RUTHFULLY YOURS

The “non-scandal” scandal involving a former I.T. aide to several Democratic congressmen, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, took an interesting turn when the wife of the alleged hacker and fraudster Imran Awan showed up in court separate from her husband and had retained a separate attorney.

Imran Awan’s own wife, Hina Alvi, filed papers in a Pakistani court accusing her husband of fraud and of marrying another woman. The couple did not look at each other when they showed up in federal court on Friday.

Daily Caller:

The couple were in U.S. court to face bank fraud charges related to sending money to Pakistan around the time they learned they were under investigation for abuses related to their work managing IT for members of Congress. Awan was arrested at Dulles Airport in July attempting to board a flight to Pakistan.

Wasserman Schultz, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, and other House Democrats have vigorously defended Awan, claiming the Capitol Police might be drumming up charges out of Islamaphobia.

Alvi was arraigned Friday on four felony counts, and Awan, who has already been arraigned, requested that his GPS monitoring bracelet be taken off – citing the fact that his wife was in America as the reason he was not a flight risk.

Yet the couple entered and left the court separately, have different lawyers, and Awan’s lawyer told the judge that the husband and wife are staying “in a one-bedroom apartment and then also a house.”

Pakistani legal papers published by the news channel show Alvi recently accused Awan of illegally marrying another woman, and of fraud. “My husband Imran Awan son of Muhammad Ashraf Awan, committed fraud along with offence of polygamy,” she charges in the papers.

Hina’s U.S. lawyer, Nikki Lotze, did not dispute the account. “I don’t see how that’s newsworthy,” Lotze told The Daily Caller News Foundation. The Pakistani legal petition named as the second wife is a woman who records show told Virginia police she felt like Awan was keeping her “like a slave.”

Awan’s two brothers have also been implicated in the scheme, and the revelation that Awan’s second wife may also have been involved makes the circle of fraud and deceit even wider.

Although The Washington Post has reported that investigators found that Awan and his relatives made unauthorized access to a congressional server 5,400 times, Wasserman Schultz has said concern about the matter was the stuff of the “right-wing media circus fringe.”

Awan and Alvi have been charged with bank fraud involving moving money to Pakistan, but they have not been charged with crimes related to their work, and the other family members have not been charged at all. Awan’s attorney used Friday’s hearing to argue that he “very strongly” wanted to block prosecutors from using evidence they found in the Capitol Hill phone booth.

The Pakistani legal motion filed by Alvi states: “A few months ago I got apprised of the fact that my husband has contracted second marriage secretly, fraudulently and without my consent with Mst. Sumaira Shehzadi Alias Sumaira Siddique Daughter of Muhammad Akram r/o Township, Lahore. The second marriage of my husband is illegal, unlawful and without justification.”

As the rape and sexual harassment accusations against movie mogul and Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein continue to aggregate, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand how Mr. Weinstein’s alleged offenses were not reported until the publication of a story last week in the New York Times . Even since the report, many of Mr. Weinstein’s associates are still reluctant to comment.

The website Mediaite takes note of an exchange this afternoon on CNN:

Hillary Clinton finally released a statement condemning Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, but CNN’s Dana Bash had to ask this afternoon, “Where are the Obamas?”

Weinstein was a big Democratic fundraiser, and gave money to both Clinton and Barack Obama (though Clinton’s statement does not mention the donations or whether she will be giving them away).

“Where is Michelle Obama? Where is President Obama?” Bash asked. “Harvey Weinstein was, and probably is, still a big supporter of them and certainly of…the President’s political efforts.”

Chris Cillizza brought up when the former First Lady praised Weinstein during a student film symposium at the White House, saying that the Obamas need to be speaking out now and it’s “odd” that they aren’t.

During the 2013 White House event, Michelle Obama called Mr. Weinstein “a wonderful human being, a good friend and just a powerhouse.”

Wonderful is not the word that comes to mind when reading a heartbreaking new report by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker detailing three separate rape allegations against Mr. Weinstein. The piece also alleges other cases of harassment followed by career setbacks for the alleged victims:

Four actresses, including Mira Sorvino and Rosanna Arquette, told me they suspected that, after they rejected Weinstein’s advances or complained about them to company representatives, Weinstein had them removed from projects or dissuaded people from hiring them.

