August 9th: Render Unto Caesar
"Ambition's debt is paid."
Julius Caesar
The life-cycle of the modern-day American Political Scandal™ always has a nice seasonality to it. There is the confused, red scrum of week one, that initial farrago of flurried reports, terse statements, and wolfish competition to scoop the next revelation. There is the flood tide of week two, when all the embarrassing photos have leaked, all political allies have abandoned the field, and, of course, when the candidate has stood under klieg lights to condole with his disappearing erection. There is week three - deep in the belly of Hell - when everything that can go wrong has, when press flacks implode and the fresh polling has been released, showing your man's popularity has sunk somewhere below Osama Bin Laden's.
And now we're in week four - the worst week: when nobody is even talking about you. When the wayward pol is a laugh-line who curdled days ago.Like another guilty grifter, the politician is "a man to double business bound," unable to ignore the maelstrom whirling around him, and unable to acknowledge it, either.
But Anthony Weiner is not dropping out. Not when there's a fight to be waged on behalf of the middle class. Weiner, warrior-poet of Sheepshead Bay, has selflessly devoted his energies to " those who are in the middle class and struggling to make it. " Lesser men might quit. But to " quit isn't the way we roll in New York City."
It has a nice, focus-tested ring to it, doesn't it? After all, the rich like to demur they're "middle class," while the working poor can't bear to think otherwise. And Anthony Weiner wants that mushy fleeting tax base to catapult him into Gracie Mansion. I personally see a few possible problems with this strategy.
The first is, Anthony Weiner can't stop taking pictures of his cock and sending it to strange women. He can't stop texting "Red Shoe Diary"-level porn prose to blackjack dealers and college students and gift shop cashiers. His penile penumbras seemingly stretch into every crevice of the American continent. If he could, he'd fuck the Grand Canyon, and document it with a multi-camera set-up like when that guy walked a tightrope across it.
So there's that.
The second, and greater issue, is that he is a craven disgusting person whose heart doesn't pump blood - just a rancid tincture of adrenaline, hormones, and ambition. Richard Nixon privately told his shrink that when he looked in the mirror, he did not recognize the face he saw. Weiner has the same reflection - albeit, in a full-length mirror, with his iPhone close at hand and no clothes in sight.
The tawdry rounds this horny toad makes via text message, but it's not his cardinal sin. He is a mountebank, a political animal of our time, who could only exist in America, and only in the vespertine shadows of the Democratic Party. Middle-class warrior? Disinterested defender of economic justice? Let's go to the videotape.
Weiner worshipped at the altar of Wall Street's favorite Democrat, his political godfather, Chuck Schumer. He won his first race in a repulsive show of anonymous ratfucking and race-baiting worthy of Lee Atwater. He did absolutely nothing in Congress, besides show-boat, hot-dog, steer money to donors, and sell out single-payer healthcare for a DNC speaking spot . He married a woman even worse than him, a corrupt hack who played padwan to Hillary Clinton's jedi, who cynically spoke at the latest depressing press conference to tell us the poor penitent dick-flasher won't keep doing this, so long as he promises she'll be first lady of New York.
"Quit isn't the way we roll in New York." Fine. I have some other verbs for Anthony Weiner. Go away. Disappear. Forever. Take your malignancy into a deep dark hole and never come up for air. Take your grifting wife with you. Take the hustling ambition that seems to be America's only esprit d'corps and test the conditions of a bubbling volcano. Do you hear me, Tony? I know what you think when you wake up, and what sees you off to bed. You don't need therapy; you need an enormous concrete sarcophagus, like the one they poured around Chernobyl so that no more radiation would escape into the air in a burning blue rainbow. You're America, all right, one hundred percent - but you need to find another country to be part of.
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