Cooper tarnishes his coming out with ‘no one else’s business’ business

Reuters photo

“The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud,” CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, who long had been rumored to be gay, proclaimed in his official coming-out e-mail that was released today. Cooper’s explanation for why it took him so long to come out, however, indicates some degree of internalized homophobia that perhaps even he isn’t aware of. (Cooper is photographed above at last month’s Daytime Emmy Awards in Beverly Hills.)

While I’m pleased that CNN anchor Anderson Cooper finally came out of the closet – and pleased with most of what he has stated in regards to his coming out, such as that “visibility [for non-heterosexuals] is important, more important than preserving my reporter’s shield of privacy” – damn, he just had to say just one “little” thing that, for me, tarnished it.

“In a perfect world, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business, but I do think there is value in standing up and being counted,” he stated in his coming-out e-mail to his long-time friend the right-wing gay blogger Andrew Sullivan, who published the e-mail with Cooper’s approval.

While I agree with that latter part — that there is value in standing up and being counted as non-heterosexual, because otherwise some (presumably heterosexual) people might otherwise think that there really aren’t that many of us non-heterosexuals – what the fuck is “In a perfect world, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business”?

Heterosexuals generally don’t assert that their sexual orientation is no one else’s business. Heterosexual celebrities (actors and other artists, politicians, TV news/“news” anchors, et. al.) generally have no problem being seen in public with and/or talking publicly about their opposite-sexed mates, if they have an opposite-sexed mate, whether they are married or not. They generally don’t take the stance that their heterosexuality is no one else’s business — because they aren’t ashamed of their heterosexuality.

Heterosexual journalists aren’t seen as violating some journalistic ethic if they let the world in on the “secret” that they are heterosexual, so why does Anderson Cooper essentially state, in his apparent justification for his having dragged his feet for so long in coming out of the closet, that he had thought that to do otherwise would have been unprofessional?

Why would a gay man assert that his homosexuality is no one else’s business, and why would a gay male journalist act as though divulging his sexual orientation would be unprofessional, unless, at least on some level and to some degree, he is ashamed of his sexual orientation?

True, whatever the silver fox Coop likes to do sexually (or whether he even has an active sex life at all) is none of our business. It’s none of our business if he’s a top or a bottom, if he spits or if he swallows or if he won’t allow a dick inside of his mouth at all, if he’s ever done anal or if he’s anal-phobic, if he’s chocolate or if he’s vanilla, whether he masturbates (of course he does) and if so, how and how often, etc., etc.

But if there is nothing wrong with being gay, as Cooper says he believes — he proclaimed in his coming-out e-mail:

It’s become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something —something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true.

– why, then, the rather revealing counter-statement that “In a perfect world, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s business”?

Cooper has, I suspect, residual shame over his homosexuality, which, in such a homophobic and sex-shaming society, I can’t entirely blame him for — neither he nor none of us exists in a vacuum — but I would hope that all of us gay men and lesbians and other assorted non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals do the self-examination that is necessary for us to identify the homophobia that we all too often carry, to some degree, within ourselves.

Most of us non-heterosexuals, I believe, have some degree of internalized homophobia, and it is worth it for us to identify it and to work to dig it up by its roots. But until we first identify it, we can’t eradicate it.

Yes, our sexual orientation is everyone else’s business. It is an important and a basic part of ourselves, of who and what we are.

To assert otherwise is to lie — to lie to others, and worse, to ourselves.

Man up, Coop — your sexual orientation, as mine and everyone else’s, always was, is, and always will be our business.

There goes the men’s vote

AFP photo

While as president of the United States the “Christo”fascist Prick Santorum would be dangerous, Gallup’s daily tracking polls show that the wingnut doesn’t have even the support of a full one-third of the Repugnican Tea Party — thank God. (Prick is shown above “praying” in Puerto Rico, which he says should embrace English, despite the fact that the nation has been Spanish-speaking since shortly after Christopher Columbus claimed it for the Spanish crown way back in 1493…) [This reminds me of that wonderful saying of anthropologist Wade Davis: “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”])    

The more papal pronouncements that “Christo”fascist Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Prick Santorum makes, the more obvious it is why he lost his last election — re-election to the U.S. Senate for Pennsylvania — by a whopping 18 percent.

Santorum’s latest crusade for the Vatican is his promise that as president, he would instruct his attorney general – remember former wingnut Attorney General John Ashcroft putting giant drapes in front of a U.S. Justice Department statue with (gasp!) a bared boob? — to prosecute those accused of distributing pornographic material that the Santorum administration (shudder) deems “obscene.”

Wow. It was one thing, I suppose, for Santorum to pick on women, opposing not just abortion but even birth control, but now he is threatening millions and millions of American men that he will cut off their steady supply of “obscene” pornography.

“Obscene” pornography — and I’m not sure what counts as “obscene” to Prick Santorum; would Playboy be “obscene”? (It very apparently would be to John Ashcroft, the kind of attorney general that Santorum would pick) – “can be very damaging,” Santorum has decreed papally.

Emissions from fossil fuels are far more damaging than is pornography — I mean, no more Homo sapiens and pornography certainly will be a moot point — and alcohol and tobacco products demonstrably are “very damaging,” as are sugary and fatty foods, but Santorum has yet to tackle any of those evils.

