Weiner tweets his wanger

[Andrew D]

How about this one, honey?

No, sweetheart. She is pretty, but she seems a bit standoffish.

Yeah, now that you mention it, she does a bit. Ooh, honey! Look at this one!

There we go, sweetheart. I could definitely get into it with her.

Okay, so should we send her a picture?

Absolutely. Let me just fluff you up a bit ....

I have no difficulty seeing that. Of course, I was born and raised in San Francisco ....

[Scooter]

I did ask, but no...

At least she didn't break your other arm.

[Lord Jim]

(I can only imagine the coffee talk between Huma & Hillary)

One of the more ironic and amusing aspects to me about this story is the Clinton connection...

Mrs. Weiner was an intern for Mrs. Clinton back when she was First Lady, ( during the same time period when Monica Lewinsky was servicing serving as an intern for Mr. Bill) and she is now her Deputy Chief Of Staff at State.

Mr. Bill officiated at their wedding, and was among the people Weiner called to apologize to for his week long lie-athon.

Man, can you imagine what you could have gotten from TMZ for a tape recording of that conversation....

Talk about seeking out a sympathetic ear....(A journalist who was on Morning Joe asked, "What did he want to apologize to Clinton for? Copyright infringement?")

I am absolutely no fan of Weiner's...he's been one of the most obnoxious, self important, and abrasive lefties on the Hill...sort of a Congressional version of Keith Olbermann...

However, when I watched the Congressman's bizarre press conference last Monday (made all the more bizarre by the fact that the guy who broke the story and who Weiner had falsely accused of hacking his Twitter account was the warm-up act) I was ready to give him props for at least one thing:

The fact that he didn't try to make excuses, or blame it on some sort of "sickness" or "addiction", or run off to hide in some rehab facility.... but repeatedly said that he was completely personally responsible and wasn't going to blame anyone or anything else.

I thought that was very stand up of him, and refreshing for a public figure.

But now apparently he has done exactly that, apparently in the hopes that he can hide out in a rehab facility until the heat's off and the pressure for him to resign subsides....

At the moment, that pressure is growing by the day....

A poll taken immediately after his press conference showed that 56% of the voters in his district wanted him to stay....However, that was before the story about the 17 year old came out, and who knows how many more shoes are going to drop.....

It is this fear of a long protracted shoes dropping that now has the Democratic leadership starting to pressure him to quit. From their perspective, everyday they have to deal with this, is another day they're not focusing on how the evil Republicans want to throw Grandma off a cliff....

DNC Chair and fellow member of Congress Debbie Wasserman Schultz had this to say: ""It is with great disappointment that I call on Representative Anthony Weiner to resign. The behavior he has exhibited is indefensible and Representative Weiner's continued service in Congress is untenable. This sordid affair has become an unacceptable distraction for Representative Weiner, his family, his constituents and the House – and for the good of all, he should step aside and address those things that should be most important: his and his family's well-being."

That's pretty damning and categorical; (and would never have been issued without the approval of the White House) and he's getting more pressure from behind the scenes. The Hill Dems can't force him to resign, but they can certainly make life unpleasant for him. Weiner's arrogance and abrasiveness have not won him many friends on his side of the aisle either, and when you get in a fix like this, you really need to have some friends you can call on to stand by you. Weiner (unlike Charlie Wrangel for example ,who has numerous friends among his colleagues in both parties) hasn't got any.

[Scooter]

LOL, I'm watching Bill Maher, he's got Jane Lynch (from Glee) on and the two of them are reading the transcript of Weiner's chats with one of the women he was diddling with online. It SO sounded like incredibly bad porn dialogue.

[Lord Jim]

LOL, I'm watching Bill Maher, he's got Jane Lynch (from Glee) on and the two of them are reading the transcript of Weiner's chats with one of the women he was diddling with online. It SO sounded like incredibly bad porn dialogue.

LMAO

All they need is some really cheesy light jazz playing in the background, and they'll have that 80's porno movie thing down to a T....

Here's a Youtube link for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu7Q6Wp2FLg

[Scooter]

Wow, a Jewish girl who sucks cock. This thing is ready to do damage.

You get yourself to work and save this country from those cocksucking Republicans.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

[Lord Jim]

nice, just what I'm looking for. I want to bang the future mayor of nyc!

I think she's SOL on that one...

Here's a link to a transcript of their exchanges: (there's more than what was in the Maher skit)

http://www.radaronline.com/sites/radaro ... marked.pdf

Weiner says he never intended to meet any of the women, but part of this sure reads like he was seriously looking to hook up with this one....

[Andrew D]

And we are buried under a mountain of hypocrisy. (Look into Santorum/Ensign.)

And all the while, things that matter keep on happening. And our attention deeps on being diverted from them.

[Scooter]

Well excuse me for finding an excuse for a good laugh as an escape from a world that is going to hell all around me. Bad Scooter. Baaaaad Scooter. (gives self several slaps on the back of the hand)

Some of us are actually sufficiently adept at multitasking that we can see the humour in this while simultaneously keeping our eye on the ball. Perhaps you should give it a try, if giving the barbed stick up your ass another quarter turn doesn't do the trick.

[Scooter]

Weiner says he never intended to meet any of the women, but part of this sure reads like he was seriously looking to hook up with this one....

Welcome to the internet world. It's all fantasy. No one chats up someone on the other side of the country with the intent of actually going to meet them. If their intention is to hook up they go about it differently.

At least, that's what I've heard (cough, splutter)

[Scooter]

u owe me big time for keeping this all quiet…i am defending u to the death on every blog and to everyone….telling everyone u would never send dirty messages to women

Didn't take much to get her to spill, apparently.

