The special election for Anthony Weiner's old seat

By Richard K. Barry




I don't know that many people are paying a lot of attention to the special election that will take place on September 13th for New York's 9th congressional district, but things are tighter there than they should be. 



This is the seat vacated by Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner for conduct unbecoming a congressman. You remember.



To provide some context, Weiner held the seat from January of 1999 until his resignation in June of this year. He won seven terms, never receiving less than 59 percent of the vote. The seat was previously held by Democrat Chuck Shumer, who went on to run successfully for the U.S. Senate.



In a Siena poll conducted Aug. 3-8, Democratic candidate David Weprin is leading Republican Bob Turner by a 48 to 42 percent margin. With a 4.4 percent margin of error, that makes things close.



One interesting note here is that Joe Lieberman has endorsed Weprin, a move meant to counter former New York City Mayor Ed Koch's endorsement of Turner. In general, the media has been trying to characterize the special election in this heavily Jewish Brooklyn and Queens district as a referendum on President Obama's Israel policies, which Koch has characterized as not sufficiently pro-Israel.



In giving his endorsement in late July, Lieberman, a strong supporter of the U.S.-Israel relationship, said:

While David Weprin can be counted on to fight for the safety and security of the State of Israel, we can also rely on him to protect the seniors and working families in Brooklyn and Queens.

Steve Greenberg, a pollster for Sienna, said what pollster always seem to say, which is that voter turnout will be key.

Which campaign will do a better job of identifying their voters and getting them to the polls [will be important] because, as we know, special elections tend to have low voter turnout. Probably fewer than 20 percent of the registered voters in the 9th congressional district will actually go to the polls and vote.

Turner is a retired media executive who ran unsuccessfully against Weiner in the general election last year.



Assemblyman Weprin is a former New York City councilman who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination to be comptroller in 2009.



Just what the Democrats need right now: A close race in an historically Democratic district.



Thanks, Anthony.



(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Weiner resigns, hypocrisy reigns

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's a shame that it had to come to this, but there was really no other way it could end, not after the lies, not after so much more came out, not after his own party abandoned him, including Pelosi and Obama. (Though I would stress that it's the right, far more than the left, which is generally far more understanding of human frailty and certainly far less hypocritically moralizing, that tries to exploit such scandals for partisan gain, and that was evident throughout "Weinergate.")

Is there a double standard at work here? Of course. Weiner gets nailed for meeting women online, and essentially for behaving stupidly, while Republicans like Newt Gingrich and David Vitter -- despicable, hurtful hypocrites hiding behind their "family values" self-righteousness -- get away with far worse philandering and remain respected public figures, or respected at least by the media. How is it that Weiner has to resign while Gingrich is regarded as a leading conservative with Meet the Press as a frequent venue, as if he must of course be taken seriously, making millions and now running for president?

Not to excuse Weiner's stupidity, but that's what really pisses me off here.

Leave the Weiners alone

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Weinergate just won't stop:

Rep. Anthony Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, returned to Washington early Wednesday from a trip abroad, setting off a new round of speculation that the New York Democrat's resignation could come soon.

Friends of Weiner have said he would not make a decision on whether to quit until he had a chance to talk to Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who returned to the United States from a trip to Africa with Clinton that began early last week.

Weiner and Abedin are expected to meet on Wednesday, and she was spotted driving into the garage alone at their northwest D.C. apartment building in the early morning hours. She has not yet been seen leaving the building.

Anthony Weiner is a public figure, behaved idiotically, and deserves the public scrutiny that comes with the job. But I refuse to excuse the media, salivating profusely, for its lascivious and sensationalistic coverage of what is essentially a sad, if not tragic, story.

Will he resign or won't he? Okay, it's fine to speculate. It's also fine to talk about what he did. But staking out his apartment, pulling his wife into it (as if she doesn't have enough to deal with), and trying to publicize what is, and what must be, inherently private? Disgusting, even if it's what the media always do.

No, invasive reports like this aren't as bad as the moralistic bullshit spewed by the likes of Andrea Peyser and other right-wing smearmongers, but they're nonetheless deeply irresponsible.

Leave the Weiners alone. Let them deal with their relationship in private. We'll know soon enough what the Congressman plans to do.

Friday night political randomness: Palin, Weiner, and Perry

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Sorry, I've been so busy all evening wading through Palin's e-mails. Such a glorious treasure of wonderment. (No, not really. There are people who can be bothered to read through, or even to skim through, the 24,000 pages. I'm not one of them.)

**********

So Weiner had online contact with a 17-year-old girl. Not good -- not good at all. A spokesman says that the contact was "neither explicit nor indecent," but I'm not sure it matters. Well, sure, it does, but his reputation, rightly or wrongly, has already been destroyed, and he's pretty much on his own now, with little to no support from his own party.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before it came out that he had contact with a minor. He acted like an idiot and did idiotic things, especially for a public figure. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with having contact of an innocent nature with a near-adult, but given that he was using the Internet to chase women, the fact that his contacts included a minor only makes it all seem so much worse. Even if he wasn't sexual with this girl, the speculation that he might have been with some other minor is unavoidable.

