One thing about being out of the country is that I functioned more like a normal, non-news junkie person. When your Internet access is very limited, you tend to just scan the headlines and not dig too deeply into complicated stories. One thing I did manage to catch is Weinergate or Weinerweiner, as I like to call it.
When I first heard about it, the story was that some shady RWNJs had hacked Rep. Weiner’s account and sent a lewd picture. Rep. Weiner confirmed this account by saying “I was hacked.” I didn’t really think much more of the story, figuring it would go away. A few days later I saw accounts of Weiner’s strange and evasive answers – that he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a picture of him. I think we all understood that he meant it was a picture of him.
Some people on the left spent time trying to determine how Weiner’s yfrog (picture-sharing service) could have been hacked (with his own photo). To their credit, they did find a loophole in the yfrog security that did allow people to falsely post pictures.
So we were left with two explanations – one (floated by John Cole and no doubt others) that Weiner meant to send a direct message to the woman (which would be seen only by her) and accidentally sent a reply (the @ symbol instead of d) so it was seen by people who follow both Weiner and the woman and on his public timeline. The second explanation is that someone hacked one of Weiner’s personal photos and hacked his yfrog account, all to make Weiner look bad (perhaps to hide his criticism of Clarence Thomas).
So the truth was the much more boring and common explanation that Weiner was lying and he was sending naughty pictures to various women. This is a classic case of Occam’s Razor – the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
The reason I’m writing this is to remind myself (and everyone else) not to fall in love (figuratively) with a politician. They will only break your heart. Politics is a game that requires a lot of compromises, some that you will hate. Politicians need votes to keep their jobs, so they will respond to prevailing winds sometimes, even if they know it’s wrong. I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t involve ourselves with politics, because it’s more important than ever that we participate. What we shouldn’t do is depend on one politician to do it for us – we have to keep pushing and push on all of them. I think it’s human nature to hope for a hero, but they are so far and few between. We should be our own heroes, realizing that changing things is a lot of hard work.