After being extremely disgusted by how things panned out with Rep. Anthony Weiner and his admission that he was actually sexting with women on line after being newly married for only a year or so, and after quite frankly being really tired of the media giving this wall to wall coverage, I think this segment by Maddow is one of the few things I watched among maybe one or two others that might be worth some conversation on the subject.
And that is, how does what happened with Anthony Weiner stack up with other sex scandals and does what happened with him amount to something that he should be pushed to resign over? I also think a bigger question should also be, why does the media ignore some stories and give others wall to wall coverage? Why hasn't the press been hounding Tom Coburn about his part in covering up for the Ensign affair and giving that scandal the same type of breathless coverage over the last few years?
What Maddow did not bring up in this segment which is also extremely regrettable is the sorry, sad tabloid nature of our press that loves to take after this type of story when it suits them, and ignore it when it suits them as well and the fact that most of our media seems completely incapable of chewing gum and walking at the same time and not doing one BREAKING NEWS!!! story tabloid nonsense story after another instead of reporting on things that matter, like the U.S. economy going to hell, the fact that we've got so many unemployed and nothing's being done about it, or that our politicians are currently playing an extremely dangerous game of chicken with whether they're going to raise our debt ceiling or not and what price the GOP is going to extract from the working class to get a vote on that issue.
It's hard to say whether Weiner will survive this or not because it's likely this story will grow more legs if more photos end up being published and even if our national press ignores it, which I doubt, the press in New York is not going to. I would like to see him come back from this if he makes things right with his wife and continues to fight for progressive causes, but he's not going to be able to do that in the same manner he was before in the national media, and that really is just a damned shame.
In this political climate where we have way too few being willing to go to the media and push back against some of the status quo on issues like whether Democrats went far enough on the health care bill and should have been pushing for a single payer system instead, and whether Republicans care if 9-11 responders are taken care of and other issues besides that which the Congressman has spoken out on, losing Anthony Weiner's voice on those matters in the media is not just a loss for him and his political career. It's a loss for the rest of us that care about those issues as well.
And I'm quite sure no one is happier about the events of this week than Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni.