Corporations, which put obscene profiteering way above people and the planet and which crush the human spirit like something out of “The Matrix,” are “very damaging,” as is permanent bogus warfare for the war profiteering of the military-industrial complex (indeed, military overspending perhaps is the No. 1 factor in the collapse of the American empire). Is Prick Santorum going to take on the sacred cows that are the corporations and the military-industrial complex?

And how about guns — aren’t guns more dangerous than is pornography? Don’t guns kill far more people than does porn? Is Prick Santorum, who is so fucking eager to protect us all from ourselves, going to take on the gun lobby? 

In the same year (1973) that the U.S. Supreme Court decided the issue of abortion in Roe vs. Wade, in Miller vs. California the court decided the issue of “obscenity” with what came to be called “the Miller test,” which essentially leaves it to the states or other locales to determine what is and what is not “obscene.” (And obviously, what is widely considered to be “obscene” in Salt Lake City, for instance, and what is considered to be “obscene” in such places as New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco are very different.)

The Miller ruling fairly explicitly prohibits the federal government from imposing a nationally uniform standard on “obscenity,” yet this is exactly what Prick Santorum promises to do as president.

Apparently, all that “the Miller test” allows in all 50 states is mere nudity (without sexual activity, presumably — and I suppose that masturbation would be sexual activity, and perhaps even an erection is indicative of sexual activity) and, according to Wikipedia’s entry on “obscenity,” “male-to-female vaginal-only penetration that does not show the actual ejaculation of semen, sometimes referred to as ‘soft-core’ pornography wherein the sexual act and its fulfillment (orgasm) are merely implied to happen rather than explicitly shown.” (So, if Prick Santorum’s crusade against porn were taken to its extreme, apparently Playboy would be allowed, but not much else. [And indeed, Playboy is pretty tame by today's standards of porn, probably so that it can be distributed in all 50 states without Miller-related local interference.])

In my book, Miller vs. California is woefully outdated — indeed, the availability of wonderfully raunchy Internet porn in all 50 states, which probably could not have been foreseen in 1973, pretty much makes Miller moot – and thus deeply flawed. In my book, the First Amendment covers all forms of sexually oriented expression with the exception of such things as child pornography and other forms of sexually oriented activity in which the participants are not consenting but are forced. (It is legally recognized that minors, because of their young age, cannot consent, and that certain intellectually incompetent individuals cannot consent, either.) Other than that, willing, consenting participants who are of age should be able to have just about whatever they want to do sexually be visually recorded if they so wish.

I probably digress a little, but I know that millions and millions of men — and, of course, plenty of liberated women — of all sexual orientations are with me when we say collectively to Prick Santorum: You will have to pry our “obscene” porn from our cold, dead fingers.

This “freedom” that the wingnuts bloviate about so much, yet so many of them want to impose their own backasswards religious and “moral” beliefs on the rest of us just like the theofascists of the Taliban wish to impose their own backasswards “moral” code and religious beliefs upon other people. That’s not fucking “freedom.” That’s theofascism. That’s why I call these far-right-wing traitors “Christo”fascists (with the quotation marks because the one thing they most definitely are not is Christian.)

It is very simple, ridiculously simple: If you oppose abortion, then do not have an abortion. If you oppose contraception, then do not use contraception (although those who contribute to overpopulation are major fucking assholes). If you oppose same-sex marriage, then do not marry someone of your own sex. If you oppose pornography, then do not consume pornography.

As I pointed out, Americans’ freedom allows them — us – to possess and/or to consume or use even things that demonstrably, and not even arguably, are harmful to us, such as firearms, cigarettes, booze, certain prescription drugs that easily are abused, and junk food.

Our personal “salvation” is our own to work out as individuals – it’s not the job of Prick Santorum, acting as the puppet of Pope Palpatine, to “save” us against our will.

The Ides of October

AFP photo

Maybe “666” wasn’t the best photo op after all… (I mean, it’s pretty pathetic when Michele Bachmann is shown to maybe have been correct about anything.) Anyway, Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Herman Cain has been accused of having sexually harassed at least two women while on the job. Why do I tend to believe that he is guilty as charged? 

So last night I saw the George Clooney political movie “The Ides of March,” which is about how a good old-fashioned sex scandal can bring down a presidential campaign. (While not as good as Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “The Ides of March” is watchable.)

And then, later last night, I saw the headlines that top-tier Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate Herman Cain has been accused of having been accused of sexual harassment at least twice in the mid- to late 1990s when he was the top dog of the National Restaurant Association.*

Wow. What timing.

Of course the Cain campaign vehemently denies that Cain ever sexually harassed anyone. (Cain — who, for some fucking reason, many people actually claim is a good speaker — even asked a POLICITO reporter who had asked him about the sexual harassment allegations if he [the reporter] had ever been accused of sexual harassment. Yeah, very presidential.)  

While I believe that even a wingnutty scumbag like Cain is (at least more or less) innocent until proven otherwise, the thing is, I still believe Anita Hill, and it looks as though we have another Clarence-Thomas-type of scandal unfolding right about now.

