DIRTY POLITICS - On one coast, we have a prick of a mayor and on the other coast we have a would-be mayor obsessed by his prick.
It’s hard to say who’s the creepiest perv: San Diego Mayor Bob Filner or New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner. What we do know is this: neither jackass should be the top elected official of a major American city.
Filner, 70, has alienated just about everyone in his base with his handsy, mouthy harassment of engaged, dedicated women who worked like crazy to get an improbable Democrat elected in conservative San Diego.
Now he’s going into “intensive therapy” to fix a problem that obviously predated his mayoralty. What he ought to do is work a deal that if he resigns, nobody will sue him so he can just crawl back under whatever rock from which beneath he slimed.
Weiner, 48, has been exposed as an Internet streaker of the first order, having texted not just explicitly sexual messages to various women but a picture of his naked junk – after resigning from Congress and pledging that he’d never act the digital weirdo again.
John Oliver, sitting in for Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, summed up Weiner’s problem better than anyone in his epic takedown: ”Anthony Weiner does suffer from a debilitating addiction . . . He’s addicted to running for office. And if he could just give that up he could live a full, productive life as an internet sex freak.”
Narcissistic aphrodisiacs: They are hardly the first politicians to engage in kinky, illicit, sexualized behavior, of course. The list is long and thoroughly bipartisan, including the likes of John F. Kennedy, Gary Hart, Bill Clinton and John Edwards, and Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, Larry Craig and Arnold Schwarzenegger, to name just a few.
What is common among these Type P personalities (a label invented by our friend Garry South) is that they believe they are invisible and invincible. Perhaps it’s unfair to quote the old adage that politics is show business for ugly people because some of the afflicted are not ugly people (although Filner and Weiner certainly qualify).
But there’s no question that some people who might otherwise go unnoticed are attracted to politics because it is glamorous, offering an aphrodisiac and lots of potential victims. They think the rules don’t apply to them; they engage in a pursuit that is rife with opportunities for quick, easy, insincere relationships, and many have strained marriages already stressed by the demands of constant campaigning.
Moreover, power corrupts. Only men and women of great integrity can resist the constant opportunity to cheat, accept favors, take advantage and otherwise profit from public office. Men of questionable character – like Filner and Weiner – are the first to succumb to the temptations presented by power. Instead, they get drunk on the magic elixir. And they do stupid, untoward and disgusting things.
And they think they can get away with it. They’re never really sorry. They’re just sorry they got caught.
“I don’t mean to sound like a prude, but what the hell do you have to do to be disqualified from high-level politics in this country?” asked the far-from-squeamish Matt Taibi in Rolling Stone, the other day.
Your Calbuzzers are no prudes, but we have to ask: Gentlemen, have you no sense of decency?
Gas Man Seeks Recompense-Meanwhile up in Davis, we’ve got ex-UC cop John Pike. Not since the kid who axe murdered his parents and then pleaded for mercy because he was an orphan have we seen such indecent chutzpah as that displayed by Officer Pike.
Pike, as every fellow-traveling lefty knows so well, is the dimwitted bozo who infamously and heedlessly pepper sprayed students during an Occupy protest at UC Davis a few years back, inadvertently becoming an internets virus viral sensation and, in the process, costing the university $1 million to fend off a pack of lawsuits while getting his boss fired as campus chief cop.
Now comes Pike, applying for workers’ comp benefits because he suffered psychiatric injury from the incident, no doubt because his secret fantasies of busting heads as a Chinese street thug cop leading the charge against peacefully protesting Tibetan Buddhist monks no longer provide him relief.
Oy.
(Jerry Roberts is a California journalist who writes, blogs and hosts a TV talk show about politics, policy and media. Former political editor, editorial page editor and managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. Phil Trounstine is a communications consultant, pollster and political writer. He is the former political editor of the San Jose Mercury News, former communications director for California Gov. Gray Davis and was the founder and director of the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University. This column was posted first at Calbuzz.com)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 62
Pub: Aug 2, 2013