What makes smart powerful men risk everything for a bit of skirt? Men who have a name and a position to lose, men who KNOW that the media spotlight is on them - the names just go on and on - and let’s not even go as far back as Bill Clinton - just more recently, there have been Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Arnold the Terminator (is there anyone who can spell that surname without looking it up?), DSK from the IMF and now the beleagured Mr Anthony Weiner from New York.
Somehow we just don’t seem to have scandals on this scale here in Holland - I don’t know if its because powerful Dutch men just don’t have that kind of alpha male thing going on, or whether they’re just too busy with their jobs, too Christian or too asexual, or whether the Dutch public just isn’t into these kinds of scandal as much as the Americans seem to be. I mean there was the resignation of Ruud Lubbers at the time head of the UNHCR, but the kerfuffle significantly took place in the US and not here, and there were revelations about Prince Bernard (married to our previous Queen Juliana) who’d fathered daughters outside the nest, but his name suffered far greater damage from his dubious financial dealings than his sexual ones. His reputation as a Lothario frankly just didn’t seem to have the kind of thunder here as you hear coming out of the US when another powerful man is caught with his knickers down - or in the case of poor Mr Weiner, has photos of himself with his knickers on distributed on social networking sites.
And btw, have you noticed how the loudest booing and most aggressive finger pointing comes from the Republicans towards Democrats so shamed, as if they never had any of their own?
I mean look at the circus in New York at the moment - thousands of cameras hounding Anthony Weiner, his friends and family,about a story that seems to me frankly to have no relevance to anyone except his wife. It looks like a witch hunt of a guy who acted like an idiot but professionally seemed a pretty decent ethical character. And while the press hounds him, I have to feel a huge wave of sympathy at the collatoral torture of his innocent wife, the glamourous South Asian beauty Huma Abedin, Hilary Clinton’s right hand woman.
Anyway, avid reader as I am of the NYTimes, I think I’ll lay off for a few days till the furore dies down, and settle for the good old Dutch papers - who love nothing better than a juicy story on eColi bacteria that is to be found neither on cucumbers or sprouts, or the slow drumbeat of doom for the Dutch public sector (including our beloved Radio Netherlands) being dismantled piece by painful piece by buget cutbacks.
And if I want a bit of juice, I can alwasy check out the Dutch mags to see what Princess Maxima is wearing this season.
