This Tweet Bottom Lines The Clinton-Weiner Mess

With news breaking Friday that the FBI was investigating new Hillary Clinton emails — paired with the New York Times reporting that the emails in question were uncovered during a separate investigation into the latest sexting scandal of Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin — the media is whipping itself into a frenzy as speculation spreads like pink eye in a preschool. But David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones and a commentator for MSNBC, summed up the Clinton-Abedin-Weiner chatter in one succinct tweet: “The choice: a man who bragged about committing sexual assault or a woman whose top aide was married to a sexter?”

Even though this latest news development has spiced up a relatively bland week, Corn’s statement should make sure we’re all mindful not to take our eye off the ball.

Media watchdogs have already been critical of the knee-jerk coverage of this latest, and perhaps strangest, chapter in the Clinton email scandal, with a clear intent to grab as many eyeballs as possible, possibly at the expense of journalistic integrity. This has been an existential question the media has wrestled with throughout this election, with only moderate success: How do you cover two very unpopular candidates whose qualitative deficits are wildly different?

An important message in Corn’s tweet — perhaps the most important one — is the bizarre tendency throughout this election to hold women responsible for the behaviors of their husbands (in this case, their aide’s husband), while men who have actually been accused of assaulting women manage to slither out from under their own culpability (Trump has consistently and adamantly denied all of the allegations made against him). It’s one more double-whammy of sexism in a presidential campaign that has had far too many of them.

That Clinton should find herself tied — however tenuously — to the texting shenanigans of "Carlos Danger" is a dismal report on our political discourse.