Entries Tagged 'hypocrisy' ↓

Christopher Hitchens offers a pretty persuasive explanation of alpha-male Eliot Spitzer’s “puzzling” behavior:

[H]e was a bright dude.

So what in the wide world was Eliot Spitzer thinking?

“Oh, that’s easy,” Christopher Hitchens said from his Washington apartment last week, as word of Spitzer’s morning resignation buzz-sawed through the Beltway.

Hitchens—a former contributor to the Voice—has written the obituaries of more than a few political careers, and he has a theory about the ones with poor coital judgment: They just don’t see illicit sex as an obvious threat to their political survival. In fact, they see it as a primary reason to seek higher office in the first place.

“You wouldn’t be doing any of this if one of the objectives was not to increase the amount of pussy that was available to you. That is what you do,” Hitch says. “You don’t do it to be, ah, the most approval-rated governor of New York, for fuck’s sake.”

Hitchens is a little harsh, but we all know that power goes to your head.
We do know that, don’t we?
Spitzer’s behavior isn’t really “puzzling,” is it?

Hitches, no stranger to powerful men, claims that this is what alpha males say with their alpha-male behavior:

‘I do this to get laid.’

Could be!

Via Ann Althouse, who, having more visitors than I and being more careful of her visitors’ possible sensitivities, provided only the link. Her commenters have some interesting insights, however:

My wife was a lovely young woman with an amazing head of light golden blond hair and an advanced degree in international law from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She’s been saying what Hitch just wrote here since I met her.

A stint in the service of Your Federal Government, including contact with plenty of elected officials, convinced her that politicians and alpha male types in government generally, have a “high sex drive,” as she puts it charitably. Sometimes she isn’t so charitable. In any event, she didn’t lack attention from the high and mighty, although it didn’t seem to have much to do with the quality of her latest legal analysis of issues surrounding hydro power export from Québec.

An old friend from Fletcher is even more bitter about the international diplomats at the U.N. for whom she worked.

One commenter clues me in to news I haven’t been following for 24 hours—and look what happens!

George said…
[Brand-new New York Governor David] Paterson needs to go, too. Multiple affairs, procuring a job for at least one mistress, tape recordings, possible use of state funds…

9:23 AM

Yikes! The Dems’ heads are going to explode after all of this exposure of their peccadilloes.

You think Eliot Spitzer’s in trouble? Check this:

Tehran’s police chief, Reza Zarei, has been arrested after he was found nude in a local brothel with six naked prostitutes, according to report on the Iranian Farda News.

Mr. Zarei has something else in common with Mr. Spitzer:

Before he was arrested, Zarei was in charge of the programme for the ‘moralisation of the city’.

It is alleged that in the past six months, hundreds of young people have been arrested in Iran for not respecting the Islamic code of behaviour.

Fallibility*** knows no religion. It’s what we human beings all have in common.

———
*** I’ve got nothing against prostitution, as long as it is consensual between two people: the hooker and client. I do have issues with age, of course: no minors! And I have big issues with anything that involves an unequal power relationship, like pimp and hooker.

Something’s gonna have to be done about Tina Fey, who was profiled in the NYT about her surprising hit show 30 Rock. She admitted that America’s Mayor is her weakness:

In writing for Liz, Ms. Fey said, she drew somewhat on her own experiences in television. In one episode Liz is called a vulgar name by a subordinate, an incident that Ms. Fey said was based on something that happened to her.

In another episode, in which Liz reflects on things about herself that others wouldn’t know, she says, “There is an 80 percent chance” that she will “tell all my friends I’m voting for Barack Obama, but I will secretly vote for John McCain.”

Ms. Fey, who wrote that line, said it was semi-autobiographical, a way of “admitting I have a lot of liberal feelings, but I also live in New York, and I want to feel safe, and I secretly kind of want Giuliani.”

As I was saying just recently …

The Democrats in general, and MoveOn specifically, seem not to realize that in order to deliver politically correct votes, you need to do a lot more than kneecap people into spouting politically correct attitudes in the public square. You can lead a horse to water, etc.

My point about Rudy Giuliani was that he knows a lot about the kind of public political correctness that elects a “fascist” to a second term in a huge victory in decidedly not-”fascist” New York City.

Anybody paying attention?
Nah, I didn’t think so.

A nobody by the name of Neely Tucker, writing for one of our country’s leading newspapers, the Washington Post, disgraces him/herself (sorry: I don’t know the sex of this “journalist” named Neely) and the reputation of his/her newspaper—not to mention his/her profession—by doing a grotesque hit job on Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

So now, ladies and gentlemen, live from Somalia and the Netherlands! Give it up for new-to-Washington Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Muslim heretic, self-proclaimed “Infidel,” whose memoir by that name is at No. 7 on the New York Times bestseller list!

It’s a popping good story, fascinating, with lots of forward lean to the narrative. She’s got guts, brains, looks, talent. She’s called the prophet Muhammad a pervert. She says, “Islam is a culture that has been outlived.” She has lost her faith, ditched two husbands and been disowned by her family.

I would be erring on the side of tolerance and indulgence if I said that of course it’s understandable that the WaPo’s Neely Tucker doesn’t get Hirsi Ali. Tucker, after all, is just your typical American—born, bred, and marinated in the knowledge that the things Hirsi Ali describes in her memoir could never happen to someone he/she knows. And also used to judging books by their cover and never peeking inside.

But I would be wrong to indulge Neely Tucker, because Neely Tucker is a journalist, whose job requires that s/he look deeper into the subjects he/she examines, in order to explain to his/her readers something that they don’t know. None of that here, of course. To Tucker, Hirsi Ali is just another provocative celebrity author who needs to be taken down a peg or two.

For example: Why not pretend that (instead of being the worldly and well traveled intellectual she is) Hirsi Ali just landed from Mars?

you know, you have to wonder how idealized a concept she has of this country. You wonder what she’ll make of the cultural incoherency: 50 Cent, Rosie O’Donnell, Jerry Falwell, Don DeLillo, the death penalty, the state of Idaho, college football, the gun lobby. She seems as if she’d be perfectly at home at a Georgetown reception as the only black person in the room and perfectly lost at a Harlem dinner party. She wouldn’t rate an invitation to the Dearborn, Mich., Arab American dinner.

So the smearing of Ayaan Hirsi Ali continues apace. And I note once again that this disgraceful, shameful trend is being fueled by noted “progressive” Western elites and intellectuals.

After Michael Richards had made the rounds saying he was sorry for his racist outburst, David Letterman once joked in his monologue: “And apologizing tonight, we have …”

He was definitely onto on to something. Today, Adam Nagourney writes in the New York Times:

The day ended, appropriately enough for the way politics is practiced now, with Mr. Biden explaining himself to Jon Stewart on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

Not exactly the consciousness-raising truth-and-reconciliation process that TAPPED’s Garance Franke-Ruta had in mind, eh?

Get out your handkerchiefs:

“I have been called a liar,” Carter said … “I have been called an anti-Semite,” he said. “I have been called a bigot. I have been called a plagiarist. I have been called a coward. Those kind of accusations, they concern me, but they don’t detract from the fact the book is accurate and is needed.”

Un-huh. Just look how much it has done for the Palestinians.