If you don’t realize this is creepy, maybe the problem is you

File that face under “C”, for creep.

You’re married, and you describe a much younger employee as your “soul mate”, and you think that’s OK, even though she never reciprocated or expressed similar statements.

Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.) sought to defend himself against an accusation of sexual harassment Tuesday, saying he “developed an affection” for a decades-younger staffer he considered his “soul mate” but never sought a romantic or sexual relationship with her.

You get upset when you discover she is dating someone her age, who you don’t know.

In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday — Meehan’s first lengthy response to the New York Times report — the four-term congressman denied engaging in harassment. He acknowledged lashing out when he learned the aide had started seriously dating someone outside his congressional office, attributing his reaction to the stress of a debate over repealing the Affordable Care Act.

“I started to talk to her about my reaction to [her relationship] and you know, selfishly I was thinking about what this was going to mean to me,” he told the Inquirer, adding that he “should have been looking at it from the perspective of a subordinate and a superior.”

I don’t know what that last bit means. So he should have ordered her, as her boss, to stop dating other men? It’s a bit ambiguous.

She accuses you of sexual harassment, and you actually settle for some large unspecified sum — not paid out of your pocket, obviously, but rather with taxpayer’s money.

Meehan settled with the former aide last year using taxpayer dollars after she filed a formal complaint of sexual harassment. The revelation of the settlement in a report by the New York Times on Saturday led to Meehan’s expulsion from the House Ethics Committee, which began investigating his behavior this week.

You are brought before an ethics hearing where you still insist that there was nothing abusive about your “relationship”, despite admitting guilt with a payoff, despite admitting that you’d been possessive of this woman, and despite openly talking about having an imaginary deeper relationship with her.

You know, by this point you ought to realize that you really are a great big creep, and that you’ve been oblivious.

But no can do: he’s a Republican.

I’d rather be a Thespian than a Spartan

It has always struck me as odd that the brutal meatheads, the Spartans, were portrayed brilliant heroes in that movie, 300. It was odder that they went into battle half-naked rather than as armored hoplites. It was oddest of all that they kept howling about “FREEDOM!”, but Sparta was a slave society, and one of the reasons they were so focused on war was the need to keep the helots oppressed. Finally, someone says it: the Spartans were morons.

The word spartan, taken separately from a military context has come to mean utilitarian, basic. In ancient times the word was more pejorative, carrying a connotation of stupidity and coarseness. The word Thespian, has come to mean artistic and sensitive. At Thermopylae the 700 Thespians fought as bravely as any other force. There was a city-state that balanced the need of self-defense and to develop culture.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the alt-right idolizes Sparta, with their simplistic worship of brute rigidity and hypocritical adoration of slogans. We just have to remember: the Spartans lost, and left nothing of value to civilization.

That’s some payoff

Why is Paul Ryan smiling? Because he got paid.

House Speaker Paul Ryan collected nearly $500,000 in campaign contributions from Charles Koch and his wife after helping usher through a massive tax reform law. According to a recent campaign finance report filed Thursday, Koch and his wife Elizabeth each donated $247,7000 to Ryan’s joint fundraising committee… The Republican tax overhaul plan passed in December benefited Koch Industries, as it cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, among other cuts. The legislation then got a boost from the Kochs’ multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to highlight its benefits. And 13 days after it passed, Charles and Elizabeth Koch made the near $500,000 donation to Team Ryan, which raises money for the congressman, the National Republican Congressional Committee and a political action committee run by Ryan. On the same day, Charles and Elizabeth Koch also each donated $237,000 to the NRCC.

There’s a word for this: corruption. Ryan is a bought and paid for stooge for billionaires, and he has received his quid pro quo. It’s gotten so bad they don’t even try to hide it any more.

Hiding behind Pepe isn’t very effective

There was a guy wandering around the edges of the Iowa City women’s march, putting up white supremacist stickers, and looking like this:

Saturday, Jan. 20, 2018. — photo by Zak Neumann

He was pursued, non-violently, and people were taking photos of him to document his activities. He hid in a building and started making phone calls. None of this was illegal, nor were any of the marchers doing anything illegal — he was just being obnoxious, and his sweat shirt was provocative, obviously intentionally so.

What struck me, though, was this bit of the story.

“I was standing outside MERGE looking through the photos I’d taken, when a young woman in a blue hoodie came up to me,” Sarsfield said. “She asked if I’d taken photos of her boyfriend. I asked her if her boyfriend was the one putting up the white supremacist stickers.”

“She said, ‘Yes,’ and that he’d called her saying he was in MERGE. She said she wanted me to delete the photos, because this whole thing was traumatic for them,” Sarsfield recalled. “She said he’s not a racist, he just likes to do these things to get a rise out of people.”

Really? REALLY? I know the 4chan crowd likes to maintain a pretense of ironic mockery, but there are limits. Dress like a racist, act like a racist, spread racist slogans, you are a racist. I don’t care if you’re hiding behind your cloak of anonymity, you are still a bad person.

It’s kind of peak 4chan, though, when a trolling white guy claims he’s traumatized because people take photos that might identify him. He’s boo-hoo-hooing because his words and actions might just catch up with him. And that’s not all he has to worry about — he has been identified, and he was previously found guilty of possessing child porn. He’s deplorable. It just gets me how badly these people try to deny their actions.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

There is a culture of corruption in too many police departments. Case in point: New York police (and who knows who else) hands out ‘get out of jail free’ cards to their officers. Pulled over for a speeding ticket? Wave one of these and the policeman is likely to just wave you on.

The city’s police-officers union is cracking down on the number of “get out of jail free” courtesy cards distributed to cops to give to family and friends.

Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association boss Pat Lynch slashed the maximum number of cards that could be issued to current cops from 30 to 20, and to retirees from 20 to 10, sources told The Post.

The cards are often used to wiggle out of minor trouble such as speeding tickets, the theory being that presenting one suggests you know someone in the NYPD.

The rank and file is livid.

“They are treating active members like s–t, and retired members even worse than s–t,” griped an NYPD cop who retired on disability. “All the cops I spoke to were . . . very disappointed they couldn’t hand them out as Christmas gifts.”

“Cracking down” means reducing the number by a third, not getting rid of this unethical practice altogether. And clearly the cops are treating these as a privilege to be taken for granted — they deserve these special exemptions. I guess there’s one law for the friends and family of the police, and a different, harsher law for the rest of us.

Mary’s Monday Metazoan: A horror story

This is not a pleasant story. Sometime in the 1960s, a hunting dog shimmied up a hollow space inside a tree, presumably after some smaller animal, and when the hollow narrowed, got stuck. There was no rescue. The poor dog died of thirst, alone in the dark, and then its body was mummified by tannins in the wood, and remained there for decades until the tree was cut down. And there he was.

Now its on display in a museum, which is rather grim. I hope none of you are claustrophobes, because this would give me the heebie-jeebies.

Cadet Bone Spurs gets burned

Tammy Duckworth addresses the Republicans.

I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five-deferment draft-dodger. And I have a message for Cadet Bone Spurs: If you cared about our military, you’d stop baiting Kim Jong Un into a war that could put 85,000 American troops and millions of innocent civilians in danger.

It’s a good speech. I do have concerns that it takes praising the military, rather than the lives of children or ordinary working people, to rouse some rudimentary sense of shame in the electorate.