I asked my Facebook and Twitter followers Tuesday how liberal media members would save disgraced New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner so he wouldn't have to drop out of the race.
Andrew Sullivan certainly did his part in a Wednesday piece titled "Breaking: Man Gets Off Online" wherein he actually wrote, "In this new Internet Age someone has to be the person who makes sexting not an excludable characteristic for public office."
Throughout the coverage of the latest Anthony Weiner sex scandal on Wednesday's NBC Today, hosts and correspondents repeatedly made comparisons between Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, and her long-time boss Hillary Clinton. At one point, Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski declared that Abedin "has learned from the master, Hillary Clinton" on how to deal with scandal. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
In a later segment, chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd similarly touted Clinton as Abedin's mentor in damage control: "But you can't help but remember, Huma works for Hillary Clinton. Is that her political role model? Is that her political role model as a spouse? Is that where she's getting her advice? Well, we know what Hillary Clinton did as a political spouse in the same situation."
CBS Evening News stood out among the Big Three evening newscasts on Tuesday in their failure to cover former Rep. Anthony Weiner's admission that he sent lewd text messages even after his resignation in 2011. The CBS show apparently deemed the British royal family's new baby, the doping scandal in baseball, and whale watching to be more important news items. ABC's World News and NBC Nightly News both devoted air time to the Weiner story.
The network finally reported on the latest revelations about the disgraced politician on Wednesday's CBS This Morning, but failed to point out his Democratic affiliation. Jan Crawford merely identified him as a "former U.S. congressman turned New York City mayoral candidate."
Appearing on Wednesday's NBC Today, MSNBC Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough made a strange analogy while discussing the latest Anthony Weiner sex scandal: "You know, let's just say he is the Chuck Yeager of sex scandals, he is constantly pushing the envelope, and breaking – I mean this is like The Right Stuff for sex scandals. Nobody has ever been here before, he is in new ground, new territory." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Moments earlier, Scarborough put Weiner in line with other disgraced politicians making political comebacks: "We now officially live in the age of Bill Clinton, where you can survive a scandal. I mean, you look at Mark Sanford, you look at David Vitter, you of course look at President Bill Clinton, you look at Eliot Spitzer....it's not about the scandal, it's about competence. And the question is, can these people do their jobs?"
MSNBC’s Morning Joe spent nearly half of their Wednesday program covering the latest revelations in the Anthony Weiner scandal, yet never once mentioned that the disgraced former congressman and New York City mayoral candidate is a Democrat. The panel was extremely critical of Weiner and his candidacy, but apparently did not consider the candidate’s political affiliation to be of any importance to the story.
But while the (D) label was never applied to Weiner – save for one graphic showing a Democratic primary poll – the MSNBC show did have time to squeeze in two partisan labels – one for Republican Senator David Vitter and one for Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, in a round-up of other scandal-scarred politicians. In that same round-up, Democrat Bill Clinton was, like Weiner, not labeled.
For some reason, press reports I've seen thus far dealing with revelations that disgraced former congressman and now-New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner continued "sexting" after his June 2011 resignation won't directly tell us that he didn't stop sexting -- assuming we've heard the last of this, which is by no means certain -- until November 2012 or January of this year, 4-6 months before he declared his Gotham mayoral candidacy. Additionally, he kept communicating with one of his partners, while supposedly not sexting, until April, the month before he began his run.
The four-month time frame can be inferred from the first excerpted paragraph after the jump in an Associated Press report by Jonathan Lemire (bolds and numbered tags are mine):
Former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner, now a New York mayoral candidate, admitted Tuesday to sending out lewd photos of himself even after he resigned from Congress for doing so back in June of 2011.
During the previous scandal, up until Weiner's resignation, members of the media moved from casting the evidence against him as a smear job to acknowledging his mistake while imploring him to stay in Congress to mourning the "tragedy" of his downfall and resignation and insisting he was too talented to stay out of politics for long.
Isaac Chotiner at The New Republic exposed New York magazine writer Mark Jacobson as a Huma Abedin shoe-polisher. “Abedin always gets good press, but this piece takes it to a new level. As a public service, I have chosen the four silliest/creepiest tidbits.”
1. “She approached in a knit white top and navy-blue business skirt, her dark, almost black hair down to her shoulders. She wore bright-red lipstick, which gave her lips a 3-D look, her brown eyes were pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent in the history of the human race.”
On Monday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell not only mocked disgraced former Democratic officeholders Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer for their efforts to return to political office, but he even suggested that former President George W. Bush is setting a better example by working to fight cancer in Africa.
After playing clips of Weiner and Spitzer talking about returning to office, O'Donnell responded:
Touchy, touchy. Despite Team Anthony Weiner's best efforts at political rehabilitation, there's just no way to shore up his sorest scandal spot. As the New York Post reported this week, Weiner had a bit of a snit fit when a local Democratic official boldly slammed his sexting habits with underage girls.
Chris Owens, the Dems' state committee member in northwest Brooklyn, called out the skeezy ex-congressman at a mayoral candidate forum. "I am outraged and disgusted by you," Owens told Weiner. "Both by what you did and by the fact that you have the arrogance to run for mayor. I want to understand how you explain to us how you used a public facility to tweet offensive material to ... minors you did not know, you then lied about it ... and now you come back."
MSNBC and Anthony Weiner: made for each other like a frank and a bun?
Today's New York Daily News reports that when NYC mayoral candidate Weiner got into an argument on the campaign trail yesterday, he boasted that despite his mistakes, "I am still gonna be out there leaning forward." "Lean Forward" is of course MSNBC's lefty slogan, featured in many promos that NB has analyzed, as here and here. More after the jump.
From time to time, Americans manage to elect extraordinarily corruptible people—and these walking moral catastrophes, in turn, pass laws for us, enforce those laws for us, presume to lecture us, and run, in general, as much of our lives as they can gets their hands on. It's not that we don't care about being governed by vulgarians, and it's not that we're pathologically gullible—so what is it? What's the secret of their success? How do they hold on to power for so long? The short answer is: the media—with a little help from human nature.
Such was the case with Weinergate, which most people still regard as a sex scandal and not the story of a scandalous character. Former Congressman Anthony Weiner has recently begun his campaign to become the next mayor of New York City, and given New York’s bizarre and inexplicable gluttony for punishment, he has a real chance of being elected. Then again, maybe New Yorkers are catching on – the fact that Weiner was booed last weekend at a parade offers a sliver of hope.