Anthony Weiner will have a lot of time on his hands now, and for his pregnant wife’s sake, let’s hope he doesn’t spend a lot of it alone on the computer.
More than a week after admitting he lied and that the infamous gray underwear crotch picture was his, even while adamantly refusing to step down, Weiner emerged from a few days of an unknown form of rehab for his overblown narcissism and incessant need to be sexually desired by strange women on the Internet to face the cameras once again.
His news conference was marred from the beginning by a heckler who cheered when he announced his resignation, loudly screaming “pervert” and then another, apparently from the Howard Stern show, who shouted “are you really seven inches” and “are you going to keep your hot physique” before being thrown out.
Any dignity Weiner may have been able to salvage was shredded, despite his efforts to appease his constituents from the same location where he launched his first political campaign as a city councilman 20 years ago, a senior center in Brooklyn.
After all, he could have issued a written statement, but this is a man who loves cameras, all right, and especially seeing himself in the lens.
There was too much pressure for Weiner to do anything else but toss in the towel, and after the release of those self-portraits from the House of Representatives private gym, we know he likes towels.
While Weiner goes off to spend time with his wife, presuming she doesn’t kick him to the curb, it’s unknown what will happen to Gloria Allred’s “case” against him. It was inevitable that the media-savvy lawyer grabbed her face time in the scandal in a news conference Wednesday with client Ginger Lee, a porn actress and aspiring realtor who says she was the recipient of Weiner’s sexualized texts, but didn’t send any back herself. She just wanted to talk politics. There were apparently 100 messages between March and a couple weeks ago, right after Weiner mistakenly tweeted the gray underwear shot to his followers, of which Lee was one.
You may recall that Lee was the one who last week revealed that Wiener told her to lie when the press started asking questions about their relationship. He even offered the help of his PR people, who may or not have been on the congressional payroll. Now that there won’t be a House ethics investigation, we’ll never know.
With the president weighing in and democratic party leaders calling for his resignation, Weiner dodged a bullet there.
The more that came out about him, especially that batch of photos he took of himself in the mirror of the gym and the continual references to his “package” in conversations with Lee, it’s unbelievable the guy had much time or energy left for focusing on the many issues that required action in his district.
At 46 years old, he seems abnormally obsessed his own sexuality and ever desirous of strange women to reassure him of his desirability–all done at arms length on computer and phone screens rather than in real life.
Most congressional sex scandals only involve one other person. In the case of all the Weinerettes, it seems as if the women first approached Weiner to actually talk about politics via Facebook or Twitter, and not sex. He was the one who changed course, and many of them went down the raunchy path with him and even urged him on.
If you need any proof, just read the transcripts of his Facebook messages with Lisa Weiss, a Las Vegas blackjack dealer. Or better yet, listen to the dramatization done by Bill Marr and Jane Lynch to hilarious effect. It’s the featured video on our homepage.
As for Weiner, well, to paraphrase Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’ll be back.
