I’ve always found the way Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) reveled in being a ballsy, in-your-face politician quite appealing.
Therefore, I’m more than a little disappointed by the way he’s been answering clearly impertinent questions about a picture he sent of himself – in his underwear with an apparently erect weiner – to a 21-year-old female from his Twitter account.
Because instead of giving a ballsy, in-your-face answer like “Yeah, that’s me … impressive, eh?”, he’s been pissing all over his enviable reputation with weenie responses about his account being “hacked“; that one of his photos might have “spilled onto the Internet … and been manipulated”; and, the most flaccid of all, that he cannot say with “certitude” that it’s not a picture of him. (No more puns, I promise….)
Frankly, as sex scandals go, this is clearly G-Rated. The problem for Weiner (46) is that he has fallen into the oldest political flytrap in politics: getting into big legal trouble by trying to cover up a little indiscretion.
For the only thing truly newsworthy about this story is his claim that his account was hacked: Because if it was, this really is a federal case. But if it wasn’t, he’s risking both criminal prosecution and political death for making a false claim.
My hunch, however, is that FBI agents are so busy these days trying to catch the Chinese spies who are hacking into every government agency and major U.S. corporation that they can’t be bothered to investigate this matter. Not to mention that they probably suspect, as I do, that the only thing that was hacked was Weiner’s brain … by a political nincompoop.
This brings me to his wife, Huma Abedin, to whom he’s been married for less than one year. Because his political life will depend to a large degree how she reacts.
Apropos of this, when he was asked how she’s coping with the embarrassment, I find it interesting that he repeatedly alluded to the fact that she has worked as Hillary Clinton’s top aide for 15 years.
For this suggests that he’s pursuing a two-pronged crisis management strategy, which is actually more in keeping with his ballsy, in-your-face political character:
On the one hand, he’s putting his wife on public notice that she dare not leave him over this scandal after enabling Hillary to stand by her man even through the more notorious and damning Monica Lewinsky sex scandal; while on the other, he’s warning fellow Democrats that it would be unfair and hypocritical of them to abandon him after rallying around Bill….
Well, I have no doubt that, just like Hillary, Huma will stand by her man. And fair enough; for, as marriage infidelities go, this is at worst a misdemeanor.
I know most commentators are already writing his political epitaph, especially given the way a married, Christian-values Republican from New York was forced to resign from Congress earlier this year after a photo he sent of himself – just shirtless – to a woman on Craigslist went viral.
When all is said and done, however, I think Weiner will survive. And this will be due primarily to the fact that Democrats are less judgmental (and hypocritical) about the sexual conduct of Alpha Dogs like him (and Bill) than Republicans.
But am I the only guy who thinks that it’s not just creepy but counterproductive for men – like this congressman and Brett Favre – to send pornographic images of themselves as a form of seduction? Or have women become so “liberated” that their sexual behavior is now governed by the same primal, animalistic impulses as ours…?
NOTE: The imminent federal indictment of former presidential candidate John Edwards for misusing campaign funds to cover up his extramarital affair will also help not only to put Weiner’s relatively harmless Twitter affair into perspective, but also to take it out of the 24/7 stream on cable news.
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