More locally, when he was running in the bullshit do-over California gubernatorial election of 2003, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was accused of having sexually harassed — even sexually assaulted — several women during his years in Hollywood. The Schwarzenegger campaign essentially called all of these women liars. Maria Shriver of the Democratic Kennedy dynasty publicly stated that she stood by her Repugnican man, which helped Schwarzenegger to usurp the governorship from the duly re-elected Democratic governor, Gray Davis.

Then, after his governorship ended in January of this year, Schwarzenegger in May admitted, after he’d been outed by the Los Angeles Times, that he had knocked up his housekeeper and that she had borne his son in 1997. Obviously, had the state’s voters known this juicy fact in 2003, they never would have voted for Schwarzenegger in the Repugnican-orchestrated gubernatorial recall election, and Maria Shriver, understandably, is keeping a very low profile here in California these days.

Gee, if he knocked up his housekeeper, do you think that Baby Daddy Schwarzenegger may actually have sexually harassed all of those (other) women after all?

It all boils down to this, methinks: Men who woefully mistakenly believe that they are qualified for high political office, such as the presidency or the governor of the nation’s most populous state, even when they never have held any elected office before — and both Cain and Schwarzenegger fit this description – obviously have issues with power.

Politics is the exercise of power, as is sexual harassment. (Many of us don’t like to talk about issues of power, which is why sex, politics and religion, which are so interchangeable and which all have to do with the exercise of power, are such taboo topics even though they probably are the most important topics that we possibly could discuss.)

Do I know that Herman Cain is guilty as charged? No. I wasn’t there. But if I had to bet a large sum of money on it, which way would I go?

I’d bet that Herman Cain is another Clarence Thomas.

And it’s a slap in the faces of all women to automatically call any woman a liar when she reports sexual harassment — especially when most of the time such allegations turn out to be quite true.

And after the likes of Clarence Thomas and Arnold Schwarzenegger, do we really want to get punk’d again by another sexual harasser, a man who has demonstrated that he cannot wield his personal (political) power responsibly?

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*The website POLITICO broke the story, reporting:

During Herman Cain’s tenure as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior by Cain, ultimately leaving their jobs at the trade group, multiple sources confirm to POLITICO.

The women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable, the sources said, and they signed agreements with the restaurant group that gave them financial payouts to leave the association. The agreements also included language that bars the women from talking about their departures.

In a series of comments over the past 10 days, Cain and his campaign repeatedly declined to respond directly about whether he ever faced allegations of sexual harassment at the restaurant association. They have also declined to address questions about specific reporting confirming that there were financial settlements in two cases in which women leveled complaints.

POLITICO has confirmed the identities of the two female restaurant association employees who complained about Cain but, for privacy concerns, is not publishing their names. … [Full story here.]

We won’t have Weiner to beat up anymore

It’s no shock to learn that embattled U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York, who perhaps has been attacked even more by his fair-weathered cohorts within the Democratic Party than he has been by the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, is going to resign.

How this helps the Dems I’m not certain. Oh, wait, I forgot: They don’t give a shit about us “professional leftists,” those of us who actually give money and who are politically active (or who would like to be, anyway, if our interests were ever actually fucking represented). The Dems care only about the precious “swing voters,” those who, when they don’t have something else more important to do, actually step inside of a voting booth with their Magic 8 Ball in order to make their ballot decisions.

And we can’t have the precious “swing voters” thinking that the Democrats are OK with — gasp! – penises!

Weiner’s resignation — and the fact that it stems from at least as much as the cowardice and the sanctimoniousness and the pseudo-Victorian hypocrisy of the so-called Democrats than it stems from pressure from the bottom-feeders on the right — make me, for one, less likely to support the Democratic Party in the wake of Weiner.

If I’m going to devote my time, energy and money to a political party, I’d like to know that in exchange for that, that party is going to stand up and fight, not cave in.

Increasingly I see little difference between the craven corporate whores of the Repugnican Tea Party and the craven corporate whores of the Democratic Party. The two parties are like Coke and Pepsi: They’re hard to distinguish and both of them are bad for you.

Weiner at least now knows who his true friends really are, and he can take solace in the fact that he’ll be much better off without such “friends.”

Save us from the new ‘feminists’!

Associated Press photos

“Democratic” U.S. Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are coming for your balls (or ovaries…) next!

U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner wisely has decided to take a timeout from “Weinergate,” requesting a leave of absence from the U.S. House of Representatives.

He claims that he is going into treatment, although for what, exactly, I am not sure. Treatment for sex addiction, that is, for sexually compulsive behavior that has disrupted his life? Treatment for the 46-year-old’s apparent midlife crisis, as evidenced by the fact that he even took a picture of his toned and depilated chest — and by the fact that he even depilated his chest in the first place? 

In any event, whether Weiner truly believes that he needs treatment for something or not, it’s a great political move, whether it was intended to be a great political move or not, because now those who are calling for his resignation appear to be self-righteous assbites who are attacking a man who only wants to overcome his problem(s).

Sadly and pathetically, these self-righteous assbites aren’t only members of the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party.