The Times has followed up with a report that Mr. Weinstein also allegedly harassed Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow back when they were on their way to becoming movie stars. Among the saddest details of many of the recent accounts of alleged harassment and assaults by Mr. Weinstein involve the number of people who either ignored or even facilitated the movie mogul’s meetings alone with young women. Since the reports became public a number of actresses including Lena Dunham have also expressed disappointment in the silence of their male co-stars.

At least one guy in Hollywood seems to have been at least annoyed by one of Mr. Weinstein’s alleged offenses. The Times notes that at the time she was allegedly victimized, Ms. Paltrow was dating the actor Brad Pitt. According to the Times, “After she told Mr. Pitt about the episode, he approached Mr. Weinstein at a theater premiere and told him never to touch Ms. Paltrow again.”

Ms. Dunham for her part says the problem goes beyond Mr. Weinstein:

She condemns Weinstein as a “predator” and says he’s not the only one in Hollywood, detailing her own encounters with “everyday sexism” as a young, acclaimed indie-film director.

“His behavior, silently co-signed for decades by employees and collaborators, is a microcosm of what has been happening in Hollywood since always and of what workplace harassment looks like for women everywhere,” Dunham writes of Weinstein…

“The use of power to possess and silence women is as likely to occur in a fast-food restaurant as it is on a movie set, and Hollywood has yet another chance to make a noisy statement about what we should and should not condone as a society,” she writes.

Ms. Dunham’s fact-free smear against the fast-food industry aside, her comments raise the disturbing possibility that one of the reasons Mr. Weinstein got away with the alleged behavior for so long is that it’s not that rare in Hollywood. On Tuesday another accuser named Louisette Geiss came forward and held a press conference along with her attorney Gloria Allred. According to the Hollywood Reporter: CONTINUE AT SITE

One of the few successes of John McCain’s 2008 campaign was a 30-second ad called “Celeb.” It interspersed images of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears with Barack Obama and his adoring crowds. A narrator said: “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead?”

Pundits and political pros dismissed the spot as off-target and unconvincing. Mr. McCain seemed almost embarrassed by it, claiming his campaign was just having “fun.”

Yet the implication that Mr. Obama was a glitzy Hollywood-style confection resonated with voters. Mr. Obama, just coming off his ecstatic appearance in Berlin, saw his poll numbers drop noticeably. His advisers were quoted in the press acknowledging the ad’s power.

Which brings us to Harvey Weinstein. If Hollywood people are anything like normal people, they should be nearly as offended by Mr. Weinstein’s presumptions about them as they are by his alleged bullying of women for sex. Where does he get off assuming his colleagues can be so easily manipulated, will so readily fall in line, just because he cites, as he did in his recent self-defense, their shared liberal politics?

How can somebody with his smarts be so heavy-handed and obvious as to think he can mint an instant pass for his transgressions merely by alluding to his opposition to the National Rifle Association and President Trump ?

Then again, maybe we’re missing the real point. Mr. Weinstein was reminding liberal elites that his trouble is their trouble, because they tolerated him for so long. That’s why this scandal may have legs.

He was a guest at the Obama White House 13 times. He gave hundreds of thousands to the Clintons. In 2016, he hosted or headlined multiple fundraisers for Mrs. Clinton with people like Leonardo DiCaprio, Helen Mirren, Julia Roberts and Sarah Jessica Parker.

He was coached by Team Clinton for a campaign appearance on CBS . In turn, he coached campaign chief Robby Mook on how to answer the Bernie Sanders threat.

He’s also a man who the Los Angeles Times now tells us was “generally loathed” in Hollywood. His sexual predations were so well known that they were the subject of a joke on “30 Rock.” His behavior, we now learn, has been the subject of ongoing reporting projects at the New Yorker, New York magazine and the New York Times, which finally blew Mr. Weinstein out of the water with its 3,500-word account last week.

His offenses were the “biggest mess” Disney had to deal with during its 12-year partnership with Mr. Weinstein, a former executive now tells the Times. Actresses Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan, who related their stories to the paper, as well as Lena Dunham, creator of HBO’s “Girls,” have been outspoken in the aftermath about Tinsel Town’s history of covering up for Mr. Weinstein.

When a decent old stiff such as Mitt Romney talks earnestly about looking for suitable female job candidates and clumsily distills the effort into the phrase “binders full of women”, all the smart sophisticated types jump on it and make it a punchline for an antiquated condescension that only confirms how irredeemably misogynist the GOP is.

