Democratic fear prevails in the case of Anthony Weiner.
Rachel Maddow (and Cenk Uygur) nail the real issues in the now (thankfully over) Anthony Weiner scandal): namely, Democratic cowardice, Republican hypocrisy, and media feeding frenzies that only feed ‘the beast.’ Video after the jump.
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I can’t improve on Rachel’s take on the Weiner madness, and she and Cenk were dead on regarding the cowardice of Democrats, who have once again taught Republicans how to destroy them, one man at a time: by tweaking their fears of losing control of a media narrative they never control anyway. Except to add this:
Recall that this all began with one photo — just one — that Anthony Weiner tweeted to a young woman. The photo wasn’t of him naked, and it didn’t include any dirty lingo. The half naked photos, and the blue talk, all were sold to willing news outlets — namely ABC News — and to a bottom feeder named Andrew Breitbart, by “entrepreneurial” women, who once the initial scandal broke, realized they had a goldmine in their private interactions with the then congressman. These women engaged in the lowest form of commerce: hawking the contents of their private, mutual interactions, however sordid, to a media that was more than willing to buy, or to hand out 15 minutes of fame to anyone who could prove she had interacted with Weiner. In doing so, they took a controversy over a single, mistaken tweet, and turned it into a full blown dirty photo scandal, with all of the dirty photos emanating not from Weiner, but from women who made a buck — in one case, five figures — by literally selling him out. This defense of checkbook journalism by Chris Cuomo should give you chills, if you care about what the press is supposed to be:
“The commercial exigencies of the business reach into every aspect of reporting now … It is my decision. I’m the anchor of ’20/20.’ I could have said, ‘Don’t do it.’ I don’t because it is the state of play right now. I wish it were not. I wish money was not in the game. But you know, it’s going to go somewhere else. You know someone else is going to pay for the same things. The question becomes what you’re paying for. You’re paying for these photos, why? Because they are the key to the exchanges. And this became about photos. This became about things that had to be real. So I needed them. And that is the state of play, Howie, I wish it were not. You do too. But it is the state of play. And to say otherwise I think is false.”
Yeesh.
And the Democrats succumbed to the subsequent media frenzy, by playing right into the hands of Republicans, whose hypocrisy could have been melded to the media’s ridiculousness with one, simple phrase from Democrats: “we’ll call on Anthony Weiner to resign as soon as our Republican colleagues call on Anthony Vitter to leave the Senate.”
Now, talk about Vitter will be ignored by the Beltway press, because it’s no more “relevant” to the non-story than Clarence Thomas.
Related: Cenk’s “seven steps to media domination” here.
And John Judis weighs in, with a timely “shame on you” to cowardly Dems.
