Love, Hate, and Huma’s Pathetic Weiner

“She said her husband should be elected mayor! You do not get to trash his candidacy and praise hers. Want to support Huma? Then vote for Anthony!”

—Marc Tracy

Yes, really, it comes to this.

The thing is that I really, really don’t care. Really. I promise. The sad saga of the Little Weiner That Couldn’t Quit is all abstraction to me. Can he get elected? We’ll see when this is over.

But Marc Tracy’s article for The New Republic was one of those idiotic headlines I just couldn’t resist. I don’t know, maybe I was expecting satire.

There isn’t a transcript available yet, and I was too transfixed and oblivious of myself to take notes during this proverbial train wreck. But basically, she said that she determined that it was best for her, her marriage, and her child to stay together. It all seemed perfectly valid. And the Twitterati seemed to agree: My feed lit up with variations on a theme I have been seeing since Weiner announced his mayoral candidacy in late May—Huma is great; I love Huma; it should be Huma. As in: Weiner is the worst, and, relatedly, Abedin is the best.

Sorry, but no. Abedin spoke at her husband’s press conference (it was reportedly her idea, in fact), among the most important events of his political career, in the service of getting him elected mayor. This doesn’t mean you can’t agree with what she said. (Besides, to the extent that she was speaking about her decision to remain married to Weiner, it isn’t really our business.) But at least listen to what she said! She said her husband should be elected mayor! You do not get to trash his candidacy and praise hers. Want to support Huma? Then vote for Anthony!

Maybe Abedin should be mayor. Maybe she should be President Hillary Clinton’s chief-of-staff. Maybe she should divorce Weiner and marry someone better, like Eliot Spitzer. Or maybe she should be First Lady of New York City. But to deny that she is in the same boat as her husband as far as his political ambitions are concerned is to believe she is incapable of making informed decisions for herself. I doubt that is how her admirers feel ….

…. Abedin’s story isn’t over yet, either. But in this chapter, she is shilling for her husband to become mayor. If you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with her.

(Sigh.)

Yes, really.

I don’t have a damn thing to say to disagree with Tracy. Like I said, it’s all abstraction, like whether Irv Halter can unseat Rep. Doug “Tar Baby” Lamborn in Colorado’s Fifth Congressional District.

But … I don’t know. Really? This is really what our political discourse is coming to?

Hermanating the First Amendment

Some years back, before the internet beat every dead horse into a mudhole, a New York professor, Dr. Leonard Jeffries, stirred controversy by asserting that black people cannot, by virtue of empowerment balance, be racist. And while one can construct the argument in a way that it makes abstract sense, it’s kind of hard to translate that abstraction into practice. When a racist, or any sort of bigot gets in your face, it really doesn’t matter what color their skin is.

However, Herman Cain is working hard to demolish Jeffries’ assertion.

One would think that’s an easy job, since maybe twelve people in the whole country ever agreed with Jeffries. But Cain is putting some serious effort into it.

In 2010, he argued that Republicans should vote for him because he’s black, in order to take the race card off the table. No, really, he did. Of course, he said it to World Net Daily, so it’s a safe bet none of the faithful readers and supporters of the site noticed the contradiction.

And while religious bigotry isn’t racism, well, I still can’t see how the first paragraph of Tim Murphy‘s article for Mother Jones, covering Cain’s latest episode of outrageous bigotry, could possibly help make Mr. Jeffries’ point. Empowerment issues aside—

GOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain has an Islam problem. The former Godfather’s pizza godfather put his foot in his mouth early in his campaign when he told Think Progress he wouldn’t appoint any Muslims in his administration (which would be unconstitutional), and again when he said Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) wasn’t loyal to the Constitution because he’s Muslim, and again when he said he has never encountered an American Muslim who is loyal to the Constitution, and then again when he denied ever saying any of those things and blamed the media.

—that’s just not a paragraph anyone should ever want to read about himself.