[Lord Jim]

Welcome to the internet world. It's all fantasy. No one chats up someone on the other side of the country with the intent of actually going to meet them. If their intention is to hook up they go about it differently.

Well, that may be...(though traveling across country for a guy in his position is no big deal; especially to Las Vegas...with all the conventions there, he could easily come up with a legitimate reason for going)

Here's the part I'm specifically referring to, from the transcript (Weiner's words in bold):

September 17th 2010
i like this cute new pics of you! when r you coming to vegas to help me beat up the right wing
crazies?

this is my "pull my finger" shot. glad you like. i'm ready for a vegas trip. truth telling
during the day. got a night plan for us?


haha..that was a very loaded questions! i've got all kinds of night plans for us! when are you
coming?

dunno. make me an offer i can't refuse.

In fairness to Weiner, that took place last fall, and though she brings his coming out to see her in Vegas up one more time later, I don't see any more focused discussion about it.

[Scooter]

Stuff like that gets said all the time in internet sex chats, it's all talk (at least, so I've heard )

[loCAtek]

Luv the opening commercial joke, but the rest is on topic;


http://teamcoco.com/content/penis-disguise-kit

[Andrew D]

Well excuse me for finding an excuse for a good laugh as an escape from a world that is going to hell all around me. Bad Scooter. Baaaaad Scooter. (gives self several slaps on the back of the hand)

Some of us are actually sufficiently adept at multitasking that we can see the humour in this while simultaneously keeping our eye on the ball. Perhaps you should give it a try, if giving the barbed stick up your ass another quarter turn doesn't do the trick.

So why is it that when I turn on CNN or FOX or MSNBC or any of the others, I am bombarded with stories about Weiner's weiner, but I almost never see anything about the war(s) in sub-Saharan Africa?

Are the news networks busily multitasking?

I realize that it is a trivial distraction. I mean, how important can the deaths of at least 3 million people be when there's an opportunity to show fuzzed-out photos of a Congressman's bulging underwear?

Yes, I haven't devoted my blogging life to the Congolese war either. But can you really blame me for pointing out that there is stuff happening that is of greater significance than pictures sent by a Congressman over the internet?

And, of course, there is the hypocrisy. Where was all the media hoopla when Ensign was not just banging one of his staffers but then fired her, fired her husband, arranged a cushy lobbying job for her husband, and arranged payments to cover it all up?

And people say that the so-called "mainstream media" are biased toward the left. And I have just been elected to the papacy.

(Oh, by the way, it seems to me that stick up the ass, barbed or not, is more your province than mine. It's all about pressure on the anal wall ....)

[loCAtek]

oh, you're not adept at multi-tasking, and more dept at projecting/criticizing? Yea, we knew that by now.

[Lord Jim]

Where was all the media hoopla when Ensign was not just banging one of his staffers but then fired her, fired her husband, arranged a cushy lobbying job for her husband, and arranged payments to cover it all up?

That's easy to answer; modern media is a heavily visual medium, and there were no pictures; there were no chat logs....there was no one willing top pop up and dish the dirt on the Today show....

If there had been similar pictures of Ensign in his underwear, or dirty talk transcripts, you'd have seen more coverage...(and when the full extent of what Ensign had been doing became known, he was forced to resign)

A more comparable example would be Tom Foley, where you did have these elements present....and he got the same kind of intense media focus as Weiner.

I don't think you can blame the media for this; (or any MOTU conspiracy) the news media, (particularly the 24 hour news channels) are in a fiercely competitive environment, and they're giving the public what the Arbitron ratings tell them the public wants. A congressman in his tighty whities draws a much larger audience then a grinding war in place where we have no involvement and little understanding of.

[BoSoxGal]

MSM wouldn't be wasting time on the Congo or Sudan absent Weiner's scandal, Andrew D. You know better than that.

[Lord Jim]

MSM wouldn't be wasting time on the Congo or Sudan absent Weiner's scandal, Andrew D. You know better than that.

That's right. They'd still be talking about Schwarzenegger and Edwards...

[Andrew D]

... the news media, (particularly the 24 hour news channels) are in a fiercely competitive environment, and they're giving the public what the Arbitron ratings tell them the public wants. A congressman in his tighty whities draws a much larger audience then a grinding war in place where we have no involvement and little understanding of.

MSM wouldn't be wasting time on the Congo or Sudan absent Weiner's scandal, Andrew D. You know better than that.

So is Arbitron right? Do we really care about Weiner's sexual stupidities more than we care about millions of people dying?

The media -- left, right, center, whatever -- had no problem coming up with visual images of starving children with bloated bellies, and they helped to generate a massive effort to respond to famine in Ethiopia. They had no problem coming up with visual images of brutal slaughter in Rwanda and Burundi -- if anything, they had problems coming up with visual images that they didn't have to fuzz -- and they helped to generate a (lamentably belated) response to that genocide.

Are images of people viciously hacked to death by machete-wielding psycopaths somehow less captivating than images of someone's bulging briefs? I don't think so.

And I think that history backs me up on that: Visual images from Vietnam captured the public's attention back then, and I see no reason why visual images from the Congo would not capture people's attention now. We were, of course, involved in Vietnam in ways in which we are not involved in the Congo -- which does not mean that we are not involved in the Congo; it just means that we are not sending boatloads of young people to fight there. But we weren't sending boatloads of young people to fight in famine-stricken Ethiopia either, and the visual images brought to us by the mainstream media had a huge impact nonetheless.

So are the ratings really driving the bus? Or are the ratings just a contest among the things that people have selected for us to see in the first place?