By contrast, when Harvey Weinstein corners a TV reporter in the corridor of his restaurant and forces her to watch as he unzips his pants, masturbates, and finally concludes the performance by ejaculating into a pot plant, all you hear, from a couple of larger leaves round the back of the plant, are drenched crickets chirping. Three decades of crickets chirping.

“Binders full of women”: what an appalling sentiment!

“Stand there and shut up while I masturbate in your general direction”: well, say what you like but Harvey has always supported, as Meryl Streep noted today, “good and worthy causes” – like the Hillary campaign.

Not so long ago, picking up a Golden Globe for her turn as Mrs Thatcher, Meryl was happy to salute Harvey Weinstein as God, notwithstanding that the previous occupant of that position was famously antipathetic to the sin of Onan, with or without attendant shrubbery. Harvey, more modestly, saw himself as the “”f**ing sheriff of this f**king lawless piece-of-s**t town”. So, when he pounded the crap out of some journalist on a city sidewalk, a hundred cameras snapped, but, mysteriously, not a single photograph saw the light of day. When a junior reporter at The New York Times noticed that the head of Miramax Italy was a guy who knew nothing about movies but was paid 400 grand a year to procure broads for Weinstein, Matt Damon and (alas) Russell Crowe personally called her to talk her out of pursuing the story (subsequently gutted by an editor). As recently as this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live”, Lorne Michaels, head honcho of the world’s most cobwebbed edgy comedy show, declined to address the Weinstein controversy, presumably in case Harvey was merely temporarily hors de combat and a week or two hence was minded to beat Lorne up, too.

Possibly Lorne, Matt and Russell have Harvey’s name tattooed on their butts. Dame Judi Dench, who played Queen Victoria in another upscale Oscar-bait Weinstein production, does – and she’s happy to lower her knickers and show it to you. Or she was, until Sunday. Maybe, all over town, Hollywood A-listers are frantically booking emergency removals of their Weinstein tramp-stamps.

Harvey thought those “good and worthy causes” would come through for him again. In response to the disclosure that he had attempted to force Ashley Judd into joining him in the shower, he announced that “I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party. ” Sure, that seems an even longer shot than Wayne would attempt, but why wouldn’t it work? Twenty years ago, Time’s Nina Burleigh said of Harvey’s pal Bill Clinton, “I would be happy to give him a bl**job just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.” If the chicks’ll swallow that, why wouldn’t Ashley Judd be lining up to give him an assisted shower for regulating bump stocks? Happy the land in which a “semi-automatic” means Harvey reflexively dropping his trousers when a comely reporter enters the room.

Why do Mitt’s binders full of women outrage liberal sensibilities but not Harvey’s pot plants full of semen?

Well, in the old days, the bourgeoisie expected bourgeois values throughout society. The wealthy and powerful disdained them, but discreetly. Now they disdain them openly. Indeed, they wage war on them, relentlessly. Instead, they enforce “progressive” values. Institutions fundamental to the nation-state, such as citizenship, have to be rendered meaningless – so that what matters in any immigration debate is not the citizens but the invaders, to the point where Nancy Pelosi thanks the parents of “Dreamers” for breaking American law and bringing them here, as a precious gift to a nation crying out for even more low-skilled immigrants. As for institutions that pre-date the nation-state – institutions almost as old as humanity – they’re as easy to redefine, so that marriage can no longer be confined to those of opposite sexes. Speaking of the sexes, human biology can be vaporized, so that two sexes become 57 genders, and grade-school boys more interested in Barbie than GI Joe get to be pumped full of puberty blockers and directed to the girls’ bathroom. And after all that, religion has to be put on the back foot, so that any recalcitrant mom’n’pop bakery for whom two men atop a wedding cake is an abomination, must be hunted down, dragged into court and financially ruined pour encourager les autres. And in a revolutionary present it is necessary ultimately to throttle the past – eliminating Robert E Lee, Christopher Columbus, Dr Seuss, Stephen Foster, the national anthem, to dam up the stream of history, the flow of past to present to future, and thus sever the citizenry from their entire inheritance, so that we are mere flotsam and jetsam on the frothing surface of the moment – a world where, in a certain sense, Harvey Weinstein is God.