It’s a right wing country, and the National Security State exists to advance a right wing agenda. This includes the wars and ongoing covert operations in countries that do not toe the neoliberal agenda. Those members of Congress who hold the national security state to strict account would be the ones to bring down. They are troublesome. Further, if they are bright and charismatic, they can be even more troublesome.
Assume, for the sake of this example, that of the 15 men in your keeping, that 13 have succumbed to the host of temptations available in DC – drugs, bribes (real and disguised), prostitutes provided by lobbyists, canoodling staffers and even staffers planted for the sake of blackmail. But of those 13 who are misbehaving, say that 12 are voting correctly, not introducing pain-in-the-ass legislation to undermine the security state, the ongoing wars or tax policy. They are not harassing, investigating, or otherwise attempting to intimidate high officials. The one that is misbehaving does not know that his private activities are under surveillance. Thirteen are available for sandbagging, only one goes down.
His name is Anthony Weiner. He’s a good man, bold and effective, a strong and smart and well-spoken progressive, and a pain in the ass to the executive branch.
I know – this is paranoid fantasy. Elected officials are not under surveillance, and sting operations are never run for purposes of entrapment. Anthony Wiener’s sexting just happened to be exposed, John Edwards just happened to have a concubine and his activities, as opposed to say, Newt Gingrich’s or George W. Bush’s, were exposed. Senator David Vitter is still in office, but then again, he was exposed by Larry Flynt, known to go after public hypocrites for non-political reasons, and so gets to stay in office.
I am speculating. We do have a super-secret agency that is capable to spying on any one of us. The common assumption here in American-exceptionalism-ville is that even given that kind of power, people don’t use it. 
What followed the Daily Show appearance was silence. Only Olbermann seemed interested, and his MSNBC interview was a mere pebble on the window trying to get our attention. The issue died.
Now, imagine that NSA has unsupervised power to keep watch on every journalist, every office holder, and collect information on them. The most common ‘failing’ of people, men especially, is sexual meandering. Men are by nature sexual polygamists, and we stay in line for two reasons: 1) lack of opportunity, and 2) fear of losing something valuable. Even a man who loves his wife and does not want to hurt or lose her will succumb to opportunity, especially if it appears he will not be caught.
Maybe I’m paranoid in saying that a powerful secret agency that has the ability to spy on powerful people and use that information against them actually does so. But I suggest that not to wonder about that is polloyannish.
Piece of Mindful 
My understanding is that the NSA, whether through the Echelon system or whatever they call it now, literally colllects every single electronic communication in the world. I know nothing about technology but im sure there are encrypted things from other countries and sophisticated parties that would still elude them or which they could collect but not understand. In other words Im sure these emails from Weiner are on a database in the NSA somewhere and maybe even they have a file on him and every ‘member’ in Congress that is classified and hidden away somewhere. But Weiner gave himself away by posting it onto a public website.
I do agree the drumbeat for him to resign is not really justified but its the media being sensationalistic as always. Diaper Dave Vitter was not as high profile as Weiner and also probably did a better job of just clamming up and ignoring it until it went away. If Weiner just stops addressing it and feeding the media trolls they will move on to the next scandal at some point.
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They do have the ability to trap just about every communication , but don’t have the ability to monitor, so that all they can do is use sophisticated parsing programs to sort through and look for suspicious transmissions. Encryption has reached a point where it is virtually unbreakable – read Simon Singh’s The Code Book – fascinating how they do that. But not impenetrable – nothing ever is. If you cannot break the message, go to the place where the message was concocted and get it before encryption. If you cannot do surveillance, infiltrate. Where NSA fails, CIA steps in.
What I am talking about is quite different. I am not a target for eavesdropping, as I am nobody. Every member of Congress, every journalist is. Given the sophistication of technology and the relatively few number of targets, it is easy to to capture and digitalize every word. Note that Weiner says that the picture is real, but that he was hacked. I’d say that he was taken down by a sting using his own private messages.
The media does not decide what to cover – that’s an executive decision handed down from on high. It appears as though the message has come down to focus on the Weiner story. That did not happen with Vitter. The incessant drumbeat is not a product of a random media merely looking for a story. It’s not free to behave in that manner. All that medai does is direct our attention, and our attention is being directed at Weiner. He will step down.
