Carlos Danger for mayor? Well, anybody but Antonio Estupido!

by Ken

When I looked this morning at Aaron Blake and Ruth Tam's "The best Carlos Danger tweets" on washingtonpost.com's "The Fix" blog, I swear there was one genuinely funny one in addition to Ana Navarro's too-true-to-be-funny one. Now I can't find the funny one, though Angrygeek's might qualify if it were reworded a little, maybe to: " 'Carlos Danger'? Somewhere Michael Vick is saying, 'See? Ron Mexico wasn't so dumb after all.' "

Kind of obvious, but maybe closest to my gut reaction, is Blake Hounshell's conjuring of a write-in campaign for our man Danger. I mean, Carlos Danger might at least be a legitimate joke candidate -- in the tradition, say, of Mario "The Hanging Judge" Procaccino, the man who gave us mayoral-primary runoffs in New York, and as the Democratic candidate for mayor in 1965 to elect Republican John Lindsay. Whereas Anthony Weiner as a mayoral candidate . . . well, at this point he's barely even a joke.

Comes the news that Estupido was still at his sexting antics for at least three months after the initial public disgrace that led to his resignation from Congress, now under the nom de texte "Carlos Danger." And are we sure that he wasn't also playing under other, possibly even more idiotic playnames?

No, that's not possible. I don't mean it's impossible that our Antonio may have been text-frolicking under other names. Just that they couldn't possibly be more idiotic than Carlos Danger. I mean, let's say that we decided for some reason to hold a contest for the stupidest and most preposterous fake name our guy could have assumed? We would have to call it off before we started, because stupider and more preposterous than Carlos Danger it just doesn't get.

At this point my mind wanders to questions like: Who, and for what reason, might any registered Democrat in New York City even consider voting for Estupido? Except maybe as a protest vote -- but even that seems a stretch. There are legitimate candidates in the primary field, after all.

Another, even more obvious question: What in heck was going through the yutz's primitive brain?

Actually, for that question I think we have a plausible answer provided by Fred Berlin, director of the Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital, as told to the Post's Lena H. Sun and Meeri Kim ("Anthony Weiner’s sexual behavior may have underlying issues"). His sexual compulsions may be such that he just can't help myself.

Evem as Dr. Berlin -- making clear, of course, that he can't speak to Estupido's particular case -- had begun to set out his case, I began thinking of kinds of compulsions I know 100 percent it's wrong to give in to but often do anyway, it didn't take long to come up with the most obvious one: food. And sure enough:

[Berlin] likened it to someone who is going on a diet to lose weight. That person may be convinced they want to stop overeating when they’re not hungry, he said. But when they get hungry, they may not be able to stop themselves and end up gorging. The person is genuinely sorry afterward, he said, and then the cycle repeats.

And if there's any driving compulsion that for many of us, at least, is even harder to resist than the food one, it's sex.

Berlin and others said that in the past five to six years, they have seen a significant increase in the number of patients with problematic sexual behavior related to the Internet, including inappropriate chatting, accessing inappropriate images and engaging in virtual relationships.

In addition to making it easier for people to say and do things they might not otherwise, the Internet has become a delivery system through which someone can get access to an unlimited number of partners and sexual fantasies, said Michael Radkowsky, a District psychologist who treats couples and individuals with sexual issues. The human brain is wired to look for sex and sexual partners, he said.

It's taken me a lot of years to really understand why virtually all religions invented by mankind, and an almost equally high percentage of systems of social organization, are so phobic about sex in general (as well as in the particulars!). Sure, we all understand that sexual urges are powerful. Now finally I'm grasping just how dangerously powerful: When it comes to crunch time, far too many people, especially of the male persuasion, will give in to a sexual temptation over any other kind. If you're running a religion (I wanted to write "religious scam" but stayed my hand), you just can't have that. Unless, that is, you've structured it to incorporate this behavioral reality, as religious scammers have tried to do from the beginning of scamtime.

This isn't intended as any sort of defense of Estupido. The other day I referred to him as a dick, and I'm comfortable with that. Yutz as well. And let's not kid ourselves. Plenty of men have attained high political office with sexual compulsions far more grandiose than Antonio's. Anyone remember a fellow named JFK? And he wasn't fooling around online.

I don't know how JFK would have handled it if he had found himself having to account publicly for his sexual misbehavior. Alas, we know only too well how Estupido has handled it -- twice now. And it's the root-level stupidity and dishonesty of his responses that for me push him beyond the most generous limits of reasonableness as an ongoing political figure. It's not often that NYC's three daily newspapers agree on anything, and their chains of reasoning are hardly identical, but when you've got the Times, the Daily News, and the Post all urging Carlos the Dangerman to take a hike, I think the curtain has come down, or should have come down, on the burlesque of Estupido's candidacy.


ONE QUESTION I'M NOT ASKING . . .


. . . is how dare his wife, Huma Abedin, stand up there on that platform once again and defend the yutz?

I feel bad for her. I feel worse for their little boy. For the Post's "She The People" blog, journalist-author Sheila Wellersaying that she's "always admired Abedin’s utter professionalism," wrote ("Two cheers for the beleaguered Huma Abedin") about that admiration:

During Hillary Clinton’s 2007 primary campaign against Obama, she was there, as Hillary’s chief aide, like a rock. It takes a lot -- smarts, strategy, humility, perspective, diplomacy, and omnibus emergency competence -- to be the first aide, the "body person," the chief assistant to a powerful, complicated, and large-ego’d eminence. You have to be ready to do everything, and find anything, including answers your boss routinely can’t find, 24/7. Through a family member, I’ve seen that kind of job up close. It takes a lot of character.

But what really nailed it for me with Abedin was when, smack in the middle of her husband’s sex-texting scandal Part I, two years ago, she came home from a long, multi-Mideast-country foreign trip with Secretary of State Clinton, three or four months pregnant. Clinton’s plane arrived at the D.C. airport at around 6 a.m. Jet-lagged, pregnant, scandal-beset, at the end of a gargantuan work trip and a very long plane ride, and with the paparazzi hounding her car, Abedin drove herself to home, right into her parking garage.

This wasn’t martyrdom to me (though I did feel sorry for her and wondered why her boss hadn’t seen fit to send a driver to the airport for her. It was too peripheral a gesture (people were angry at her husband, not her) to have been some damage control ploy. I saw it as steady, business-as-usual demeanor, even in the midst of bizarre crisis. Hats off to her.

With regard to this latest round of humiliation, Weller writes:

I certainly joined the chorus of women (and men) loudly asking, “Why is she staying with him?” during Weinger-gate Part I. Now that chorus is deafening -- and so is the contempt being shown to Abedin. I think the latter is wrong. He, not she, is the guilty party. Judging a woman for staying in a marital situation that to the outside world appears humiliating is a limited — one could even say boring – criterion. Why make the sole test of a woman’s complexity or depth her decision vis-a-vis a man, when we already know that she is a far better person than that man.

Who didn’t think Elizabeth Edwards was better than John? And who didn’t think she knew it, too? If every wife had to leave every husband she was considered ”better” than, almost no one would stay married.

I'm not suggesting that anyone has to buy Abedin's defense of her husband. But to judge her for making it, for doing what she feels she has to do for her family? That seems to me nuts.

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