Weiner-Gate: Color Me Disgusted

This whole Weiner-Gate thing is gross, immature and disgusting. A 46-year-old CONGRESSMAN who is considered a firebrand liberal member of his party – therefore he garners lots of media attention for his partisan antics – should know better then to take and send lewd photos of himself to people he’s never met on the internet. (New X-rated photos are now making the rounds.) New York U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner certainly shouldn’t be engaging in that kind of thing now that he’s a married man. He only got married last July for God’s sake, it’s not like there’s been time for the romance to fade from the marriage.

But now we learn, courtesy of the New York Times, that his 35-year-old wife is pregnant. If this was a TV drama, we'd be calling BS right about now.

While Weiner claims he never “physically” cheated on his wife, he has cheated on her emotionally and has thoroughly humiliated her while she is carrying his child. To me, the fact that his wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, is pregnant makes this whole stew of ugly even uglier. Seriously. You’d think that a man who goes on television for a living as a politician who's pushing an agenda, who’s still a newlywed, who is expecting his first child with his new bride would know better than this.



What a cad, a cad who won’t resign his office like other well known politician cads (*cough* Bill Clinton, John Edwards *cough*) who had no shame and who humiliated their spouses and families.


Speaking of a cad who actually DID resign . . . former New York Governor Eliot “Client Number 9” Spitzer had the temerity to express sympathy for what Weiner’s going through, saying it’s a “torment like virtually no other.” Dude, try being married to the source of that torment, the one who brought the torment raining down upon the house. For the perp who created the situation, who created the reason for said "torment," no sympathy. Zip.

Which brings me to this pet peeve of mine as a journalist: Eliot Spitzer has no business anchoring a news program on CNN. But since CNN apparently has no problem with putting this guy on the air, perhaps Weiner could resign his office and join Spitzer as a co-host . . .

Notes on Pop Culture: 'The Good Wife,' Sad About Miley, Fey & Motherhood, 'Mars Needs Moms' (But Hates Dads)

Image credit: CBS

 The Good Wife: Sleazy Male Pol Skates While Female Pol Gets Put Through the Wringer

During my blogging break, several pop culture subjects were still rattling around in my now under-caffeinated brain (it’s a long story) . . . including a storyline on one of my favorite shows, The Good Wife which has been, to my dismay, treating Peter Florrick like Eliot Spitzer.

My pop culture column criticized the show for its harsh treatment of a fictional female candidate while allowing the disgraced politicians to flourish:

"What I find particularly interesting is that the female candidate, [Wendy] Scott-Carr has been absolutely pummeled in this race throughout the season, while the other [male] candidates haven’t, at least not to the degree that she’s been attacked.


. . . For a show that holds up Alicia Florrick as its haloed hero -- as the betrayed wife and mother who’s risen from the humiliating ashes of her husband’s incarceration and scorchingly public marital infidelities after she’d paused her own career for her family, having Alicia play the loyal, responsible moral compass -- it’s been dispiriting to watch this fictional political campaign where Peter Florrick, a man who did his best Eliot Spitzer impersonation, seems to be neck-and-neck with someone whose biggest flaw was having hired a nanny whom she didn’t know was in the country illegally.


It’s as dispiriting as watching the real Eliot Spitzer -- who resigned his governor’s post in disgrace nearly three years ago after his own call girl scandal came to light – be rewarded with a CNN primetime talk show, Parker Spitzer, and then seeing CNN fire Kathleen Parker, his female, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist co-host, in what some called a move that smacked of sexism.”


Image credit: Marie Claire

 Sad About Miley

My daughter’s reaction to Miley Cyrus’ photos in the March issue of Marie Claire -- juxtaposed with Miley’s father Billy Ray’s interview in GQ (he said he feared for his daughter and that the Hannah Montana show destroyed his family) -- prompted this column on how sad I felt for my daughter, for Miley and her dad.