The other day I remarked that

… I don’t expect the spineless Democrats in D.C. to support the now-politically-radioactive Weiner — and that’s how most politicians are, of course: they’re your “friends” only if they perceive it still to be in their best personal political interests — and without the support of his fellow Democrats in D.C., I don’t know if Weiner can politically survive being frozen out of his own party, even if he strives to survive politically.

and

… for the Democrats to cave into this kind of sexual blackmail — instead of fighting back and changing the game instead of playing along with the wingnuts’ game – is yet another example of the spectacular spinelessness and political ineptitude that we’ve come to know and loathe about the Democratic Party.

Am I prophetic or what?

I wrote those words before Democratic Party House leader Nancy Pelosi — whom all of us everywhere on the political spectrum are pretty fucking sick and tired of, I think — and new Democratic National Committee chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (who, up to now, I’ve kinda liked) both publicly expressed their belief that Weiner should resign.

Problem is, in a recent poll, 56 percent of Weiner’s constituents said that he should not resign.

So whose best interests are the likes of Pelosi and Wasserman Schultz looking out for? Their own, perhaps?

Is this the new “feminism,” in which self-proclaimed “feminists” cooperate with and enable the hypocritical right wing in its attempt to shame others over the fact that they are sexual beings?

By just giving the likes of wingnut Andrew Breitbart what he wants (Weiner’s head on a silver platter for Breitbart’s own petty ego), are “feminists” like Pelosi and Wasserman Schultz helping the cause of sexual liberation for everyone, for men as well as for women, or are they only aiding and abetting the sexually hypocritical right wing because they are lazy, self-serving cowards who just want to do the most politically expedient thing, which is to excommunicate Weiner?

Perhaps more to the point: Does Nancy Pelosi want every American male to be castrated? I mean, I generally have opposed the right wing’s attacks on her as being misogynist in spirit, but now I’m starting to wonder about the woman.

This is the deal: Anthony Weiner has not been accused of sexual harassment, sexual assault or sexual battery. He has not been accused of having sexually forced himself on anyone, in person or via cyberspace. He has acknowledged that he has had some consensually sexually oriented communications with several women, even after he got married. He claims that he has not had physical sexual contact with these women, and there is no evidence to contradict this claim.

What has happened is that some of these sexually oriented communications of his were made public for some petty wingnuts’ petty political gain. In my book, his privacy has been violated. (I reject the claim that elected officials are not entitled to any privacy. Perhaps legally their right to privacy is diminished, but morally and ethically, in my view, they have as much a right to privacy as does anyone else.)

If Weiner has wronged anyone, I suppose, he has wronged his wife — but that’s between him and his wife. And for all we know, they have an open marriage. We don’t know. It’s their marriage. Not ours. Not any of our fucking business.

But sanctimonious types like Pelosi and Wasserman Schultz, by stupidly calling for Weiner’s resignation instead of just keeping their mouths shut — which almost always is an option, by the way — are only making it not only possible, but more likely that bottom-feeders like the blackmailing Andrew Breitbart will try to destroy the careers of progressive politicians by searching everywhere and anywhere for any salacious dirt on them.

We owe it, in fairness, to Weiner and to everyone accused of sexual impropriety to look at exactly what the allegations are and to proceed only from such a careful examination. To recap some fairly recent U.S. House of Representatives sex scandals that resulted in resignations:

• Repugnican Rep. Mark Foley resigned in September 2006 after it was alleged that he had sent sexually explicit messages to underaged male congressional pages. So the main problem here (besides Foley’s apparent then-closetedness [he reportedly is out of the closet now, by the way]) is that the alleged victims were underaged and that a U.S. representative apparently was greatly abusing his power over his much less powerful staffers. It is reasonable to expect a U.S. representative who has sexually harassed any of his or her staffers to resign or to be expelled from the House.
• Democratic Rep. Eric Massa resigned in March 2010 after it was alleged that he had sexually harrassed at least one male staffer. Massa reportedly used sexually charged language with his male staffer or staffers (he copped to having used “salty” language from his Navy days) and apparently he thought it appropriate to continuously tickle at least one male staffer on at least one occasion. (A supervisor just doesn’t tickle or otherwise prolongedly touch his or her supervisees.) The problem here, again, is that of (apparent/alleged) sexual harassment, compounded by the fact of the power differential between the accused and his alleged victim(s).
• Repugnican Rep. Christopher Lee resigned in February 2011 after it was revealed that he’d sent a shirtless pic of himself to a woman (a male-to-female transsexual?) whom he was trying to pick up on Craigslist. (The woman [MTF?] herself outed Lee to the sleazy website Gawker, and Lee resigned the same day that Gawker ran the story.) Besides sending the sexually charged (but not X-rated) image of himself, the heterosexually married Lee apparently also lied about his marital status. While creepy, as I noted at the time, Lee apparently was guilty of no more than attempted infidelity and being in the grip of a midlife crisis. He was not accused of sexual harassment, sexual assault or sexual battery. Therefore, as I noted at the time, I don’t see that his resignation was called for, and I still see the matter as having been between him and his wife.

So the dog-piling upon Weiner seems to come primarily from the belief that a member of the U.S. House of Representatives may not be sexual outside of (heterosexual, of course) marriage — because sex is dirty, sex is wrong, sex is sinful, etc., and a member of the “lofty” U.S. House of Representatives just should not be acting in any way that is sexual, because sex is only for animals — and for unhappily but dutifilly married heterosexual couples.

