More “Character”
By Greenwald is definitive:
Yes, Anthony Weiner lied — about something that is absolutely nobody’s business but his and his wife’s. If you’re not his wife, you have absolutely no legitimate reason to want to know about — let alone pass judgment on — what he does in his private sexual life with other consenting adults. Particularly repellent is the pretense of speaking out on behalf of his wife, as though anyone knows what her perspectives on such matters are or what their relationship entails. The only reason to want to wallow in the details of Anthony Weiner’s sex life is because of the voyeuristic titillation it provides: a deeply repressed culture celebrates when it finds cause to be able to talk about penises and naked pictures and oral sex while hiding behind some noble pretext. On some level, I find the behavior of the obviously loathsome Andrew Breitbart preferable; at least he’s honest about his motive: he hates Democrats and liberals and wants sadistically to destroy them however he can. It’s the empty, barren, purse-lipped busybodies who cannot stay out of other adults’ private and sexual lives — while pretending to be elevated — that are the truly odious villains here.
He also points us to McArdle, who in the latest example of the death of conservertarianism believes that it’s the job of the mass media to act as the marriage police. It’s also one of the best examples of paternalism-under-the-cloak-of-feminism since Muller v. Oregon, and as for her apparent assumption that the prurience-is-its-own-justification standard will only be applied to powerful men, ask Christine O’Donnell.