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He initially claimed he was hacked but if you look at what happened its pretty obvious he just made a quick mistake and posted the picture to the public feed (or wall) of that woman’s twitter account when he meant to send it as a private message. He made a rather lame attempt to claim someone else put the picture (that ‘may or not’ have been him) on there but if you look at the totality of the circumstances here its pretty obvious it was him. Im pretty sure he admitted it yesterday at his news conference. The only room for an NSA conspiracy here is if they were monitoring him and somehow secretly brought this blunder that Weiner himself made to the attention of losers like Andrew Breitbart. Thats a pretty big stretch. I have no doubt there are dozens if not hundreds of paid party flunkies on both sides who sit around monitoring twitter and facebook and anything else for any hint of impropriety they can cache before it gets deleted and try and use for their advantage. I dont think you need an NSA conspiracy to connect the dots on this one.
As for the aftermath….Weiner went on every talkshow and took it upon himself to deny that he sent the picture but then make vague evasive responses to questions about whether it was his junk. Right then and there you know the media is not going to let it go. Diaper Dave Vitter, if i recall, did not do one real interview or press conference where he actually answered any questions on it.
I dont doubt that there are some high ups in whatever corporate-media-govt entanglements that you want to speculate exist may possibly be guiding a focus on him to try and get him to resign (or more likely because the public watches this stuff and it gets ratings which = $) but Weiner did not do himself any favors either. The media will move on at some point though because the public’s attention span is too short to care even about something as salacious as Weinergate for too long.
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You make a strong case, and I’ll have to back down some. What I am doing is as old as men advertising their junk to women – confirmation bias. I did it again!
One question that occurred to me is whether or not Weiner is worth the trouble. He’s very good on talk shows, confrontational and all of that, very un-Democrat. But is he effective in the Chamber? I don’t know. We are continually denied effective leadership, and left with the Tester’s and Lieberman’s and Obama’s to take the place of what should be hard-hitting fighting progressives. That sucks.
On media, if you think that people at the bottom are free to do as they please, you don’t know how it works. First, there’s a vetting process that goes on where only people who are not threatening get to occupy the airwaves. Chris Mathews is free to say as he pleases because it is understood that he will not say anything that displeases. Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann, Phil Donahue … gone. Their bombs had not been defused.
Part two of that is that the media outfits are owned by right wing corporations, for the longest time, by two defense contractors. If you think that they take ownership and then let it sing what it pleases, you do not understand power. True, mainstream networks are perceived to be “liberal,” but they really represent the edge of popular dissent – as Picard said, this far, no further. And, as we all saw in 2002 (and 1964 and 1999), when it was time to go to war, they all fell in line.
So if you think that news is determined bottom up and is ratings driven, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. The entertainment facet of news is ratings-driven, but news content is heavily managed.
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No I dont think news is determined from the bottom up per se but they still want to make money and the amount they can derive from advertising is determined (I think) mostly from the various ratings system. Fox news of all the networks doesnt even try to hide from anyone with two brain cells to rub together that they are an outright propaganda machine. They also have the best ratings and probably are the most profitable. The sleezy hit stories and the ratings go hand in hand.
It has also been shown that (as you say) they literally send out memos on a daily basis from Roger Ailes office dictating what they will be covering. The other networks and news outlets probably do the same thing just not so blatantly. At the end of the day none of anything that is shown on cable or network news is going to contain anything outside of the box or truly informative. They really do have a nice good cop bad cop trusted cop routine going on with Fox, Msnbc and CNN. If you have directv there is a network called Link that has some pretty good stuff on it, they show Al Jazeera as well as a program with mid east and other various media on it called mosaic. A lot of the time that stuff is just that particualr countries version of their own propaganda but still interesting and much different then what we get.
Im just saying the networks will probably linger on the Weiner stories as long as they feel like it is drawing in viewers. People will get bored with it and a new scandal or disaster will come up soon. For FOX it will obviously stick around much longer for partisan reasons. I have to admit I actually watched some cable news myself last night primarily to see what they were going to say about this..it worked on me.
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It’s not evil.
It’s not harmful.
It’s just a statue.
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Why can’t effective lawmakers also live exemplary personal lives? I agree that sex scandals are often used to punish or blackmail politicians, but are politicians so depraved that, knowing that untoward sexual activity jeopardizes their principles and careers?
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It takes an exceptional man/woman, and they do exist. but for normal people, like me, exposure to all of the temptation of that place is more than we can handle – easy women and drugs and super bowl tickets and junkets. most of us are corruptible, especially when there is no perceived downside. Bad behavior is not punished,good behavior not rewarded.
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