Meanwhile, it’s widely considered perfectly OK for fucktarded, wingnutty U.S. representatives like Repugnican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher to do such things as to announce in Iraq that Iraq should repay the United States for the cost of the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War.* (Of course, “unelected,” “illegal,” “immoral,” etc. are my words, not his.)

Now, I find it much more reprehensible that a textbook stupid white man like Dana Rohrabacher would be in another nation making foreign-policy pronouncements for the United States of America as though he had been elected fucking president than I find it reprehensible that Anthony Weiner apparently is going through a midlife crisis a la former Rep. Christopher Lee.

The actions of Rohrabacher and his ilk at least border on treason if they don’t actually cross the line into treasonous territory, yet they are not so much as slapped on the wrist. Weiner has only offended some sexually repressed hypocrites’ sensibilities – boo fucking hoo! – and yet there are calls for his resignation.

And it’s sad and pathetic to hear those calls coming from self-professed feminists**, who spit on the grave of the actual feminists who actually fought for sexual freedom for women. Because the so-called “feminists” who are calling for Weiner’s resignation aren’t advancing the sexual freedom of women, but are diminishing the sexual freedom of all of us because they enable the sexually hypocritical right wing to use our sexuality against us.

Shame on them.

P.S. My defense of Weiner as of late extends only to “Weinergate.” I do not agree with him on every issue, such as his ass-licking of Israel. Like way too many Jewish (and non-Jewish) members of Congress, he is unable to be anything even remotely like fair and evenhanded where it comes to Israel, which can do no wrong and is never guilty of terrorism or any other crime against humanity, even though the angelic Israelis have slaughtered far more innocent Arabs than vice-versa since the state of Israel woefully misguidedly was imposed upon the Middle East in the aftermath of World War II.

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*Iraq asked Rohrabacher and his contingent to leave because of Rohrabacher’s incredibly fucktarded remarks, which reportedly included, “Once Iraq becomes a very rich and prosperous country… we would hope that some consideration be given to repaying the United States some of the mega-dollars that we have spent here in the last eight years.”

Gee, I don’t recall that Iraqis ever asked for the March 2003 invasion of their soverign nation that the United Nations Security Council had refused to rubber stamp for the Bush regime and that has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

**Not just to pick on Pelosi and Wasserman Schultz (and some other “feminist” women in Congress, such as Rep. Allyson Schwartz of Pennsylvania, the very first House “Democrat” to stupidly publicly call for Weiner’s resignation), because I’ve also seen so-called “progressive”/“feminist” women writers also dog-pile upon Weiner, including one who apparently believes that it’s up to her to decide whether or not another woman has been sexually harassed (novel!).

Straining out gnats, swallowing camels and casting stones at Weiner

Associated Press photo

Archie-Bunker-like bottom-feeding blowhard Andrew Breitbart claimed on Monday that he has an X-rated image of Democratic U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner that he has been withholding in order “to save his [Weiner's] family” – because Breitbart is all about decency and fair play, you see — but Breitbart on Monday also threatened, “If this guy [Weiner] wants to start fighting with me again, I have this [X-rated] photo.” Yes, committing sexual blackmail is highly ethical and admirable! Andrew Breitbart is my hero! (But seriously, if Weiner can sue Breitbart for Breitbart’s blatant blackmail, he should.)

Are we done now laughing over Weiner/wiener ha ha ha ha ha ha ha?

Because there are, I think, some serious issues here.

Unsurprisingly, hypocrites on the right (that’s redundant) disingenuously are calling for the head (pun intended) of Democratic U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, who, they say, should resign for having lied about having had very apparently consensual sexually oriented electronic communications with several women, even after he married.

(It’s like Monica Lewinsky redux, only Weiner isn’t president, he claims that he had no physical sexual contact with anyone, and he didn’t lie about his own sexual activity that is no one else’s fucking business anyway while he was under oath. Oh, and there is no semen-stained garment — that we know of, but rest assured, because I’m sure that Great White Protector of the Nation Andrew Breitbart is on it.)

The Weiner-related “outrage” on the right is beyond pathetic. Repugnican National Committee chair Reince Priebus, a Richie-Rich frat-boy prick, was one of the first to call for Weiner’s head. The loathesome, beady-eyed weasel U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, U.S. House Repugnican leader, also has called on Weiner to resign, but, as I have stated, it’s up to Weiner first and foremost whether he should resign, and then, if he decides not to resign, it’s up to his constituents to decide whether to re-elect him in November 2012.

Indeed, Reuters reports that “A little more than half of New York City voters think Weiner should not resign, according to a NY1-Marist poll taken just hours after his tearful admission.” I surmise that as time passes and “Weinergate” subsides, even more of Weiner’s New York constituents will feel that his resignation is not called for, and in this case, it’s their opinion, not the opinion of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, that matters.

