As you have most likely heard by now Anthony Weiner has admitted to sending the lewd photos of himself over the internet, including the now infamous bulge shot.
I can’t begin to explain how frustrating this is. It’s not for the main subject of this story, his bulge and internet habits, but rather for his handling of the whole situation. Weiner went out and made false claims of being hacked and a lot of his supporters, including myself, accepted that story. He lied to us all and that is inexcusable.
If Weiner would have come out last week and said “hey I made a stupid mistake and there might be more of these out there. I apologize for this”, but he didn’t. He became defiant and took to lying, knowing tons more evidence was floating around the inter-tubes.
Stupid? Stupidity doesn’t even begin to describe this!
Then we have the whole Andrew Breitbart angle. Breitbart has no journalistic standards what-so-ever and sure didn’t exhibit any in the handling of this story, but he did get it right. I know a lot on the left will still take to blaming Breitbart, but let’s be honest with ourselves; if some blogger on the left got a picture of Boehner’s flannel-clad boner that he sent to some girl, it would be picked up by every other blog on the left. That’s the name of the game we all play.
There is one place that I still lay blame on this story and that is with the media. Yeah they should have reported it, but they have also kept on this story non-stop. Part of the blame does go to Weiner and his crap story at the beginning, but this story still garnered much more attention from the media than did the Mark Foley story, which is very similar except the fact that Weiner wasn’t engaging in this activity with underage children.
But how does Weiner get off?
Well one great thing working in Weiner’s advantage is the fact that he has never been some “family values”, bible thumping nut. Hypocrisy won’t bring him down, just maybe his stupidity. This isn’t the same as John Ensign, Larry Craig, David Vitter or Chris Lee. Everyone of those people preach family values to their constituents, yet they refuse to live by their own words. They exhibited hypocrisy in the purest form, yet their scrutiny under the media’s spotlight was far less than that Weiner will see.
So yes, this is a truly hurtful story, especially to those of us who trusted Weiner, but we must focus the most of our blame to the man we trusted the most, but also put a decent share onto the media and the extreme bias in which they handle these types of stories.