Sidelining Schmucks

Ideological and ethnic opposites Anthony Weiner and Steve King are redefining shameless stupidity and uniting their own parties against them but, in our media-salivating world, getting more attention than comparatively sane office holders.

Republicans have already moved away from King by dissuading him from running for the Iowa Senate seat next year, but Weiner is still a candidate, even as a New York Times editorial advises him to “take his marital troubles and personal compulsions out of the public eye, away from cameras, off the Web and out of the race for mayor of New York City.”

While President Obama pledges “to use every minute of the 1,276 days remaining in my term to make this country work for working Americans again,” American government is gridlocked by Tea Party politicians as weirdly out of touch as Weiner and King but sounding rational only by totally ignoring reality.

“Congressional Republicans,” reports the Times, “are moving to gut many of President Obama’s top priorities with the sharpest spending cuts in a generation and a new push to hold government financing hostage unless the president’s signature health care law is stripped of money this fall.”

Weiner and King are on the fringes giving new meaning to the definition of “schmuck,” a Yiddishism for the male member as metaphor for stupid, foolish, or simply clueless, and now earn the highest rank in the lexicon of penile designations for unwise, total “putz.”

While Weiner is caught in post-disgrace sexual tweets and King opines that undocumented immigrants have “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” they are only distracting voters from the stupidity of John Boehner’s troops, those lesser schmucks who have to be voted out of more years of disabling Congress next November.

In any language, they all have to be sidelined.