It’s not like self-serving, hypocritical, stupid-white-male scumbags like Priebus and Cantor have the best interests of Weiner’s constituents at heart. They clearly only want another Democratic scalp to nail to the wall, perhaps especially since Repugnican U.S. Rep. Christopher Lee, also of New York, resigned in February after his online sexual behavior came to light. (To add insult to injury, a Democrat, Kathy Hochul, to whom I’d happily given a $25 campaign contribution, won Lee’s vacated seat in a special election last month.)

But Lee resigned from the get-go. The day his shirtless-in-the-mirror pic hit the Web, he called it quits. He didn’t, in my estimation, have to resign. And, as I argued at the time*, he probably shouldn’t have resigned. 

However, I don’t expect the spineless Democrats in D.C. to support the now-politically-radioactive Weiner — and that’s how most politicians are, of course: they’re your “friends” only if they perceive it still to be in their best personal political interests — and without the support of his fellow Democrats in D.C., I don’t know if Weiner can politically survive being frozen out of his own party, even if he strives to survive politically.

And then there is wingnut Andrew Breitbart, who on Monday bizarrely, swinishly and inappropriately bogarted Weiner’s news-conference podium to announce that he wanted“vindication” because indeed the infamous crotch shot that he publicized is an image of the underwear-clad, engorged (and perhaps tingling) crotch of Anthony Weiner. (Yes, this was a “victory” – just like Donald Trump’s Barack-Obama-birth-certificate “victory” was a “victory” of which Trump pronounced that he was “proud” of himself.)

Yes, Andrew Breitbart is a modern-day bell-ringin’ Paul Revere, a real patriot who is protecting us from elected officials lying about whether or not racy images that they transmitted privately actually are of  them.

One of Breitbart’s self-aggrandizing websites is called “BigJournalism.” Because that’s what the best journalism is all about: not exposing fraud, graft, waste and corruption and the like, but exposing whose bulge that is in the gray underwear. Yes, world-renowned fearless journalist Andrew Breitbart makes the likes of Ida Tarbell, Edward R. Murrow, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and Seymour Hersh look like mere fucking amateurs.

To me, the largest issues in “Weinergate” are that it exposes (1) Americans’ juvenile and backasswards (read: Judeo-“Christian” [that is, “Christo"fascist], puritanical, Victorian, etc.) views on sexuality and (2) how they’ll simply let crimes of the century (like, oh, stolen presidential elections and bogus wars launched on purely false pretenses) go but will go ape shit over the teeny-tiny (but titillating) shit, like whose semen it is on a semen-strained dress and whether or not the sausage-like bulge in a pair of gray underwear belongs to a certain elected individual with the surname of Weiner (guffaw!). 

If the members of the lunatic, Taliban-like right want to lead repressed, hypocritical sex lives, that’s their own fucking business, but for them to shove their Dark-Ages hangups over sexuality down the throats of the rest of us is, dare I say — and this is one of their favorite words — tyranny. And indeed, for buttholish self-appointed morality cop Andrew Breitbart to hold the public release of an X-rated photo of Weiner over Weiner’s head also is a yet another example of right-wing (that’s redundant) tyranny.

And for the Democrats to cave into this kind of sexual blackmail — instead of fighting back and changing the game instead of playing along with the wingnuts’ game – is yet another example of the spectacular spinelessness and political ineptitude that we’ve come to know and loathe about the Democratic Party.

I can empathize with Weiner. If some wingnutty, bottom-feeding scumbag like the Archie-Bunker-like Andrew Breitbart had obtained and publicly released an embarrassing image of me and I were confonted with the question of whether or not it was me in the image – if I had been in Weiner’s shoes (and in his underwear, too, I guess…) – I can’t say for certain that my initial impulse would not have been to deny it, as Weiner did. After all, is something from my personal life really the whole world’s business?

However, the best tactic, I think, would be to refuse to respond to attempted sexual blackmail. To even answer yes or no, to confirm or deny, is only to play into the hypocritical, disingenuous wingnuts’ hands, and at least tacitly grants legitimacy to sexual blackmail, when sexual blackmail, or any blackmail, is quite illegitimate (it’s incredibly unethical and immoral, if not also illegal).

And it’s interesting to see what types of lies the Repugnican Tea Party traitors attack. Bill Clinton’s lie that he didn’t have any sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky — this lie of his didn’t hurt the nation, to my knowledge. Neither has Weiner’s lie that a certain crotch shot wasn’t his.

So we have lies like Clinton’s and Weiner’s, but when the treasonous-by-definition Repugnicans lie, an awful lot of people tend to get hurt — or killed.

How about these huge fucking lies, circa late 2002 and early 2003: Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons. We can’t wait for the “smoking gun” to come in the form of a “mushroom cloud.”

Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have died because of those lies, as have more than 4,450 members of the U.S. military since the unelected Bush regime illegally, immorally and unjustly launched the bogus Vietraq War in 2003 (five of them, in fact, were killed in Iraq on Monday, so the treasonous BushCheneyCorp’s blatant fucking lies still are killing people today).

If you want to talk about House ethics, I’ll give you just one example of something that I find a lot more disgusting than anything that has been revealed about Anthony Weiner: How about Repugnican Texas U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, who essentially takes bribes from Big Oil for selling us out to Big Oil, and who a year ago this month proclaimed that the U.S. government’s seeking to get compensation from British Petroleum for its oily debacle in the Gulf of Mexico amounted to a grossly unfair and unjust “shakedown” of the poor corporate behemoth BP?

