A Stance on Weiners

So it turns out it was Weiner’s own self after all. Whoopedy doo. Do I think he should resign? Yes. But not for the reason most folks seem to.

I do not care with whom my elected officials choose to fornicate. I just don’t. I don’t even care if they want to lie about it. Ain’t my business. Ain’t yours either. Neither action has any realistic affect on their ability to do their jobs, no matter how hard some folks like to try to twist it.

I do not care if the president screwed an intern or not. I don’t care if they hit on congressional page boys (provided they were of legal age and, of course, in the case I’m thinking of, they weren’t). I don’t care if you want to pick up gay dudes for some glory hole action in some airport bathroom. It’s their business. Not mine.

The sex doesn’t bother me one iota. It’s the unbelievable stupidity that seems to go with it that causes a problem. Weiner shouldn’t have to resign because he wanted to flash his junk around, he should resign because doing so through fucking TWITTER is dangerously stupid. Mark Foley was dumb enough to hit on underage congressional pages, and did so in IM, which is a very easily logged and republished format… and to give an indication of how common that is, Tumblr, my blogging host here, has a specific feature allowing me to do so. And Larry Craig. Old fool gets busted in the airport bathroom for allegedly soliciting sex, gets tickted, pleads guilty, and only when someone notices does he backpedal and try to change that. As opposed to pleading not guilty in the first place and probably getting out of it very easily.

Clinton’s sordid tale got out and when they tried the impeachment crap it got stupid, though at least he had generally covered his tracks about it. Wouldn’t have gotten caught if whatshername hadn’t used the illegal wiretap to grab Lewinsky’s story. So partial credit there, anyway.

I don’t just think this is a political thing. Humanity as a whole is getting dumber. People aren’t eager to try to understand what security and privacy means, from a technology standpoint and otherwise. And yet these specific instances of people fucking it up are then getting to pass the legislation about what level of security and privacy for people is appropriate. Really, it’s no wonder I’ve been taking an interest in crypto-anarchy.

But to my elected officials: sup. If you want to run off to a gay S&M club in Haiti where you can pick up a load of locally-legal (I have no idea what the Haitian age of consent is) boys and rail the hell out of them while sacrificing the odd goat and burning the Koran, go for it. If you then post pictures on your campaign Facebook page? Then we have a problem.