RUTHFULLY YOURS

When I was a kid growing up in fifties Manhattan, if my mother had told me there would be a flasher running for mayor of New York, my mouth would have dropped open. Flashers were those guys I was supposed to run away from in Central Park.

But now we have Anthony Weiner, a flasher of the Internet sort, who exposes himself to random women online, before and after having apologized publicly for it, actually (as of this writing) still campaigning for mayor of our biggest city and financial center.

Weiner is no mere adulterer as described by Flaubert, Tolstoy and thousands of lesser writers. Or even a compulsive womanizer à la Bill Clinton. He is a genuine weirdo, straight out of the pages of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the kind that really do jump out of the bushes in public parks.

Making this even more bizarre, his wife, Huma Abedin, appears to be standing by him in the face of this immense public humiliation.

Why she may be doing that, I will discuss in a moment, but it’s worth noting that Weiner is not alone among prominent Democrats these days in his assaults on women. San Diego Mayor and former Congressman Bob Filner ^[1] evidently can’t keep his hands off any female within a radius of three hundred feet and seems about to lose his job after only eight months. And we all know about Eliot “Client #9″ Spitzer, the great seeker of justice who prosecutes prostitutes while patronizing them, now back running for New York comptroller and, like Weiner, dragging his spouse along with him.

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine a Mayor Anthony Weiner consoling someone’s teenage daughter with a hug after the next 9/11. Problem? Okay, maybe Comptroller Spitzer will do it.

Not only are these men sleazy hypocrites in their politics, they are deeply misogynistic in their behavior — and yet the soi-disant “progressive” crew of female politicians (Hillary Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Elizabeth Warren, et al.) are strangely silent.

Where is the true “War on Women” and who’s waging it? Think this one through, my “liberal” friends.

I guess as long as these guys vote for free government condoms, everything’s okay.

Of course, it’s not. These people have shown themselves to be absolutely repellent liars (and, as I noted, misogynists) unworthy of any sort of public trust on any subject.

But that’s only the obvious part. Every human being I have encountered, including myself of course, has probably lied at one time or another. It’s just a question of the extent and the situation. These men, however, have brought the most egregious and unpleasant lies, that should only lead to private expiation, into the public sphere — humiliating friends, family and supporters, not to mention the society at large — and, to some extent at least, have gotten away with it. They act as if they are still entitled to run for office after all this and not head off to Bangladesh for exculpation by cleaning latrines (as they should).

How and why did that happen in our culture? What has changed the atmosphere?

Not long ago many of us thought (I include myself again) that Americans invested too much in the private lives of our politicians. We should be more like, say, the French who were able to divorce these things.

So we all shrugged our shoulders — or many of us did anyway — when Bill Clinton performed various sex acts in the hallway outside the Oval Office and evidently under his White House desk as well. We out-Frenched the French (pardon my vulgarisms).

The culture forgave old rascal Bill, but now we have sociopathic Anthony and people are beginning to get uncomfortable. How, as I just asked, did this happen?

Well, I’ll tell you — if Hillary could forgive Bill, everybody could. She was the first Huma Abedin and, far from coincidentally, Huma’s boss and ultimately, we can be reasonably certain, her role model. Stand by your man, even if it seems absurdly anti-feminist and reactionary.

Hillary Clinton has, more than anyone I can think of, led our culture to where it is now.

We all remember well Hillary in high dudgeon blaming her husband’s (serial, she knew well) adultery on the “vast right-wing conspiracy ^[2].” What kind of person does that? How disconnected is that from reality — how narcissistic, selfish and, well, sociopathic?

This is the same Hillary Clinton who told the father of fallen Benghazi SEAL Tyrone Woods — at his son’s funeral — that they were going to get that obscure and hapless filmmaker who made the dopey anti-Islam video, when all along she knew Tyrone and the others were the victims of an al-Qaeda-related terror attack. The word “entitlement” cannot encompass that behavior.

And she was, maybe still is, the mentor of Huma Abedin. The mind, as they say, boggles. And Huma, of course, is the daughter of a leader of the fundamentalist Muslim Sisterhood ^[3].

I cannot even begin to draw all the connections there. Maybe I don’t even want to know. Besides, Andy McCarthy ^[4] has done it better than I ever could.

But one connection I will draw — the way Democratic liberals treat women is the same way they treat blacks… as coolies.