct suggests that anyone who cheats on his or her spouse and lies about it is unfit to work for the government. (It goes without saying that practically everyone who gets caught cheating lies about it. Cheating is itself dishonest behavior.) That’s not just elected officials, mind you, it’s anyone working for the federal government. I don’t think that’s what this code of conduct is about. Weiner has revealed himself (heh) to be a jerk and a liar, and whether he resigns or not makes no difference to me. But I don’t think it follows that anyone who cheats and tries to cover it up is unfit for any form of government service. The government is not the clergy. A Congressman who cheats on his wife or a deputy undersecretary who cheats on her husband can still do the job. They may be jerks, but I’d rather have a government with some jerks who know what they’re doing than wait for a government made up of saints.
Perhaps only Dio could make dozens of posts to a thread dealing with a topic he believes no one cares about.
“Nobody cares,” in the sense that no one is genuinely offended or hurt by the behavior beside maybe his wife. All the moral outrage from Dems and Republicans alike is phony. Republicans are gleeful (though they’re in danger of a backlash if they keep btrying to overreach too much and turn Weiner into some kind of predator when he’s really just another dick texting idiot), Democrats are annoyed that it sucks all the oxygen out of the news cycles for anything else, but nobody is truly, sincerely outraged.
I “care” about lots of things that neither hurt me, offend me, nor cause me outrage. And if I were in his district, I would want him to not run again if he didn’t resign. There are plenty of potential Congressmen who don’t have a habit of texting their junk to random strangers.
And we are a poorer nation for it.
To update this, ABC has acknowledged it did pay one of the women for her photos.
By the way, the investigation into Weiner’s conversations with the girl in Delaware is now closed. The police said they have not discovered any crimes or inappropriate activity, or any shit like that.
So Patterico’s insinuations were just baseless slime after all. Astonishing. Who could have seen that coming ?
I’d like to be the first to call for Marley23’s resignation.
I wonder if that was just dumb luck on his part, or did Weiner know she was a teenager and temper his tweets accordingly?
I think that, dumb as he was, he didn’t send pictures of his dick to every female who followed him on Twitter. He said he did that with maybe six women over three years. If he’d sent them out that freely, he would have been caught a long time ago.
yes, that’s quite the resume maker considering the skill-sets needed to become a member of congress are identical to that of a cheerleader.
Well, judging from her tweets (those published by Patterico anyway), she’s pretty obviously a dim bulb overly smitten by the simple fact that he’s aware of her existence. You know, kinda like a teenager with a crush :).
Maybe I give him too much credit, or maybe I’m just projecting, but I’d think he didn’t temper his tweets as much as he wasn’t interested in the first place. Blind adulation is unappealing. Even if all you’re looking for is a cybersex partner, the seduction game is half the fun.
Is there any evidence she pretended not to be a teenager?
No, I don’t know that she gave any indication about her age one way or the other. There was never any concrete reason to think Weiner did anything wrong here. It was just assumptions: ‘Weiner sent pictures to some women on Twitter’ ‘Weiner spoke to this girl’ ‘Maybe Weiner sent pictures to the girl.’ He has 79,000 people following on Twitter. He wasn’t emailing pictures of his wang to all of them.
The reason I asked the question had to do with what Weiner said in his press conference-- that he hadn’t been tweeting anyone underage. If we take him at his word (ha!), then it might have been just dumb luck he didn’t tweet his wiener to her, since he assumed he was only tweeting to adults.