So it’s perfectly ethical (or at least acceptable) to take tons of corporate cash in exchange for protecting the corporate criminals, no matter what devastation they cause, no matter how much they harm the public good – but a politically motivated third party’s release of risque images of an elected official amounts to a serious ethics violation? Really? Really?

“You strain the gnats from your beverages, but you swallow camels,” Jesus Christ said critically to the small-minded hypocrites of his day, the Pharisees. (Among many other things, Jesus also said to them, “Whoever among you is without sin himself should cast the first stone.”)

Nothing, really, has changed since then.

–

*I wrote:

I don’t really see, though, that Lee was guilty of much more than attempted infidelity and apparently being in the throes of a midlife crisis….

As reprehensible as [Lee] seems to be … it seems to me that the matter really is between Lee and his wife. And, dare I say, that he shouldn’t have had to resign over it.

As fun as it is to dog-pile upon an apparent Repugnican hypocrite (wait, that’s redundant…), my concern is that these sex scandals, aside from giving us perverse entertainment at the expense of others’ privacy, serve to preserve our national hangups over sexuality. 

On a more serious Weiner-related note…

OK, so I watched U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner’s tearful news conference (in which he handled the media-shark feeding frenzy pretty well, I think), and I have to admit that I have some amount of sympathy for the guy.

His tears seem genuine, not fabricated, and in any event, it’s not like beating up on Weiner is going to absolve us of our wrongdoing, so we probably can drop our stones right about now.

It’s true that Weiner showed poor judgment by, according to his own admission, having had sexually oriented electronic communications with some women even after he got married. (He claims that he never had any physical relations with these women, and I have no reason not to believe him.)

It’s also true that Weiner showed poor judgment by doing this while being a member of the U.S. House of Representatives when there are always self-aggrandizing bottom-feeders like Andrew Breitbart on patrol for sleaze to sling.

However, it’s also true that Anthony Weiner is a human being, specifically, a male human being, and male human beings sometimes become possessed by testosterone.

That in and of itself is forgiveable. It is, after all, biology.

I personally don’t give a flying fuck whether or not Weiner used any government equipment to send or receive any sexually oriented material. I mean, fuck. That would the very fucking least of our federal government’s problems, wouldn’t it? How about that interminable war in Afghanistan and that probably illegal military intervention in Libya? And the fact that Pakistan would prefer that we pack up our drones and leave already? How about that economy? Those are problems.

The larger issue in “Weinergate,” the national discussion that we should be having but for the most part aren’t, is how much an elected official’s sex life should matter. (We also could use a national discussion on whether or not monogamy really works — ’cause it really doesn’t seem to for a great many people – but my boyfriend reads my blog sometimes, so that’s all that I’ll say about that right now…)

I mean, these political sex scandals go back and forth, Repugnican and Democrat, Democrat and Repugnican, and how do they help us? We get temporarily nationally titillated — admittedly, it’s great blogging material — but are we better for it? Finding out about the infamous blue dress or seeing images of shirtless members of Congress never meant for public viewing* — does wallowing around in this mud make us better people?

As much as I wasn’t exactly devastated to see another New York U.S. representative, Christopher Lee, a Repugnican, resign in February due to the publicization of his shirtless picture (which, despite being married, he sent to a prospective female hookup on Craigslist, who recognized him as a congressman and outed him to the media), I – we – probably could do without these sex scandals, regardless of the partisanship involved. (Which is what I said when I wrote about Christopher Lee in February.)

I retract my earlier statement of today that Weiner should resign, primarily for his having lied.

The House Ethics Committee apparently is going to look into “Weinergate,” and probably will slap Weiner on the wrist, especially for having lied (and maybe for having inappropriately used government resources, if he did so).

But whether or not having lied to the public, which Weiner fully admits that he did, should end his career as a U.S. representative should be up to the voters of his district in November 2012 – not up to Andrew “Archie Bunker” Breitbart or other political enemies, not to the media, not to you (unless, of course, you live in his district), not to me.

Weiner didn’t lie about something of national importance, and it’s understandable why he lied.

He said it himself, when asked point-blank in his news conference today why he lied. He replied: “I was embarrassed. I was humiliated. [I still am] to this moment. I was trying to protect my wife, I was trying to protect myself from shame. It was a mistake. And I — and I really regret it.”

I don’t know. From what we know up to this point, Weiner seems guilty primarily of having been human while having been a U.S. representative. At this point, it seems to me, even more dog-piling upon Weiner probably is a larger statement about our collective character than his.

And it seems to me that unless Weiner is found guilty of having committed sexual harassment — which I consider to be a serious offense for anyone, but even more so for those in positions of considerable power (with that power comes commensurate responsibility) – the matter is between him and his wife and those women who presumably communicated with him voluntarily. 

And this bottom-feeding really needs to stop. We continue relish this shit and slime while the American empire continues to collapse all around us.