“[I feel badly] For the father who somehow lost the ear of his multi-millionaire daughter and who has to helplessly watch while she makes decisions which he thinks will harm her; for the teen star – who’s still a minor who can’t legally drink in those bars she’s been photographed in – and comes across as a kid who’s surrounded by a bunch of people giving her advice on how to sex-up her image at age 17 and who doesn’t have the wisdom or the courage to say, 'No;' and for my daughter, who looks at all of this and wonders what it means for when she’s 17 or 18 and whether the world will expect her to be like Miley."

When Miley hosted Saturday Night Live soon after she appeared on the Marie Claire cover, her opening monologue included a snarky song about how what she’s done (the infamous bong video, the pole dancing included) and suggested that what she’s been up to hasn’t been as bad as, say, the antics of Charlie Sheen or Lindsay Lohan so back the “bleep” off, like, okay?! I’m not, like, perfect, ya know!

Former High-Priced Escort Turns Relationship Columnist

We've all read the grim news, day after day as more professionally trained journalists and columnists are losing their jobs in the mainstream media, particularly in the newspaper business as newspapers close or go online only, shedding jobs along the way.

So when I saw that former high-priced escort Ashley Dupre -- whose dalliances with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer made her famous (and cost him his office) -- had landed a gig as a columnist for the New York Post to write about relationships it made me so very sad for my journalist colleagues.

If newspapers are going to go this route, maybe they should consider giving Bernie Madoff a column where he can answer readers' questions about investments/finances from his jail cell? Maybe Tiger Woods could be the male counterpoint to Dupre, writing a relationship column for the Post? Jon Gosselin could write a parenting column.

Poor Silda Spitzer.

Image credit: Victoria Will/New York Post.

Is 'The Good Wife' Turning Into Just Another Legal Procedural?

I like Julianna Margulies. And I’m fond of the premise of The Good Wife: A woman -- a wife and mother -- is trying to pick of the pieces of her shattered life after her corrupt politician/husband humiliated her by having affairs with hookers and is now in jail because he was found guilty of abusing his office.

The first few episodes of The Good Wife deftly balanced Margulies’ Alicia Florrick’s attempts to attend to the needs of her children and shield them from the tawdry nature of the allegations against her husband Peter (Chris Noth), with her own personal resurrection as she returned to the professional world as a lawyer after having been out of practice for more than a decade. Alicia was ostracized from her so-called friends and her social circle as a result of the scandal and continues to struggle with her mother-in-law, who moved in with Alicia and her two teenaged children in their new apartment, away from their leafy suburb. The mother-in-law, who frequently defends her son, took it upon herself to bring the two Florrick kids to visit their father in jail for the first time against Alicia’s wishes.

All of that was good material, I thought, as the first few episodes aired and garnered top 20 ratings.

But as more installments have aired, there’s been less and less about Alicia and her family members’ lives, about the impact of Peter’s imprisonment and more emphasis on the legal cases, for which Alicia usually comes up with the miraculous key to winning the case. Don’t get me wrong, her husband Peter’s imprisonment/sex scandal is mentioned in each episode, but it’s becoming a means to an end because Peter was a prosecutor and can assist his defense lawyer wife by providing valuable information.

This is exactly what I didn’t want to see. I was hoping this show would heavily focus on a dramatization of how political wives try to carry on – for themselves, for their children -- after their husbands behave atrociously and were publically chastised for doing so, like so many real life pols (*cough* Edwards, Spitzer, Sanford *cough*). I wasn’t looking for an updated version of The Practice, with a light sprinkling of the life-as-the-betrayed-wife-of-a-lying-cheating-pol tossed in like spice, as added seasoning.

While the latest Good Wife episode “Conjugal” featured, as you might expect from its title, a conjugal visit between Peter and Alicia, the contact between them was verbal and chiefly about a murder case. Alicia wanted information from Peter to be shared privately, away from the guards’ surveillance, and the only way to obtain privacy was via a conjugal visit. Peter did attempt to hold his wife’s hand while she slept on the bed and he on the floor, but she quickly released it.

Maybe things will change and become more focused on the personal once Peter is released from prison and tries to stage a political comeback – and I’m hopeful they will – but I’m disappointed that The Good Wife appears as though it’s in danger of turning into a garden variety legal procedural.

Image credit: CBS.