We Can’t Keep Losing Our Top Anti-Corporate Voices to Sex Scandals

Below this feature Now What? did an excellent job of pointing out how strange this whole Weinergate saga is, but I’m a little interested in the uniqueness of it and a lot more interested in the “Who cares about it all?” aspect of it. Most importantly, we’re a little worried this is going to cause Weiner to resign from congress. We’re even more worried that a corporate run media will further push him to.

Ever since Alan Grayson failed to get re-elected in his Florida district last year, Anthony Weiner has become the toughest and most outspoken liberal in the House of Representatives. He’s become a YouTube phenom in his rants against corporate interests pushing over the little guy, and God bless him because he’s increasingly surrounded by a party unwilling or unable to back him up. People say this “scandal” hurts his credibility but I don’t see how. He’s never been this family values, uber-religious social conservative, so there’s no air of hypocrisy. He’s a social liberal that’s never claimed to be perfect, but more than that he’s an economic liberal and the fact that’s he’s standing up to big money (far as I know he didn’t tweet his penis to Dutch Royal Shell) leaves his honor firmly in tact.

Anthony Weiner never had any out of wedlock kids with these women, he never cheated on his wife with these women, he never met these women, and the most notorious picture in question doesn’t even show his naked penis. The fact that this scandal is being so trumped up may have less to do with what he’s done and more to do with who he is: again, the Democrat’s strongest voice against the same type of big money interests that own the majority of the media (how can a TV network take an anti-corporate stance on anything when they have commercials for pharmaceutical, oil, and banking companies?). What’s not so strange about all this is that he isn’t alone.

Systematically, we’ve seen our strongest anti-corporate voices get taken down in sex scandals that really have nothing to do with their job. First Eliot Spitzer–the only man on the planet Wall Street was afraid of–has to resign as Governor of New York for his liaisons with a prostitute, even though he was never formerly charged with a crime or asked to do jail time. Then perhaps the strongest anti-poverty advocate in the country, John Edwards, gets royally caught in the cookie jar. He’s not only airbrushed out of the Democrat Party but he could do jail time for breaking some campaign finance laws…as if he’s the first. And now we have Weiner.

Look, I don’t know what drives Spitzer to seek out a prostitute or Edwards to break campaign finance laws to cover up an affair or Weiner to send out pictures of his wiener on twitter. These would all seem to be things that are spectacularly reckless to me. And if you’re going after the biggest game in the country, you have to make sure your ducks aren’t out of line. All of that seems like a given to me, but then again, I’m not in the public eye so I really can’t say. Most all affairs (and let’s be clear that Weiner did not cheat on his wife, did not actually have an affair) happen just because of opportunity, and powerful men like politicians have a lot of opportunity. Just ask Newt Gingrich (same as Edwards), Dick Vidal (same as Spitzer), and the Gropenator (much, much worse than Weiner).

The important thing is that most of the Republicans that have had similar sex scandals haven’t stepped down and are still in their current positions or better. And Democrats can’t afford to keep losing our strongest economic fighters to scandals that really don’t have anything to do with the price of rice. It’s a sad state where screwing an intern is a bigger deal than screwing over the country.