--------------------------------------
The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg
July 26, 2013
Osvaldo Catastrophe, (which is "Dear Reader" after being wrung through the Carlos Danger name generator. Unfortunately this is not replicable. If you type it in again you'll get a different name, like "Felciano Trouble." It's almost as if there's no scientific basis for this thing whatsoever),
Look. As a paid and accredited writer of an often too bawdy quasi-magical-realist semi-humorous "news"letter ("'Magical realist?' What are you trying to say?" -- The Couch), I'm starting to get annoyed. I'm supposed to make jokes about reality, reality isn't supposed to make the jokes for me. I feel like Don Rickles when some guy in the audience tries to be funny while Rickles is insulting him. To which Rickles would reply, "I'll make the jokes kid. By the way, who picks your clothes, Stevie Wonder?"
I want to say that to reality these days. It's just trying too hard. How're you supposed to make light of this Carlos Danger business when it already goes to eleven. It's like saying to Zven Türbingen, the world's greatest flatulence-noise ventriloquist, "Here's a whoopee cushion. Can you make a funny fart noise with this!?"
Not only is that insulting to a professional like Zven, it's actually hard to make a whoopee cushion funny once everyone's just standing there, looking at it. It's the physical equivalent of an explained joke. That's what reality is doing: It's forcing the jokes on us.
The Joke Falls Flaccid
So here we have Anthony Weiner and that's all he is now, a sad joke. When you tell a joke once it's funny. When you tell the same joke again, it's not so funny. When you can't stop telling it like the guy in the trench coat with the shopping cart behind the 7-Eleven, it's not even a joke anymore -- it's a sign you have a serious problem.
When Weiner was caught -- by the Breitbartians! -- junk-tweeting his man-business, I truly thought it was one of the funniest spectacles of modern times. When Andrew stole the press conference from Weiner, all but taking out a brown bag marked "Anthony Weiner's Lunch" and eating from it, I was downright giddy. For over a year now I've been saying on Twitter how I wish we could go back to the simpler times when we could talk about Anthony Weiner's crotchal photography. But now that I've gotten my wish it's kind of sad.
Needs, Right and Left
Brother Jim Geraghty has some worthwhile thoughts on why Democratic wives seem to put up with this stuff more than Republican ones do. In fairness, I think the data are more mixed. After all, last I checked, Mrs. Larry Craig was standing by her husband.
But there do seem to be enough instances to generalize a little, and it does seem to be the case that liberal lechers tend to be more bullying or predatory in their sexual appetites -- interns, random teens on the web, groupies, etc. And that their wives are more forgiving of it. Bill Clinton took advantage of a worshipful and immature intern. John F. Kennedy literally pimped out a young girl. His brother Ted would make waitress sandwiches with Chris Dodd. As for Al Gore, I dunno. Maybe he had two guinea pigs named Chakra. One was already running free but the other was trapped under his towel. So when he demanded that the masseuse "Release my second chakra!" he didn't mean anything untoward by it, he was just concerned about the animal's welfare.
Categorizing Weiner's behavior as predatory goes beyond his overtures to a teenage girl. He also promised to help an unemployed girl find work and generally seemed to engage women and girls who were star-struck. Then again there's a filter bias there. Who would want anything to do with Anthony Weiner or his dongelgänger Carlos Danger, if she wasn't either star-struck or in some pretty dire straits? Maybe I'm a babe in the woods, but I don't know any women -- or at least don't think I do -- who are really psyched to get pictures of a 40-something dude's kickstand.
(By the way America, you're welcome for the term "dongelgänger.")
Even Sydney Leathers wasn't into it. At one point Weiner, clearly and pathetically desperate to be told how manful he is, implores Leathers: "So you won't tell me what picture of me you like the most or turned you on the most? only TV?"
As others have noted, this is like a woman asking, "Do I look pretty" or, "Does this dress make me look fat?" The correct answer is supposed to confirm for Weiner that he's a creature of raw, animalistic, man sexuality.
"Specifically," she wrote back, "your health care rants were a huge turn on."
That's like a whole bag of sadness right there. (OMG, best line ever!!!)
Different Sociologies
As for the reason liberals' wives stick with it, again, making a sweeping generalization will get you into trouble, but the conservative adulterers do seem to have more traditional affairs. The most discussed example is Mark Sanford who simply fell in love with someone else and his wife, rightly, refused to stand by him like a Hillary or a Huma.