I don't see how he escapes this. Pressure is mounting on him to resign. He says he won't, and his constituents apparently want him to stay, but he can't take much more. His thread is unravelling.

**********

The train wreck that is the Gingrich campaign (and that is The Newt himself) leaves an opening for Perry to jump into the Republican presidential race, as some of those ex-Gingrich staffers are close to the Texas governor. And it looks like Perry is very likely to run.

Given the weakness of the field, Perry could very well emerge as one of the frontrunners, perhaps even the favourite if he manages to bridge the divide between the establishment and the far right. Pawlenty looks to be that bridge right now, but Perry could easily surpass him. Republicans, after all, are looking for a savior. Why not Perry? Pawlenty hasn't been able to get much traction, others on the right, like Bachmann (and Palin), are far too crazy/extreme, and the Tea Party and the social conservative base will never approve someone like Romney or Giuliani.

Just keep in mind that Perry isn't exactly a sensible, moderate, old-school Republican, or even the sort of conservative with broad-based appeal. Check out ThinkProgress's "Top 10 Things Texas Gov. Rick Perry Doesn’t Want You To Know About Him."

**********

Oh, there was some good news today: The Obama Administration has extended Medicaid protections for same-sex couples.

That's some change we can believe in.

Worst Human Being in the World: Andrea Peyser

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Okay, okay, so this pathetic little right-wing runt of a columnist at the New York Post isn't quite as bad as, say, Ratko Mladic. But this... this is just appallingly ridiculous, and it says far more about Peyser than it does about Weiner:

She is so out of here.

On the day Anthony Weiner needed his wife the most, she vanished -- poof! -- like his harem of feisty Twitter chippies during a power outage.

The gorgeous and furious Internet cuckold Huma Abedin refused yesterday to stand by her man. She did not show up to walk the plank of public humiliation, the way doormat Silda did for her whoremonger husband, Eliot Spitzer.

And she did not stand like a potted plant, cowering beneath her hair, the way wife and beard Dina did when her hub, Jim McGreevey, announced he was a "gay American."

Yesterday, the anniversary of D-Day, Weiner, 46, threw a little sneak invasion of his own. He stood behind a podium -- sobbing, blubbering and begging for forgiveness for his fetishistic fixation with phone sex, e-mail sex and sexting gross photos to a half-dozen chicks, many young enough to be his children. And Huma was gone.

"Mr. Weiner," I asked him. "Are you splitting up?"

His reply was most curious, even for a liar and cheat. He tried to avoid the question altogether.

"I love my wife very much," he said, sidestepping a direct "no."

First, who writes like this? One can only imagine that her casual use of dirty language, lobbing it at her chosen targets, gives her a massive erection.

Second, what the fuck does she know about Weiner's sexuality? How does she know that he has a "fetishistic fixation" with any of those things? Playing around on the Internet the way Weiner did hardly amounts to a fixation, let alone a fetishistic one. Does Peyser know anything about sexuality at all, about how human beings interact, about what turns them on, particularly in this virtual age? Apparently not.

Third, what the fuck does she know about the Weiners and their relationship, about what goes on behind their closed doors?

Fourth, it's none of her fucking business why Huma wasn't there. She may very well still love her husband. Is that so hard to believe? Maybe their love is deeper than his transgressions? And maybe she didn't want to stand there only to be bombarded by the media's self-righteous, hypocritical moralizing.

Fifth, it's none of her fucking business if the Weiners are splitting up or not, and Anthony didn't owe her an answer. Maybe they're just trying to work things out, the way so many couples do when they face problems.

Sixth, how is what Weiner did so horribly wrong? He was an idiot to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to do what he did, and for the sake of his relationship he shouldn't have done what he did, but other than that, what? Is he a raving hypocrite like "family values" conservatives David Vitter, Larry Craig, and Mark Sanford, not to mention Newt Gingrich, among so many others? No. Did he commit an act of sexual violence? No. Did he commit a crime at all? No. Did he prove himself incapable of being a congressman? No. What he did was a private matter, and he and his wife should be allowed to deal with it in private without the glare of the likes of Andrea Peyser.

Seventh, there are far more important things going on in the world than "Weinergate." Not that you'd know that from the media's mouth-frothing.

Eighth, Peyser, with whom I am thankfully not familiar, is evidently -- and I use this column as all the evidence I need -- a reprehensible human being. I suppose she must be perfect. I suppose she has never done a thing wrong. Even so, she should shut the fuck up.

Ninth, let's add her to the list of Worst Human Beings in the World. Where she belongs.

