Did I not say that the National Enquirer would be the one to get to the bottom of things with regards to Anthony Weiner? Here’s what they found:

The National Enquirer pictures show Weiner protectively posing in a pair of pantihose and a bra as he smiles cheekily at the camera.

Bizarre: Weiner had an early taste for taking shocking photographs, as seen here in these new images of him as an 18-year-old

In another photo an oiled Weiner poses in y-fronted swimming trunks in front of a Christmas tree.

The pictures, taken by a college friend in 1982 when he was 18, demonstrate Weiner’s reputation at the State University of Plattsburgh as a flamboyant figure.

Speaking to the Enquirer, the friend said: ‘The cross dressing photos were taken during a holiday activity in Anthony’s college dorm when he was just a sophomore.

So does this lend more credence or less credence to my contention that the Weiner-Abedin marriage was a contrivance from the beginning? I’ll let you decide for yourselves.

I was infuriated reading Dorothy Rabinowitz this morning. So I’m just going to dive in and fisk her entire column:

To win the presidency in 2012, the Republican candidate will require certain strengths. Among them, a credible passion for ideas other than cost-cutting and small government. He or she will have to speak in the voice of Americans who know in their bones the extraordinary character of their democracy, and that voice will have to ring out steadily. That Republican candidate will need, no less, the ability to talk about matters like Medicare and Social Security without terrorizing the electorate.

Ideas other than cost cutting and small government? You mean like banning light bulbs and expanding entitlements? Didn’t we just purge ourselves of those kinds of Republicans? Didn’t the voters soundly tell the Republicans they didn’t want any more of those kinds of Republicans?

What you ought to do is start by asking why is it that we need to elect a Republican in the first place? If you want to elect a Republican just to elect a Republican, then go ahead and nominate the best looking candidate with the most mealy mouthed views, and you’ll have your best shot. Such a Republican won’t be likely to accomplish anything, but you’ll win an election.

But if you can answer the question about why we need a Republican in the White House in 2013, then you can begin to answer the question which one should we nominate. I’ll get to that question in a little bit. Back to Dot:

Americans already have plenty of cause for fear. They have on one side the Obama health-care plan now nearly universally acknowledged as a disaster. A plan that entails huge cuts in health care—$500 billion cut from Medicare—that will nevertheless cause no pain, according to its architects. As the polls on ObamaCare show, this grand scheme appears mostly to have alarmed Americans.

Americans ought to be alarmed for a whole host of reasons, cutting Medicare being the least of them. Suffice it to say that Obamacare amounts to a pig pile on top of an already alarming situation, a situation which Dotty Rabinowitz doesn’t seem to care much about:

From the Republican side comes an incessant barrage of doomsday messages and proclamations that the nation is imperiled by the greatest crisis in a generation—not, as we might have supposed, by our ongoing, desperate unemployment levels, but by spending on social programs. No sane person will deny the necessity of finding ways to cut the costs of these programs. But it’s impossible not to hear in the clamor for boldness—for massive cuts in entitlements—a distinctly fevered tone, and one with an unmistakable ideological tinge. Not the sort of pragmatism that inspires voter confidence.

This is nothing short of a smear. The calmest, most boring candidate on the campaign trail right now is Gary Johnson. Gary Johnson is pushing the most radical agenda of all the candidates, wanting to cut trillions from the federal budget. And yet his arguments are entirely pragmatic. He frames every question not as a moral one, but as a cost-benefit analysis. He can come across as calm and reasoned as a result, and can win arguments with that approach. But he’s not lighting any fires.

People don’t fight and die for a cause because its more practical or efficient than the alternative. They fight and die because they believe they are on the side of moral right, or because their life is literally on the line. The current battle over spending has both elements. The budget will consume us, and it is a moral atrocity that we are bankrupting ourselves the way we are. But Johnson only barely makes the former case, and never the latter. Chris Christie makes the connection well, but he isn’t running. And Mitch Daniels made it superbly, with his “Red Menace” analogy, but he won’t run because his wife is a slut. And so that leaves us with few choices.

In fact, it is the central dichotomy in the current field of Republican candidates. The ones who speak most fervently seem to have the least aggressive plans for attacking the new red menace, and the ones with the best plans refuse to speak with moral fervor. But to complain about too much moral fervor when we face a life or death catastrophe is to really miss the boat.

Thinking about all this, a physician friend recalls a lesson that experienced doctors learn: A patient comes in with symptoms—is it angina? Will it lead to a heart attack? Patients whose doctors show deliberation and care in the choice of their treatment, he observes, tend to have increased faith both in the treatment and the doctor. That is a point of some relevance to politicians.

So wait, the Republicans haven’t shown care and deliberation in their discussions? So it’s Paul Ryan taking the “burn all this shit down” approach? To imply so is fundamentally dishonest. I expect as much of the left, but the Wall Street Journal editorial board members?!?