I don't think there's any single explanation for this disparity. But I think the most important or at least interesting one is the different sociologies of the Right and the Left. Most Republican politicians tend to be normal business or professional guys who decide to get into politics later in life. I think Ron Johnson is a perfect example: a decent, hardworking, successful businessman who saw how terribly Washington was running things and decided to leave the plastics business and go do his part. (Note: I in no way am suggesting that Johnson has been anything other than faithful to his wife. My only point is that his is a fairly typical Republican story.)
In other words, Republican politicians tend to come from a normal background for a fairly successful person. Ironically, I don't necessarily mean that in a normative sense. I just mean that if you make a life for yourself outside the realm of politics, you probably don't consider politics all that important. Even if you catch the bug for it later in life, the moral, cultural, and philosophical stanchions holding your life together -- family, church, community, business, sports, the military, hunting, Comic-Con whatever -- are either outside of politics or don't feel politicized to you.
But as I've written in about every third G-File for a couple years now, liberalism acts more like a religion. There are no natural boundaries between the political and the personal. Politics is not only where you do meaningful things, it's where you find meaning itself (hence Hillary Clinton's "Politics of Meaning"). It's the cause and the limelight all at once. According to liberals like the Clintons and Obama, civil society is just another word for government, because "government is us."
For some liberals to leave politics means to move into the darkness, into a void bereft of meaning. Anthony Weiner strikes me as exactly that kind of person. Politics is everything to him. Well, that and junk-tweeting. A normal person would be perfectly content to go back to the non-political world and find meaning -- perhaps far greater meaning -- outside of politics. But when everything is political where can you go? People like Weiner and Huma Abedin are like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman yelling "I've got nowhere else to go!"
That was always the key to understanding the Clintons. Politics was and is their everything. Asking them to leave politics is like asking a fish to leave the ocean or a samurai to take up needlepoint. Whatever else was going on in their marriage, it was subordinate to politics because for their whole lives, everything was subordinate to politics. So, of course, the Clinton's marriage was a "political marriage" at least insofar as everything is political. When you have a traditional religious marriage the rules of the bond are, well, traditional and religious. When you have a political marriage, when it's a political partnership and part of your brand, the traditional and religious commitments have to at least share space with the political considerations. And for some people --
Look, I am famously biased in my opinion of Bill Clinton, but can we all agree that when you ask Bill Clinton to officiate at your wedding, you might as well barge into karma's office right in the middle of a big meeting, walk over and take a dump on karma's desk, and garnish the pile with his signed 1956 Yankees baseball? I mean karma notices stuff like that. It's his job.
Columnular Issues
So I wrote a column on Helen Thomas earlier this week and one on Al Sharpton last week. Shocking as it may seem, neither was complimentary. With both columns I expected to get inundated with defenses of Sharpton and Thomas respectively. But it never happened. With the exception of one sad case on Twitter -- whose bio simply says "Free Palestine. From the River to the Sea" -- nobody came to Thomas's defense. Meanwhile I have heard from quite a few people, including some surprising liberals, who thanked me for calling b.s. on the celebration of Thomas. I think it's amazing how feminist pieties trump not just anti-Semitism in Washington, but decency itself. Meanwhile, to date nobody has defended Sharpton at all. Now, of course, the fact that Sharpton is indefensible may have something to do with that. But not as much as you might think. After all, Communism was even more indefensible and lots of people still rise to speak on its behalf. And Marmite has plenty of defenders, and that stuff is Satan's toothpaste. Instead, the complaint from lefties is that I should give my "right-wing obsession" a rest because Sharpton is irrelevant and conservatives shouldn't use him to tarnish Very Serious Concerns about race in this country.
There are two arguments here, both asinine. First of all, complaining about right-wing obsessions is usually just an attempt to attack the messenger and change the subject. Whatever the issue -- Communism, the Clintons, Benghazi, abortion, taxes -- when liberals say you are obsessed with something, what they're really saying is "Shut up." But more than that, they're trying to insinuate that disagreement with them is illegitimate and creepy and so therefore people shouldn't listen to the arguments. Now, there are a few cases where people really are unhealthily obsessed about an issue. But you shouldn't rely on the Left for that diagnosis (instead look for warning signs, like when your husband starts sculpting Devil's Tower out of his mashed potatoes).
Second, look, conservatives aren't the ones who are keeping Sharpton relevant. Sure, yes, if conservatives were going to invent a creature to make the civil-rights movement look craven and dumb, our East German scientists would come up with something very close to Al Sharpton (though we'd probably keep him in the track suits). But trust me, it's not conservatives at MSNBC that gave him a TV show. Nor are there right-wing bookers at Meet the Press and the Today Show, cackling at how they're exploiting Sharpton. When Obama and Eric Holder treat the guy as a partner and ally, I think it's just odd to say that I'm the one trying to prop the guy up.
