Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Not Her Problem

The headline in the New York Times is ominous: “Weiner’s Texts Cast a New Cloud Over Clinton Campaign.”  The article itself sounds even more filled with danger:

It was supposed to be a quiet, late-summer weekend on the exclusive shores of the Hamptons. But on Sunday, Huma Abedin, the closest aide to Hillary Clinton, received devastating news.

After accompanying Mrs. Clinton to fund-raisers, Ms. Abedin learned from her husband, Anthony D. Weiner, that The New York Post was about to report that he had again exchanged lewd messages with a woman on social media: the sort of behavior that destroyed his congressional career and 2013 mayoral campaign.

Only this time, the online indiscretions included an image of Mr. Weiner’s crotch as he lay next to the couple’s 4-year-old son.

Now, Mr. Weiner’s tawdry activities may have claimed his marriage — Ms. Abedin told him that she wanted to separate — and have cast another shadow on the adviser and confidante who has been by Mrs. Clinton’s side for the past two decades. Ms. Abedin was already a major figure this summer in controversies over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information as secretary of state and over ties between the Clinton family foundation and Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.

Mr. Weiner’s extramarital behavior also threatens to remind voters about the troubles in the Clintons’ own marriage over the decades, including Mrs. Clinton’s much-debated decision to remain with then-President Bill Clinton after revelations of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Ms. Abedin’s choice to separate from her husband evokes the debates that erupted over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of the Lewinsky affair, a scandal her campaign wants left in the past.

Would someone please explain to me how Ms. Abedin’s marital break-up is going to derail the Clinton campaign?  So she was married to a skank.  We knew that.  So Hillary Clinton’s husband cheated on her and was impeached.  We knew that, too; it was in all the papers.  Is the fact that Ms. Abedin was close to Ms. Clinton for two decades and received classified briefings relevant to the fact that her soon-to-be-ex behaves like a horny teenager?  “Here’s a shot of my basket, honey; tell me what Vladimir Putin is planning for Ukraine.”

It’s sad when any marriage breaks up, especially when there are children in the mix — although in this case it’s probably a good thing that the four-year-old may no longer be in the picture, so to speak — but unless there’s a real point to making the woman sound like a patsy and incapable of doing her job without her husband around  — and there most assuredly is not — this kind of patronizing pearl-clutching is bullshit.  And it has nothing whatsoever to do with Hillary Clinton or her qualifications to be president.

By the way, if marital fidelity and domestic turmoil are to be metrics for judging the viability of a candidate, the antics of the Trump family and the court records of Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s newly-hired campaign chairman, would disqualify that crowd from getting beyond the spitballing stage of a bad idea for a reality show on basic cable.

2 barks and woofs on “Not Her Problem

  1. Would some of the religious right voters be willing to consider the fact that both Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton stuck it out for religious reasons? I thought so. They prefer the guy with three marriages in his resume, who bragged about cheating on his first wife with the one who would be his second.

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