Monday, June 13, 2011

Crotch of Fury

Let me get my Weiner, I mean, get the Weiner stuff out of my literary TVO. My quill is 40% hard hitting commentary, 15% disgust over the cultural vortex we live in, about 25% Family Guy references, and the rest is pretty much that windy sound they play when you see tumbleweed fly by in those old westerns. The fact that people who wear Che T-Shirts and stick a Darwin decal on their Prius annoy me, but at the same time, I can watch back-to-back episodes of Family Guy all evening either makes me a closet quasi-libertarian or it gives me street cred with my liberal readers who come for a laugh then get pissed off at me because they lack the language skills to call me out. Anyway, where was I? Oh the ignoble end of the mighty Weiner.

Just about every major news outlet has sucked the air out of the punchlines with bylines like "Pelosi to Ask House to Probe Weiner" and the New York Post's zinger "Weiner Roast." As we go to print, disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner is in rehab, slowly coming to the "turgid" realization that you can't take pictures of your junior member of congress, send them out to every gal who tweets you, and still expect to keep your job. Yeah, yeah, I know all the claptrap about how your personal life is your own business, but if you're doing it on the company's dime, and "doin' it" means sending nasty Facebook messages and snapshots to 17 year old girls, well, there shouldn't be any ethical discussions about the status of your employment.

Spare me the usual "they all do it." They don't. He torpedoed his new, pregnant bride (who is an up-and-comer at the State Department) with his cavalcade of depravity, and he is now under investigation because of the age of some of these girls. Now this is becoming a possible criminal matter, not to mention the terse letter he's going to get from his HR department - and that's the least of his worries. His wife's boss is Hillary Clinton. She can turn people to glass just by staring at them.

It's become the "riguour" to say that your weekly pants-off dance-off with your harem of barely legal mistresses should have zero impact on your job. Maybe I'm wet behind the ears, maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but maybe it's time we start expecting a little more from the men and woman who pick our pockets to make our country move, or in the case of this administration, come to a grinding halt. Everyone screws up, and I don't expect politicians to be paragons of virtue, but if you want to be a serial creep with teenage girls you lose the privilege of representing my interests in the hallowed halls of Congress.

We could debate nuance and at what point does behaviour A or B cross the line. You could make some sophomoric debating point about Jefferson and think you've ended the argument - but at the end of the day, Anthony Weiner didn't just cross the line, he moved it 5 miles south and ran it over with a tractor.

Sorry Tony. There's no way to wiggle or spin your way out of this one. Sit tight, though; CNN will probably give you Spitzer's time slot when his ratings start to tank.

Cordially

Joe

From the Archives - The Best of TSH by Request - Drag Me To Hell

The poster advertisement at the bus terminal shows a picture of a guy who looks as though he accidentally walked in on his roommate's hot girlfriend taking a shower, and has sprawled out on a plush comfortable couch, hands laced behind his head, just reliving the moment. The caption reads "Get Ready For Comfort". Poster guy has a laptop, an I-Pod, a stack of books, and what appears to be a rather large man-purse ready at his side. Must be nice.


Presently, I'm not feeling so much like poster dude. I feel like I'm sitting on Robert Byrd's skeleton, and there's about 6 inches of space seperating my neck from the broken cup holder precariously holding my scorching cup of coffee, which I am fairly certain will soon be gracing my twig and berries with 2nd degree burns.

"Get Ready For Comfort". I think "Get Ready For The Chiropractor" would be a slightly more honest assessment of what to expect after buying a ticket to ride the iron maiden on wheels.

I find myself in the present situation because I forgot an appointment 3 hours out of town that I had scheduled for today. Necessity and expedience has made quicker and more convenient forms of transportation inaccessible at present. These types of things happen to me quite frequently. Though the lovely Miss Claire continues to buy me beautiful leather bound day planners from Barnes and Noble every year, I persist in keeping track of all important engagements on miscellaneous scraps of paper that I randomly stuff in my wallet. You would think that a guy on is his way up the conservative-libertoid blogosphere ladder would have his s%$t together. You would be wrong.

We just passed a car with a New York license plate adorned with "Obama/Biden '08" and "War is not the Answer" bumper stickers. I quickly wrote "Obama is a wiener" on a scrap of paper to flash at them as we drove by, but thought better of it in honor of my credo that good manners are the glue that hold society together. The lady two rows in front of me appears to hold manners and decorum in much lower esteem than I do, as she seems quite fine with the fact that her 12 year old is wearing a crisp white t-shirt with the word F#$CK emblazoned in large black letters on the front. What's odd is that he appears to otherwise be a well mannered and immaculately groomed young man. He even held the door open for me to the coffee shop during our last stop. Not a trace of angst to be found for a kid making such a bold statement with his t-shirt. Maybe he's playing, as James Bowman might say, "a little pomo joke on us all".

I'll spare you the details of what I will only refer to as "the incident" that just happened in the tin box that is posing as a bathroom at the back of the bus. Push the bubble on a Trouble game board and watch the dice jump violently about inside the confined area. That would sum up the PG part of what just happened to me in the charming little rolling wash closet.

I just had to change buses. I wasn't aware that this particular form of travel had stop overs. My hopes were briefly buoyed when I noticed this appeared to be a shiny new vehicle; Maybe it would be filled with those big comfy seats with all kinds of room for laptops and I-Pods and leg stretching. Nope. It is indeed brand new, but the only modification appears to be an illustration on the near eye level cup holder warning that if the person if front of you suddenly decides to rapidly recline his seat, the coffee in your cup holder may cause a painful crotch incident.

In perspective, there are far worse things in this world than having to take a brief but uncomfortable bus ride - like making the mistake of reading a Maureen Dowd column with the false hope that the mean little shrew will put down her bile-filled pen and start being witty again...or listening to Vice President Biden trying to explain complex government policy by using arbitrary percentages to determine how successful they might be...or maybe even choosing to read an up and coming conservative blogger only to suffer through a long, rambling diatribe about his transportation prejudices.

Seriously though, I can't feel my ass anymore.

Cordially

Joe