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The Infidelity We Should Worry About
What We Don’t Know Could Hurt Us Worse
I'll say one thing about today's politicians: They have given whole new meaning to the term "stimulus package."
Democrat or Republican, gay or straight, our public leaders seem to have a proclivity for unseemly and costly behavior. And when I think of the shenanigans they're pulling and the lies they are telling their families, I do wonder how so many powerful public figures can be simultaneously so self-absorbed and so astonishingly stupid.
And as for these same leaders appropriately handling our public trust and our financial issues, it comes as little surprise that our representatives think the best way to fix a problem is to throw money at it. It is, after all, the single best way to get the attention of an Argentinean beauty or a high-priced New York call girl.
Remember Eliot Spitzer and the paper trail he left on the money he spent? That paper trail is how they caught him hiring his very expensive consorts. New invasive measures passed through the Patriot Act created a legal form of spying on our banking business done here in the United States, even though that business involves U.S. citizens. So the Big Brother department of the federal government monitored Spitzer's ATM transactions. I'm sure I don't know much about the $5,000 sex trade, but the government watching our everyday private financial dealings is what I find obscene. Still, you would expect that a former New York governor and New York state attorney general - whose business it was to know what legal traps exist - would have known better.
As for the most recently exposed dimwit in office, we can easily read every word of his sappy juvenile Harlequin-esque love letters. Jeepers, it's hard to tell which is a worse way to get caught - the feds following the money trail until they find that a famous powerful man can have sex with beautiful, sexually skilled women, but only if they pay large sums of money for it, or a local newspapers reprinting your lovesick, star-crossed testimonies to marital infidelity.
But really stupid, arrogant men desiring sexual gratification and adoring lovers is not as amazing to me as the fact that the press has such an easy time accessing the documentation to prove their foolhardy philandering. That easy press access coupled with an unhealthy congressional preoccupation with private sexual exploits - a la the Clinton impeachment trial - makes me wonder what type of really bad things must be going on in the offices that the media can't access and Congress lacks the courage to investigate.
You know, like the offices of the big coal companies.
While you know all about the stain on Monica Lewinsky's dress and her dalliances in the Oval Office, you know absolutely nothing about the conversations between President Obama and top coal executives who met with him earlier this month, even though they, too, rendezvoused in the Oval Office.
And while no law enforcement officials hassled the reporters and photographers covering the Lewinsky, Spitzer or Sanford affairs, both a reporter and a photographer covering a mountaintop removal coal-mining protest were arrested, their equipment was ceased and they have now been charged with trespassing as well as conspiracy.
Conspiracy? Conspiracy to do what? Inform the American people about the exploits of companies that manipulate our elected officials and plunder our natural resources?
Now you can argue that blowing those mountains sky high in order to easily access the coal inside is the prerogative of private ownership. But one could make the same argument about former President Clinton's private parts. For some reason the press and Congress think we have the right to supervise Clinton's little treasures but not the majesty of an entire mountain range. And the same protections given to Newsweek when they collected evidence in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair were not afforded to Paul Corbit Brown and Kurt Mann when they covered the protests at Massey Energy Mine.
We know a little bit about the coal companies and President Obama. The president campaigned against mountaintop removal. He has since entertained coal executives privately at the White House. And he no longer opposes it. If the media wants a story about unfaithful men, they should cover this one.
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17 Comments so far
Show AllAbolish politicians.
While infidelity is not a crime, hypocrisy (family values BS) and politicians' criminal behavior contributes to the steady stream of revelations.
As the US electorate demands less and less accountability from politicians, the politicians become more and more corrupt. Like any criminal, the more crimes politicians get away with, the more crimes they commit.
In recent years we see politicians decriminalizing the crimes they committed the previous year, and decriminalizing the crimes they plan to commit next year.
Nicely stated piece. When I read the following sentence I thought you were talking about Obama until I got the "love letter" part. But it still seams a modern urban legacy of what we are up against when it comes to entrenched elites:
"As for the most recently exposed dimwit in office, we can easily read every word of his sappy juvenile Harlequin-esque love letters."
