Maureen Dowd gets in on the Abedin shamming

I really need this to end, like yesterday. On the positive, I have Internet in my new place, set up by myself because I’m a boss, but that means I got to read this on Sunday, “Time to Hard-Delete Carlos Danger,” by Maureen Dowd. Now, remember it is a cold and strange day in hell when I agree with this woman, though it has happened at least once.

This is how Dowd begins her column, “When you puzzle over why the elegant Huma Abedin is propping up the eel-like Anthony Weiner, you must remember one thing: Huma was raised in Saudi Arabia, where women are treated worse by men than anywhere else on the planet.”

Oh, you want to go there? What about in prison? As I’ve mentioned before I’m not one for the Oppression Olympics, but let me say, deciding one culture is by nature less is pretty fucking condescending. Again, not my, Dowd’s, or the West at large’s place to decide that women in Saudi Arabia are oppressed. This sounds like straight up racism and Islamaphobia.

Dowd then gives her opinion of the scandal, Weiner’s short-comings, and even takes shots are the woman who received the photos, because Dowd is classy like that. I want to put out Dowd draws comparisons between this woman and porn stars (nothing wrong with sex work, but this woman isn’t a sex worker). This comparison is just a cheap shot to “slut shame” another woman for what I would consider a bad decision.

Dowd then continues to discuss the Clintons and how they changed the way we look at sex scandals. She claims Weiner and Abedin are using the Clinton’s playbook because voters are more concerned with their own lives than politicians, “Americans keep moving the marker of acceptable behavior, partly as a reflection of the coarsening of society and partly as a public acknowledgement that many pol[itician]s with complicated personal lives have been good public servants.”

Dowd then asserts, and she isn’t wrong here, there isn’t much that be used to redeem Weiner in his political service life. Additionally, while the Clintons have a close relationship with Abedin, they are appearing to distance themselves from this mess and H-Rod gears up for a 2016 Presidential run, at least according to Dowd. Dowd then devolves into how Weiner and Abedin got together, and how everyone is worried about Abedin because she may have “learned the wrong lesson from Hilary, given that Bill was a roguish genius while Weiner’s a creepy loser.”

Does this sound like a tabloid article to anyone else? Then Dowd will interview a doctor, who has never met let alone treated anyone involved in this. This kind of trite dribble just annoys me. Can we all agree if we’re not going to have the conversation about consent then we should just stop talking about this?