Weiner, Weiner, & more Weiner

Annals of Hackery

One of these men is not like the other.

Weiner: Newscom; paul ryan: AP / Carolyn Kaster

It used to be said that the most dangerous place in Washington was located between the Rev. Jesse Jackson and a television camera. Nowadays, Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat, is the standard punchline on that one—which works well as a joke since it is not too far removed from reality. 

But The Scrapbook disagrees with the premise. For us, the most dangerous place in Washington is not between a preening politician and a camera—in a city where there are plenty of both—but somewhere in the no-man’s-land between a self-important columnist and the search for higher meaning. Whether it’s Thomas L. Friedman (of the New York Times) predicting the end of the world on a monthly basis, or Richard Cohen (the Washington Post) casually name-dropping for effect, the spectacle of journalists searching for metaphors, allusions, parallels, and Lessons of History reminds us, as Alexander Pope taught, that a little learning is a dangerous thing.

Consider, for example, Post columnist Dana Milbank’s recent meditation on the Anthony Weiner scandal. Milbank is a curious case: a reporter-columnist whose contradictory stock in trade is (a) smirking accounts of public officials making fools of themselves, and (b) lamentations that the public doesn’t take public officials seriously. The Weiner case fits perfectly onto Milbank’s template: It enables him to poke fun at a member of Congress who sends naked photographs of himself across the Internet and at the same time to complain that the lurid details about Anthony Weiner distract us from pressing issues of greater importance.

But not content with this ancient, and all too obvious, insight—that humans would rather be entertained than instructed—Milbank shows off his columnist’s chops by compiling a list of labored, and mildly crackpot, analogies to drive home the point.