What kind of creep-fest are New Yorkers staging this election, for crying out loud? As I’m hearing it out on the West Coast, the lead candidate for mayor is a guy who tweeted pictures of his dingus to various women and then publicly lied about it, and the comptroller race is between a whoremonger and the madam who supplied him. Really? The YMCA used to have a slogan: “Character counts.” In New York from now on, you ought to add, “For nothing.”

The madam is a libertarian and, as I understand it, a bit of a joke. But the dingus-tweeter, disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, and the hooker boy, disgraced former governor Eliot Spitzer, both Democrats, are considered serious candidates. That makes sense, I guess. The Democrats are the party that celebrated Teddy Kennedy as the Lion of the Senate, even after he drove his likely mistress into the drink and left her to drown. This is the party of a president who carried on a sleazy Oval Office affair with a woman half his age and had his minions slander and intimidate other women who plausibly accused him of rape and grotesque sexual harassment. And, of course, this is the party of former congressman Barney Frank, who fixed parking tickets for his gay escort lover but remained in office so he could help destroy the nation’s economy by facilitating bad housing loans. …

On average, it seems to me, Republicans punish sexual transgressors more harshly, and certainly the left-wing media is relentlessly one-sided in the matter. Sanford, Foley, and Craig got no media quarter on the one hand, whereas on the other, Newsweek actually tried to bury the Clinton affair story, filmmakers turned out the documentary Client 9 to try to soft-soap Spitzer’s whoring, and NBC’s Today show brought on “experts” during the Weiner scandal to advise us to stop being so “puritanical” and get over it.