Category: Politics

I’m kind of Weinered out today, frankly, but I know readers expect their daily dose of Weiner updates, so here goes:

• Mickey Kaus has too much fun at the expense of Markos Moulitsas, Howard Kurtz and Jeffrey Toobin, who are apparently addicted to being wrong.
• Peter Beinart gets all preachy: “How many of the pundits mocking Weiner have marriages that could survive the kind of scrutiny they have been giving his?” Uh, Peter: The congressman sent pictures of his schlong to women he had never met. This is a pretty high threshold of kinkiness. If you’ve never done that, you’re entitled to be outraged by it.
• New York Post headline: “New Weiner photos taken in House gym could be an ethics breach.” You don’t say!
• Reuters headline: “White House calls Weiner’s sex scandal a ‘distraction’.” You don’t say!
• Sources tell BigGovernment.com that Weiner’s congressional staffers are looking for new jobs.
• The Associated Press has a video report about protests in Weiner’s district:

So there’s your daily dose of Weiner updates, and here’s my latest American Spectator column:

Police showed up Friday afternoon at the home of a 17-year-old girl in Delaware who had been among Rep. Anthony Weiner’s online fans. Within 24 hours, three top Democrats issued calls for Weiner’s resignation.
The timing was merely a coincidence, some Democratic sources told reporters. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel had actually been planning to release their statements anyway. Their “coordinated effort was [already] in the works,” one insider told Russell Berman of the Hill, adding that the statements “were released on Saturday to get ahead of the Sunday shows and the return of lawmakers on Monday.” So while the Brooklyn congressman was announcing that he would take a leave of absence to seek “professional treatment” for whatever compulsions led to the scandal that has become known as WeinerGate, his Democratic colleagues were chiefly concerned about working the news cycle to their advantage.
Democrats appear increasingly desperate to put political distance between their party and the disastrously disgraced Weiner, because they have no idea what further revelations await. . . .

Read the whole thing, because you can never have too much Weiner.

UPDATE: The latest on Congressman Junkshot:

A Democratic source who spoke to Anthony Weiner after Democratic leaders called on him to resign Saturday told CNN that even with that public hammer dropped on him, Weiner made clear he was still “on the fence” about whether to step down.Democratic sources CNN has talked to since Saturday said that Weiner told Democrats pressuring him to go that he wanted to wait for his wife Huma to return from a trip with Hillary Clinton. . . .
The same Democratic source said that Weiner was emotionally falling apart on the phone in this and other conversations and in a state of “despair.” Other Democratic sources who talked to him late last week described him the same way. Another person who spoke to him on Saturday called Weiner’s disposition “turbulent.”

So, he’s an emotional basket case who still thinks he’s fit for high public office.

“Not only are political sex scandals great fun, they serve an important social purpose. They remind us that we should think twice before we cede more power to these clowns.”
— Gene Healey, quoted by Matt Welch at Reason Hit & Run

That’s the most important takeaway from Aaron Worthing’s online interview with the 21-year-old student to whom Anthony Weiner send the momentous May 27 crotch-photo Tweet.

Reading everything she said, taking it all at face value, it is impossible to escape the conclusion: Gennette Cordova is a liberal Democrat and her chief regret of her role in this entire episode is its negative political impact for Democrats, Weiner included.

Ace of Spades tries to read between the lines of Cordova’s comments, but I think that’s pointless. Given her obvious political incentives, to say nothing of her personal incentives, including her relationship with her live-in boyfriend,  shouldn’t we be profoundly skeptical of her version of events?

Cordova deleted the Twitter account on which she carried on her DM exchanges with Weiner, so that she herself no longer has a record of what either of them said in those exchanges. Now she publicly describes those exchanges as perfectly innocent, a description which — if true — raises the question of why Weiner would have suddenly decided to send her that crotch photo, unsolicited.

But we don’t know what is true or not and, absent a law-enforcement investigation that includes subpoenas for the complete records from Twitter, Facebook, etc., we can never know. The same is true of the Delaware teen — I doubt the cops there got subpoenas for her Twitter records — and of everything else involved in this story: Absent a thorough law-enforcement investigation, we have only a partial record of the evidence, and are left to wonder about everything else.

And I remind you that the one thing Weiner has been most eager to avoid is a law-enforcement investigation. Because once the FBI starts asking questions, the rule becomes: Tell a lie, go to jail.

Gennette Cordova was, and apparently remains, a liberal Democrat fan of Anthony Weiner. So if she’s telling a version of the story that would tend to discourage an FBI investigation, I certainly am not surprised.