…dick:
It was a low-profile race, but Weiner attracted positive reviews, aggressively campaigning and using his performer’s flair to steal the show at debates and candidate forums. But as the all-important Sept. 10 Democratic primary approached, the consensus was that he’d come up short and that, as Newsday put it in an editorial endorsing one of his opponents, he should “try again next time.”
* Continue reading
It was at this point that Weiner’s campaign decided to blanket the district with leaflets attacking his opponents. But these were no ordinary campaign attacks: They played the race card, and at a very sensitive time. They were also anonymous.
Just weeks earlier, the Crown Heights riot — a deadly, days-long affair that brought to the surface long-standing tension between the area’s black and Jewish populations — had played out a few miles away from the 48th District. The episode had gripped all of New York and had been national news. It was just days after order had been restored that Weiner’s campaign distributed its anonymous leaflets, which linked Cohen — whose voters he was targeting in particular — to Jesse Jackson and David Dinkins, who was then New York’s mayor. It is hard to imagine two more-hated political figures in the 48th District at that moment. Jackson just a few years earlier had called New York “Hymie town,” and it was an article of faith among white voters in Weiner’s part of Brooklyn that Dinkins had protected the black rioters in Crown Heights — and thus endangered the white population — by refusing to order a harsh police crackdown. (Two years later, Dinkins would lose to Rudy Giuliani by an 80-20 percent margin in the 48th District.) The leaflets urged voters to “just say no” to the “Jackson-Dinkins agenda” that Cohen supposedly represented. At City Hall, Dinkins held up the flier and branded it “hateful.”
It’s impossible to say what precise effect this all had on the election, but it clearly didn’t hurt Weiner. In a surprise result, he finished in first place — 125 votes ahead of Garson, and 195 ahead of Cohen. Only after the ballots were counted did he admit that he’d been behind the leaflets, claiming that “We didn’t want the source to be confused with the message.” This prompted an editorial rebuke from the New York Times, which noted that “Mr. Weiner’s hit-and-run tactics tarnish his come-from-behind campaign.”
Not that it mattered. The primary was over and Weiner had won. The general election was a formality, and months later he became the youngest City Council member in New York history. Seven years after that, he parlayed his Council spot into a seat in Congress, and you know the story from there. But who knows where Weiner would be today if he hadn’t made such a dark appeal to racial hostility days after a notorious riot?
Salon goes on to say that it is perhaps unfair that Weiner could lose his congressional seat over a “stupid” scandal in which he repeatedly lied to the press and his constituents, opened himself up to blackmail, potentially engaged in kiddie porn, used public time and (perhaps) public resources to engage in his online trysting, and then stood back and watched as his howling supporters libeled private citizens and attacked their livelihood, intimating that they were guilty of framing a sitting Congressman and hacking his online accounts — after all, that’s just silly nitpicking — but at least they did their job here and sussed out the part of Weiner’s character that we’ve always recognized: arrogant, vicious, sneaky, and fundamentally dishonest, though not without the ability to rationalize his own tawdry acts, should they happen to assist him achieve his goals.
He’s the kind of insulated, unopposed Democrat who has had no fear of the media, and who — because he is in a safe district — was free to use his special gifts to become the left’s hatchet man and character assassin.
And as a perk, he allowed himself leave to showcase his minimalist schlong to women he’d met online — using his position as a Congressman as the lure, convinced he’d never be caught.
But hey: if that kind of piddling thing is going to get you booted from Congress, we may as well not even have a Congress, am I right? I mean, talk about impossible standards.
KEEP YOUR ETHICS CHARGES OUT OF MY PUBLICLY BROADCAST UNDERPANTS, WHERE IT SHARES TIME WITH MY COMPLETELY AVERAGE TUMESCENCE!
(h/t Dave O’C)
But Matt Damon likes Weiner. It is a falling out point between Damon and Afleck (Afleck does not like Weiner). So Weiner has that going for him.
Personally I want to see Alec Baldwin win mayor of NYC. That fucker will beclown himself. Baldwin is capable of making Dinkins look competent. It would suck for New York, but oh well.
That’s why Weiner denied this all the way at first… And why initially he allowed the professional left to try and work their usual magic by pinning this all on Breitbart.
This all just proves what an odious hack he is, and strangely this sounds similar to the manuevering of Barack Obama’s early political career; where he disqualified nominating petitions and such.
In both cases the thought was that the end justified the means.
What is funny to me are the Leftists who, after a week or so of expressions of credulity in the little man with the big lies, turned on a dime and are now defending him by stating that what he did was not a “big deal.”
From their perspective my question is whether they think it would have been a big deal if one of the ladies he was sending pictures to had really been unfriendly to his worldview, and leveraged his pictures to “persuade” the Honorable Weiner to vote one way or another? If, for example, an unscrupulous operative had had Weiner pictures in the run up to the healthcare vote, do you think it would have been possible to strong-arm Weiner to stay with the liberal caucus that he led and to not vote for any Bill without a so-called “Public Option?” Something he already wanted to do and which galvanized his public perception as a “liberal fighter?” One could easily foresee Obamacare never having gotten the requisite votes in the House and therefore never having become law. Corrupting the legislative process, as they say.
Now, perhaps hard for the Left to understand, and perhaps less of a concern – imagine if the pictures had fallen into the hands of an agent of a foreign power and could have been used in a way deleterious to the interests of United States of America or her allies by forcing Weiner to reveal secret or classified information with National Security implications for fear of release of his meat tweets. Did the Honorable Weiner really seem like the kind of fellow who would have given up the ghost and admitted his transgressions to foreclose such a blackmail? Or did he seem like the kind of fellow who would have done anything to save himself from public embarrassment and the death of his political career?
Honestly, Alec, I don’t think our foreign enemies really need incriminating pictures of any Democrat to get their hands on state secrets and influence policy to our detriment. It would be like offering money to a tri-Delt for going down on you.
Cock shot emerges.
I can’t really tell what’s going on, there. Did he actually prune back the shrubbery around his deck to make it seem bigger? I’ve heard people say that’s the thing to do, if you need to.