It was all right until the line, "...their equipment was ceased...."
I think the word is supposed to be "seized." Sloppy proofreading.
establish a dictatorship of humility.
This level of obsession with the private lives of politicians in the USA is at once disturbing and revealing. It is disturbing that sexual conduct brings down politicians who should be out of office (or not) based on their performance of their mandated duties. There is a strong element of hypocrisy (especially from the GOP, whom use "family values" as a cudgel against their opponents). What is revealing is the cultural imprint of the "puritan hangover" (though it certainly makes purveyors of pornography rich) which facilitates this.
If you are willing to whore yourself to the corporations,using whores in your life poses no moral problem.
I'm convinced these guys are just fed up with their open-book political lives and don't really want to be president, or whatever. This is a great way to get your private life back.
During the Bush/Cheney/neocon eight long, long years, I tried to talk up the notion that then, and sadly since, evidence of murder, torture, fomenting illegal wars, violating the Bill of Rights and international law, ad infinitum were clearly not enough to rouse public demands for removal from office, that we then needed to recruit/find some self-sacrificing attractive men and women willing to go to the citadels of power and corruption in New York and Washington to seduce, with documentation, the likes of Dick Cheney, George Bush, Richard Pearle, Nancy Pelosi, Paul Wolfowitz, corporate CEOs, etc. And indeed Wolfowitz did fall from his perch at the World Bank in a sexual scandal, though he and his neocon kind continue their influence on US policy. It was evident that this was asking people to make a truly ultimate personal sacrifice, but what else removes credibility and support from ruling elite figures faster and more decisively than a sexual scandal ? And done without violence or physical force. Unfortunately their real vile crimes so far haven't been sufficient. The women who seduced Nazi commanders in occupied Europe often gained valuable information, showing that for the greater cause some could and did connect with morally repellent individuals on behalf of all. Perhaps ideas of non-violent social change need to be expanded to include sexual seduction. The numerous examples before us of Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggert, Eliot Spitzer, Sanford, show the results are usually swift and decisive in ending their credibility and power.
We still know nothing about Cheney's behind-closed-doors meetings with energy execs, prior to the "war on terror." Far more egregious than any extramarital affairs, as far as I'm concerned
check out the current CD article regarding Iraq's 'sweet oil'...one of the latest on the line of events drawn from the meeting(s) you reference...
Oh, we all know what they were discussing-- I just don't understand why the American people don't seem to push for that info to be released. But, give them steamy emails between lovers and they're content.
Perhaps the progressives should put every whore on the East coast under contract and use them to either "lobby" for public policy assuming the politician is discreet enough to get away with the affair; or if that doesn't work, black mail them to do the right F*&#*ng thing after a bit of political intercourse. Imagine that, we the People black mailing our representatives to do their job.
It seems sex is the only means left to the People that can reach politicians and the media.
I wonder how many are blackmailed to do the wrong thing!
smipypr
Americans are notoriously puritanical when it comes to people, but will ignore corporations, and their agents in government. screwing everything they can reach.
Corporatism is a societal cancer that, along with destroying the moral fiber of its victims, so warps the models of reality the victims hold that they never recognize that they are ill.
Does the pusherman push drugs because you WANT the drugs, or so that you WILL WANT the drugs? The same with media. People sit at home wanting to be 'entertained', not 'informed'. To that end, one should ask, is this because that is what HAS been provided, so that is what is expected. Real information is poison to the corporations which control the economics of this country. General Electric, AOL Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, NewsCorp, et.al. have MUCH more at stake than just their media networks which control what we watch, hear and read. The police are just "following orders", never having learned any "Constitutional law". Hell, even most lawyers never get into Constitutional law, but are content to accept regulatiory law as the bread and butter of our nation. I guess we should be happy we have it this good, we can still communicate over the internet, at least for the time being.... big brother soon come mon.... soon come