–

*Frankly, I find it skeezy — and, frankly, gay**, in a closeted kind of way – that 29-year-old U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock, an Illinois Repugnican, appears on the cover of the current issue of Men’s Health:

I picked up this issue of the softcore gay porn magazine in a store recently, and it occurred to me, as I looked closely at the cover, that maybe we don’t really need to see our elected officials’ appendectomy scars and treasure trails. (And Schock’s treasure trail and chest are meticulously manscaped, and you know how I feel about that.)

Honestly, if we are going to castigate Weiner for having had sexually charged images of himself released to the public by someone else – saying that these images of him diminish the institution of the U.S. Congress — can we say that Rep. Aaron Schock’s having posed for the cover of a softcore gay porn magazine does not also diminish the institution of the U.S. Congress? 

What’s next? U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan on the cover of Playgirl?***

**Schock allegedly is heterosexual, but judge for yourself from this photo of him that surfaced a year ago:

Really, I’m surprised he didn’t just tie his shirt like Daisy Duke:

***Well, we can hope…

He has a promising future in porn!

Associated Press and Reuters photos

U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York tearfully admits at a press conference today that he indeed sent a crotch shot of his via Twitter recently. Like we really needed the admission.

And they won’t even have to give him a fake porn-star name!

Just sayin’.

P.S. Yeah, but seriously, he should resign — for lying, if for nothing else — but he says that he won’t.

P.P.S. Here’s a shirtless pic of Weiner, courageously provided to the world by Andrew Breitbart, the Archie-Bunker-lookalike Great White Savior of Our Nation:

OK, now that I’ve cleared the little bit of vomit from my mouth, I do have to say that Weiner, while on the thin side, is pretty toned.

But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Dudes really, really should not remove their body hair.

This should be the Eleventh Commandment.

Just sayin’.

I have dildos older than that

LiveScience, which often has some interesting articles, actually has one on whether an apparent carved antler believed to be around 6,000 to 8,000 years old found in Sweden might have been used as a dildo.

Uh, I understand wanting readership — people will read this blog piece because of its title and subject matter — but, even as dirty-minded as I can be, I’m not convinced that the antler ever was inserted in some forebearer’s body cavity.

This the alleged ancient sex toy:

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. (Of course, it was reported that Bill Clinton had used a cigar as a dildo on [well, in...] Monica Lewinsky, if memory serves…)

The LiveScience article even goes on to apparently suggest that the “dildo” might have been used by a male or males:

It’s not immediately clear whether the tool would have been one most likely to be used by men or women or both.

“If it’s a tool and it’s also shaped like a penis, it could be an item where you want to discuss gender questions,” [an archaeologist] said.

The dirty mind boggles. If a dildo is “used by” a man, does that mean that he’s inserting it inside of himself or that he’s inserting it inside of someone else? Or maybe both?

LiveScience also even reports that the object might have been used as a dildo and as an everyday hand tool. (“Honey, where’s my hammer?”)

Anyway, LiveScience reports that the potential antique sex toy is only about four inches long and less than an inch in diameter.

It is my expert opinion that we can conclude that no gay guy from way back in the day would have been fulfilled by something that insubstantial.

Coitus interruptus

There is controversy in Montana over a proposal to teach public-school first-graders that homosexuality exists and to teach fifth-graders, in sex education, about vaginal, oral and anal intercourse.

Fuck.

I remember sex ed in sixth grade. We were shown chainsaw views (cross-section depictions) of the female and male reproductive systems, and we were informed that males produce sperm and that females produce ova, and that the sperm and the ovum meet and that this results in a baby.

A tiny detail that they omitted, however, was how, exactly, the sperm and the ovum come to unite.

They dared not tell us back then, in Arizona circa 1980, that the erect penis repeatedly thrusts inside of the vagina and eventually ejaculates, delivering the sperm, swimming around in semen, to the waiting ovum. We didn’t get to see visual aids such as these:

I mean, hell, that last one is a drawing of Leonard da Vinci’s — that’s art, no? And the image above that supposedly is an MRI of coitus — that’s science, yes?

Lacking this explicit instruction, my sixth-grade mind filled in the gap (so to speak…): I figured that the scary-looking female anatomy, with all of those tubes, must send a tube inside of the penis, like a ridiculously long earthworm, and collect the sperm itself. (Please don’t laugh. I was young.)

This idea was not appealing, having my sperm taken from me by a wormlike appendage from inside of an already-scary-enough-looking vagina.

That’s probably not why I turned out gay, but still, I would like to have had received a full instruction in how it all works.

Showing kids diagrams of parts and neglecting to tell them how it all comes together isn’t of much help to them — and, such as in my case, might cause even more confusion than enlightenment — and I see no problem with teaching kids about things they’re going to discover at some point anyway, such as oral sex and anal sex.

And homosexuality, too, of course.

I don’t recall a mention of that when I had sex ed back in the day. If memory serves, dudes get with chicks, and that’s the only possible permutation that was presented to us.

(Speaking of ’mosexuality, wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci gay? Is that why in his diagram, only the man is fully depicted, with the woman being little more than a semen receptacle?)

Anyway, sex ed in the public schools always has been and long will be a touchy subject. Perhaps the best approach is for parents to teach their kids about sex.

But if we’re going to present sex ed at all in the public schools, we should do it right – uncut and unedited — or not at all.