The Republican who wants to win would avoid talk of the costs that our spendthrift ways, particularly benefits like Social Security, are supposedly heaping on future generations. He would especially avoid painting images of the pain Americans feel at burdening their children and grandchildren. This high-minded talk, rooted in fantasy, isn’t going to warm the hearts of voters of mature age—and they are legion—who feel no such pain. None. And they don’t like being told that they do, or that they should feel it, or that they’re stealing from the young. They’ve spent their working lives paying in to Social Security, their investment. Adjustments have to be made to the system, as they now know. Which makes it even more unlikely they’ll welcome handwringing about the plight of future generations.

So here is the crux of it: Fuck the younger generations, they don’t vote as much anyhow. Don’t piss off the older voters, they don’t give a shit about America’s future, nor should they.

You know, it occurs to me reading this that the baby boomers get their unfair share of the blame for our current predicament. After all, I remember the mathematical certainty of this day of reckoning being discussed back when I was in high school, some 20 odd years ago. And at the time, boomers were still relatively young, and certainly didn’t control the levers in Washington. No, it was the older generations, who in response to scare ads from the Democrats marched to the polls to make it clear that dealing with this day of reckoning was a death sentence for any politician who dared. And so it never happened. And here we are today, reading Dorothy Rabinowitz, a woman who appears to be older than dirt and certainly older than the boomer generation, telling us once again to lay off.

Well, I can’t put this any more politely than to say Fuck You Dorothy Rabinowitz.

Your generation has had every ample opportunity to deal with this situation. It was not the younger generations who instituted the Ponzi scheme known as Social Security. It is not the boomer generation, or generation X who refused to consider means for reforming it. It was you, and your ilk, who deluded themselves into thinking that they were paying into a retirement system, a magical system that returned insane benefits compared to the amount paid in. So you want your money back? Shit, i think we’d all be happy to give it back to you. It’s the benefits that can’t be paid, not your “principal”.

“Adjustments have to be made to the system, as they now know”… AS THEY NOW KNOW?!?!?!?!? Where the fuck have you old people been for the last twenty years? Thirty years? Did you all fail math class? Adjustments have been needed for 60 years now, since the baby boomer generation came into existence, or at least 40 years when it became apparent that there wouldn’t be enough members of generation X to pay for the boomer population bulge. And you couldn’t have dealt with it then??? And you want sympathy today, as if this is just something that suddenly came up (apologies to the Brady Bunch)? Well fuck you.

Our current predicament is existential. It is a matter of stealing all the life’s savings from everyone under 50 to blow it on retirees. Either we decide to move forward with that insanity or we don’t. Either way, I’m starting to hide my money. I would suggest my readers do the same.

The Republican who wins will have to know, and show that he knows, that most Americans aren’t sitting around worried to death about big government—they’re worried about jobs and what they have in savings.

I can’t believe I even read that sentence.

To create a job requires some planning, and certainty about the future. Our current future looks like one in which we bankrupt the country, either by means of high taxes or inflation of the currency, in order to shovel Spaghettios into the pie holes of old people like Rabinowitz. If you don’t deal with that reality, there will be no future jobs. We will become Europe, with a permanent unemployment rate hovering between 15% and 25%. If Rabinowitz can’t see that, she lacks the most basic of economic understanding.

The candidate would do well to give time and all due detail—the material is rich—on the activities of the Justice Department under President Obama, the most ideologically driven one in U.S. history. He would make the connection between the nature of this Justice Department and the president’s view of the American nation.

I think people are more concerned with us becoming a police state, ala TSA nude pictures and groping, than with the idea that the justice department is being too soft on terrorism.

That view was made clear early, in candidate Obama’s repeated reference to that happy time ahead when America would once again be worthy of respect—which we had presumably lost through our immoral policies—and when we would regain the trust of friends and allies around the world. That vision, still alive and well two and a half years into his administration, has been nowhere clearer than in Attorney General Eric Holder’s determined effort to give 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the benefit of a trial in an American court, with full constitutional protections. Only with such a trial, Mr. Holder argued, could America prove to the world the fairness of its justice system.

I’m beginning to wonder if this isn’t an opening salvo for a Giuliani campaign. If it is, then wow, is he hitting the wrong notes. Here’s a hint: as bad an idea as Holder’s was, nobody gives a crap now. Really.

I can’t continue. Basically, the rest of her point is to run on foreign policy. I can’t imagine that what the country wants right now is to see the US more deeply involved in affairs abroad, nor do I think we can even afford it if we wanted it.

I wrote about this issue back in 2004 when Bush was running for re-election. And more or less, nothing has changed since then other than the passage of time, which has only made the issues worse.

What worries me is not that Republicans won’t win the presidency in 2012. Frankly, I think they could nominate Bozo the Clown and still beat Obama. What worries me is that they won’t nominate somebody who is serious about tackling the problems that we face, namely what Mitch Daniels termed the Red Menace. And I’ll tell you what, if the Republicans don’t take care of this problem in 2013, I’m not going Galt, but I am going Francisco. I’ll be voting Democrat from now on and working overtime to accelerate the looming bankruptcy so that we have a chance to learn our lessons and come out of it reformed on the other side as quickly as possible. I have zero desire to live through a 25 year or near permanent recession which is what will happen if we allow this to drag on out. I think we have at best a 50% chance of nominating a serious Republican in 2012. People like Dorothy Rabinowitz are doing everything in their power to make sure that doesn’t happen. They need to be purged.