Weinstein's Helpers

Writing at The Cut, Heather Havrilesky attempts to walk a mile in sleazeball Harvey Weinstein's mental moccasins:

When you really slow down the tape on Weinstein -- or Trump, or Cosby, or Stephen Paddock, or Richard Spencer, and make no mistake, you have to work very hard not to draw lines between these men by now -- what you see more than anything else is a profound lack of connection to other human beings. It's not just that women or strangers or people of color or children of immigrants or Muslims don't rate in their world. It's that other human beings in general are utterly irrelevant. You are useful and part of the club or you're cast out like trash. The second you're not useful, you are waste. Or you were always waste. Your feelings about the matter couldn't be less relevant. Whether or not their behavior will ruin you or literally end your life and the lives of countless others is utterly insignificant to these people. [bold added]

Let's set aside for a moment whether Havrilesky is fair to place all four on the same level of hell and consider the bolded statement above: This is doubly true of anyone who, knowing that open secret about Weinstein and being in a position to do something about it, went ahead and kept things quiet for him, took his donations, sought him out, or some combination of the preceding.

And it makes me wonder about any leftist who isn't recoiling in abject horror at what it says about their political establishment that Weinstein, apparently, was (still is?) such a big shot. (This is not the same thing as worrying about lost votes in the short term.) I am no fan of Donald Trump -- and maybe one can draw parallels between his personality and Weinstein's -- but it strikes me as odd that he merits a mention here, and a few big name Democratic politicians apparently don't.

-- CAV