The media have just reported that Anthony Weiner has been fined $10,000 and sentenced to 21 months in prison. (He could have got up to 10 years.) Here is one such report, from today’s New York Times.
What a farce!
I mean, sure, Anthony Weiner behaved like an A-1 schmuck. But let’s be real. The guy never even met, let alone touched, the woman he will now have to spend 21 months in jail for allegedly “violating.” That violation being – no kidding — “consensual texting.”
Not to excuse Weiner’s behavior, but for Pete’s sake, what kind of a society are we? All the guy did was text! He admittedly exchanged suggestive sexual banter with an underage, but clearly sexually sophisticated, 16-year-old girl – a girl who, by her own admission, was the initiator of the contact with Weiner, then egged him on, and is now shopping 6-figure magazine exposés and a book proposal.
Stupid bad behavior on Weiner’s part? For sure. But the self-righteous hypocrites in the media (and our courts) who consider 21 months behind bars to be fair punishment for what he did, are beneath contempt. Especially when those same arbiters of virtue, in the courts and in mainstream media, don’t treat the real criminals in our society the same way.
I mean, think of all the convicted rapists – not merely texters, like Weiner, but real abusers – whom the courts often let off with no more than a slap on the wrist in the form of a few months “Community Service” or “Probation.”
And think of all the $20-million-a-year Big Pharma executives who cynically murder hundreds of thousands of people a year by marketing dangerous drugs like VIOXX, which they know are deadly but continue to market anyway, because the fines that their companies will eventually have to pay amount to only a fraction of the profits they will earn from keeping those drugs on the market.
And the bank executives and financiers at firms like Goldman Sachs, who ruined millions of lives by routinely cheating customers, abetting drug dealers, skimming off billions in scams like LIBOR and finally destroying the entire economy in 2008.
And war criminals like Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Bush-1, Bush-2, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, et al, who are responsible for murdering at least 23 million innocent (and darker colored) men, women and children by launching deceitful wars for power and profit in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Anthony Weiner is neither violent nor dangerous. He transmitted, in his texts, nothing that any 16-year old high school girl doesn’t hear in the school yard and on cable TV every day of the year. At the most, Weiner should be deprived of his Smartphone – or perhaps have its texting function turned off – instead of being sentenced to 21 months in prison. Until we start putting some of the real criminals in prison, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for jailing harmless if pathetic creatures like Anthony Weiner.