Sex, politics and media

Latest that I'm hearing on MSNBC in my ear at this moment (literally so, as we now have marriage-saving TV headphones for my late-night viewing) is that the FBI agent who initiated the Broadwell-Petraeus investigation was motivated by strong political antagonism toward Obama. Not to mention by his own case of the hots -- he himself is being investigated for sexting bare-chested pix of himself to Jill Kelley, the recipient of the harassing e-mails from Broadwell that got this sleaze snowball rolling earlier this year.  Schmuck. 

Unfortunately, now a commercial break from the breaking news is telling me how Cialis could give one the power to do something manly about that tingle he gets when she does those quirky things that aroused him in the old days -- like when she hops on one foot trying to put her shoe on the other one.  Sorry, not sexy at all.

Earlier versions of these ads did at least have some connection with sexual reality.  Like my favorite of all: the wife, her tight li'l tuchus wrapped snugly in jeans, is perched halfway up a stepladder hoisting a paint roller, leaving that bootay precisely at the hubbie's eye level.  It was a hoot when the VO says, "You never know when the moment will arise".

Maybe not, but Nate Silver might compute that that eyeful had a pretty high probability of triggering such a moment.  That ad was cute, touched with winking humor; it made me happy that those who need biochemical boosters now have them.  The hippity-hop lady, not so much.  Oh, well.

Switch over to Jon Stewart.  He's showing clips of Fox News Channel and others in the "conservative entertainment complex" (the term invoked by David Frum in his brave if not altogether astute* Morning Joe diatribe) spinning the Petraeus affair into one conspiracy theory after another ("Something smells!").  Stewart exposes each in turn as ludicrous, patently false or just very stupid. 

Like the one about the White House holding onto this until after the election to protect the Democrats from scandal revelations ... 

Oopsie, how about the fact that rabid GOP Tea-Party Congressman Eric Cantor had the information in October?!  What up wit dat?  Cantor a Dem mole? 

Thanks to the impervious 'bama-hatin' stalwarts at FNC and right-wing talk radio, Stewart is surviving quite well the untragic loss of super-rich comedy targets like Romney and Trump (the latter being so broadly reviled that there's almost no puff left in his balloon to deflate). 

Stewart says that in the end that the Petraeus affair was, um, an affair.

Fortunately for all involved, the general's lady only wielded pointed, sharply worded e-mails, not a butcher knife!  

 

 

*  I admire David Frum's heartfelt indictment of what he called the "fleecing" of right-wing zealots by the likes of Fox, Clear Channel, Coulter, Gingrich, Palin, Limbaugh and the rest.  He resents his party's being overrun by delusional haters and exploitive media owners and their running dog talking heads.  He knew he would be attacked from the right, but he let it rip.  (Scarborough was contemptible in jumping aboard Frum's rant train, by the way -- Joe was denouncing Nate Silver as biased the week before he was denouncing the right-wing alternate reality.  Hack.) 

 

However, for all of his truly righteous contempt for the exploiters of hatred and extremism, Frum is still a semi-blind ideological conservative: he said that Romney would have made a great president!  Had the extremists not pushed Romney to nut-fringe positions in the primaries and afterwards, said Frum, he could have run as the pragmatist/problem-solver that he really is. 

 

So Frum is not revolted by the GOParty's being devoted to the welfare of plutocrats and greed-driven corporations that regard workers as liabilities. 

 

Romney would have made a horrific president.  Just as he was a horrific governor of his home state -- the one that just voted against him by 23 points -- and with SCOTUS's future in the balance, his legacy would have been a 20-year fiasco.