Matt Taibbi. (photo: Current TV)
26 July 13
Nathan's Fourth of July champ backs hot dog Anthony Weiner for mayorRim-shot! The event was the pre-Independence Day weigh-in for the annual Coney Island Hot Dog eating contest, and improbably contending New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner was there to secure the "endorsement" of perennial dog-pounding champ Joey "Jaws" Chestnut. "Joey Chestnut obviously has an affinity for Weiners," cracked the candidate, in a Twitter-ready sound bite.
Chestnut's actual endorsement must have been made
off-camera - I can't find him quoted in any of the campaign stories -
but we can take Weiner's word for it, right? It's not like the guy's
ever lied before. "I can no longer say I don't have the support of any
famous people," Weiner gushed, after scoring the endorsement.
Now, weeks later, the inevitable has happened: yet another sexting scandal
has popped up involving Weiner and, surprise surprise, this one was
still live a good year after he resigned from Congress promising never
to flap his hose across the face of the Internet ever again.
Predictably, a series of really gross, genuinely Favre-ean dong shots showed up on some Scottsdale, Arizona-based website called TheDirty.com.
It turns out that Weiner was pursuing his usual creepy
Internet rubfest with some poor sap of a woman from Princeton, Indiana
(which the Daily News noted is "one mouse click and 850 miles away from
Weiner") using the nom-de-wank of "Carlos Danger," a preposterous title
destined to be adopted by a whole generation of hackers and trolls
justifiably tired of the whole "Emmanuel Goldstein" meme.
I don't mean to sound like a prude, but what the hell
do you have to do to be disqualified from high-level politics in this
country? When someone told me a while back that Weiner was running for
Mayor, I thought it was a joke. This married politician sent unsolicited
pictures of his penis to female strangers on the Internet! It's not a
crime, I guess because indecent exposure laws haven't been updated for
the cyber age, but basically, he's a 21st-century flasher who used the
U.S. Congress as a raincoat. Then he got caught, had to resign from
Congress in what normally would be shame and disgrace, only to turn
around and start doing it all over again pretty much immediately.
I'm not saying the guy can't have a career after what
happened, but his options should be pretty limited - a rodeo clown,
maybe, or one of those guys who hands out fliers for strip clubs in
Times Square. In an absolute best-case scenario, a guest panelist on
some gross-out/embarrassing-video-footage compilation show on cable like
Manswers or America's Dumbest Criminals.
But Mayor of New York City? I know the bar was set
pretty low when Mike Bloomberg bought the office outright in 2001, but
we can't have sunk this far. And it's not just that he's some poor guy
who got caught jacking off on the Internet. He's also increasingly
tone-deaf and belligerently nuts in an inappropriate-Thanksgiving-guest
sort of way. Lawrence Downes of the Times passed on this tidbit just a few weeks back:
Anthony Weiner strides onstage at Simon Baruch Middle School and grabs the mic to talk to the good people of the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village Tenants Association. He takes his position beside, not behind, the lectern. He has nothing to hide.
He wears a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, and pants that brightly violate the boundary between orange and red. "I don't usually dress like this," he says. He explains that he was just at a rally in Greenwich Village, celebrating the Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage. Is he really saying he hasn't had time to change out of his gay pants?
Weiner simply isn't a well man. His campaign strategy
has been to act like his scandal and downfall never happened, but you
only need to catch his act a few times to realize that the strategy is
working precisely because Weiner isn't acting. He genuinely doesn't
think he did anything wrong and spends a lot of time, as an unwell
person would, slamming some nebulous "they" who he is convinced are the
real guilty parties in his personal melodrama. He talks a lot about how
his campaign is making those haters crazy, which - well, you've all read
Freud, or at least seen The Seven Percent Solution, you be the judge, tell me this isn't a classic case of projection:
I'm running a campaign in a different way . . . and it makes them nuts . . . . You know, someone once yelled out to Harry Truman at a campaign stop, he yelled out, 'Give 'em hell, Harry.' And you now what he said? He said, 'I'm just telling them the truth and it sounds like hell to them.' The very evidence that I'm doing it right is how crazy I'm making them, and I'm not gonna stop doing it.
As a pundit I know I'm supposed to enjoy political
car-wreck spectacles like this, but this Weiner candidacy is a very dark
story. He's surging in the polls mainly because the other candidates in
the New York mayoral race are so awful (Downes humorously called them
talented but "collectively uninspiring," like the Eagles) and because of
the I'll-do-absolutely-anything-to-get-in-the-newspapers factor that
New Yorkers always love and respect (just ask Joey Chestnut). But the
endgame here is that millions of New Yorkers might put a guy who needs a
nice quiet decade or two away from cameras and the Internet, maybe
manning an ice station or diving for abalone somewhere, into the least
therapeutic job in America.
It's crazy. I bet there are thousands of New Yorkers
out there right now who wouldn't hire Anthony Weiner to condo-sit (and
who wouldn't go near the areas around their desktop computers afterward
without a Haz-Mat suit), but would gladly send him to live in Gracie
Mansion. Believe me, I'm all for funny, but this really isn't as funny
as it sounds. This is one of those ideas that sounds hilarious when
you're high, but the next morning - not so much. Can we not go there
this time?
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