And a lot of people must do this or we would not have a word—- sexting—-for it. And politicians are people— the dialogue was like bad porn talk and the pictures, well, they could have been worse. I have not gained any respect for AW, don’t get me wrong, but again I did not start with any. But isn’t there something oddly prurient about how obsessed we get with other people’s sex lives. And not just on the right. And would it be news if he wrote it to his wife or he was not married (so no one could play around with his abuse of the sanctity of marriage—- and use that against him). And why do we give it more than a side note? It does not help his family. If this is his political death, we don’t have to hungrily expose all of the details of the corpse.

Are we all getting in touch with our inner Kenneth Star? Let’s detail someone else’s sex life it takes 500 pages or 5 days of TV and in this case, it has the odd honor of not being sex so much as foreplay without any touch. Naughty talk. Let me jumpcut and see if this makes any sense: right after the Monica scandal broke with Clinton, everyone on the left had had it with him, they were disgusted; they wrestled to figure out why he did it, etc. They wanted a rational and public answer to an irrational and intimate urge and action. Guess what, no one ever got that satisfaction and no one will get it with Weiner. You just take it at face value, for about 5 minutes and move on.

And then, yes, discuss the real issues. We have enough problems with the crazies on the right running for office and an economy that seems to be in a permanent slumber. We need to rethink our relationship to an entire swath of the world— I do think this is getting done and I think AW is a temporary sideshow but I am interested in why we get so damned into these sideshows. Maybe if we gave it a big “so what” shrug of the shoulders and moved past it without getting tripped up in it we would look more like the adults we are. I mean, really, a politician caught with his pants down—- next.

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And from a not so different angle, I have had it with knowing everyone’s business. When the Arnold scandal broke, my first thought— and I am not trying to sound holy; like I said, I got a huge laugh out of a lot of the AW stuff before I thought about how much it dominated political discourse—- none of my business. I do not want to be invited into anyone else’s bedroom. Not my business. There must be a way to let people fall from grace and then just give them some privacy.