Yes, Weiner is a dick -- so what?

By Richard K. Barry 

I think the "what the fuck?" moment for me came when Representative Weiner said that he could not be sure the crotch shot was not of him. Maybe he meant that over time he had taken so many crotch shots of himself that he couldn't be sure that this particular picture was not of him. His answer certainly did not suggest that there was no way in hell the shot was him. That never seemed to be implied.

From that moment it occurred to me, and probably a lot of others, that the stupid bastard was doing something he shouldn't have been.

Along with many, because I really admire his politics, I wanted to believe that he was being set up, that he was not in any way responsible for sending these pictures far and wide. But again, as others have commented, his reaction was so obviously the worst example of damage control imaginable that he was either a really stupid man or a really bad liar. Sadly there is obviously truth in both.

Mostly I don't care that he has this weird hobby as long as we find out that this took place between consenting adults. Whether or not his marriage can survive this is, as far as I am concerned, between the Congressman and his wife. And, yes, the lying to the public is a problem.

But beside that, I see this as more of a personal tragedy by a man who did something incredibly stupid. God knows it's not a liberal vs. conservative thing. Men on both sides of the aisle have been doing stupid things when it comes to sex for a long time. That's not likely to change.

He wasn't publicly condemning behaviour he was personally engaged in either, another pathetic thing that some politicians have been known to do.

Look, I'm not defending him, I'm simply saying that politicians too often get away with lying to the country about things that are of huge political and moral consequence but when there's a penis involved or any hint of sexual indiscretion, by golly, stop the presses.

Call me crazy, but getting the country into a war based on a blatant lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction leading to the needless death of who knows how many is just a tad more immoral than some idiot who sends naughty pictures of himself to women over the internet or via twitter.

We just get so damned excited about sex. And if Weiner is actually telling the truth this time, there wasn't even any of that, just pictures and now we hear maybe a phone call or two. Okay. Not good.

Again, I'm not defending the man. It's icky. But let's keep things in perspective.

What a jackass.

Can we move on now? Probably not for a while, unfortunately.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)

Was Weiner framed?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

From the start (of Weinergate), Rep. Anthony Weiner has claimed that his Twitter account was hacked. While he says that he cannot say "with certitude" that the photo in question is not of him, which is a bit odd, he stresses that he did not send any such photo and that he is "the victim of a prank."

Is that credible?

Yes. Yes it is. I won't get into the details, but blogger Joseph Cannon -- and you're right, Jon Stewart, it does sometimes take bloggers to do the investigative reporting that the "mainstream" media refuse to do, or are too lazy to do -- explained what might have happened in an essential post earlier today. Suffice it to say that it's incredibly easy to "hack" (although it's not really hacking) into a Yfrog e-mail account like Weiner's and from there to make it seem as if a photo originated with the Twitter account connected to the Yfrog account. Again, Cannon explains how, and he's discovered an anomaly, added to all the other evidence, that proves the photo in question must have originated somewhere else -- that is, not with Weiner.

And who was the culprit? The evidence appears to point to Dan Wolfe, "a partisan zealot" who "was obsessed with Congressman Weiner. His obsession strikes many as downright pathological." It was Wolfe who first "reported" on the the photo.

Whether Andrew Breitbart is behind it is another matter, but his right-wing site Big Government has been reporting salaciously on Weinergate from the start. And of course the photo was first published there. 

You do the math.

Even if Breitbart wasn't involved, he went with the photo, and the story, without knowing the details, which is par for the course for him. And regardless of his involvement, it seems pretty clear that this was indeed a vicious right-wing prank.

Surprised?

My views on Weinergate

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Reluctantly, I wade in...

First, if Rep. Weiner really did tweet a photo of his penis, or rather of his underwear with a prominent bulge, he's an idiot (among other things). Have we not learned that social networking, like much of the Internet (e.g., Craigslist), isn't private?

Second, he's not handling the crisis well. Even if he didn't do it, even if he finds the media's obsession ridiculous, he should know that treating the media poorly will only hurt him more (and make it seem as if he's done something wrong that he's trying to cover up. Given the absence of facts, what matters is image, and his image is suffering.

Third, this may very well have been (yet another) conservative dirty trick, with someone hacking into Weiner's Twitter account. Breitbart? Someone operating with Breitbart's backing? Maybe. It would fit the profile.

Fourth, Weiner's lawyer is looking into "what civil or criminal actions should be taken, but why hasn't a formal investigation been launched yet, by Capitol Police or the FBI? Shouldn't Weiner want there to be an investigation?

Fifth, is it Weiner? (Whether it is or isn't, how ridiculously stupid is this? A poll asking if it's him? How would anyone know? What bothers me as much as anything about "Weinergate" (because, of course, it has to be a "-gate," is how lascivious the media are, not to mention much of the public.) 

Sixth, who cares?