Is Wiener's wiener a career killer?

Another big reason has been politics. Polling shows that a wife’s reaction is a strong cue to voters, Ms. Lake said, particularly to blue-collar women and women over 50. “If the wife is there, they are more accepting,” she said. “It matters to them if the wife says they are pulling together, but if she looks injured, they will turn against you.”

Mr. Weiner’s political career, for the moment, is on ice. So Ms. Abedin did not face the same political imperative that Mrs. Clinton and others have faced, to serve as character witnesses for their candidate-husbands.

Ms. Abedin deeply guards her privacy even as she is married to one high-profile public figure and works for another, Mrs. Clinton, now the secretary of state. (Ms. Abedin became an intern for Mrs. Clinton in 1996, when she was first lady, and was her traveling chief of staff during the presidential campaign in 2008. She is now her senior aide.)

Still, expectations for the betrayed wife of today have been flipped upside down. The question now is not why Ms. Abedin was not at the news conference, but why would she be there?

“It’s very gladdening to us — and I think most people — to see Huma not being dragged visually through this,” said Robert King, the co-creator and executive producer of “The Good Wife.” He and his wife, Michelle, developed the CBS drama after being riveted by the scene in 2008 of Silda Wall Spitzer, a corporate lawyer, standing glumly behind her husband, Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, when he resigned as governor of New York after being caught in a prostitution scandal.

At that point, Mr. King said, the serial images of these wives being exposed to the public in such vulnerable moments began to seem like a cliché. Everyone is now well aware of the political calculations involved, he said, and he would like to think that the show has helped bring such public humiliations “to the end of the line.”

This was very survivable and yet Wiener did not, his wife's lack of support is probably what did him in. If it were me I would seriously consider ditching her.

To me he did himself in by not having more of a backbone and just publicly stating from the get go that the only person he is accountable to in this matter is his wife and as far as resigning hell will freeze over first.

Being unable/unwilling to convince his wife to support him publicly would be indicative of a lack of a backbone.

If I was in his silly shoes I do not think I would feel that I had a moral right to ask her to appear in public over this matter and it would not go very well with taking the position that this is a private matter that is none of the damn public or congress business in the first place.

Pelosi would have had a very difficult time continuing the attack after than.

As soon as Pelosi and the others leaders became convince that he is not going to resign come hell or high water the attacks from that quarter would stop as it would not be in their interests to continue with no chance of any grain.

As soon as Pelosi and the others leaders became convince that he is not going to resign come hell or high water the attacks from that quarter would stop as it would not be in their interests to continue with no chance of any grain.

Normally I would have expected that Pelosi would drop the assault once he rolled over, agreed to play by the normal rules, which he did when he went into seclusion for two weeks to let the story die. Pelosi refused to play ball, she worked to keep the story going. I would love to know what was used to get him out, was it a threat that he would never earn another penny in politics? Was it a promise of support of the party if he wanted to run for office again? Either way this almost certainly boiled down to money.

By Richard cohen, Monday, July 11, 4:33 PM
A date has been set — and the candidates chosen — for an election to fill the seat of the disgraced Anthony Weiner. To my disappointment, none of the candidates is Weiner himself, who is surely the last bullying victim of the academic year. His resignation was demanded by Nancy Pelosi, who heroically put party over principle and, without so much as determining whether a law had been broken, a body found or even the ethical canons of Congress violated, ordered Weiner to be gone. The president backed her, saying that if he were Weiner, he would resign. Unmentioned was that if Obama were Weiner, we’d have a budget agreement.

Weiner was supposedly banished on pragmatic grounds. He was a distraction from work not being done, deals not being made, a budget deficit turned over to the Good Lord for managing and a war-non-war in Libya that the House of Representatives will fund but not support — or something like that.



The 2012 presidential race gets old-school.
Weiner went — and in an appropriate bow to the weird, did so in a news conference. Much of the press piled on. It hardly mattered, it seemed, that Weiner intended his pictures, as lewd and strange as they might be, for specific recipients. Most of the women solicited his attention and the one who appeared on the “Today” show (along with two lawyers) said she had reciprocated in kind. Traci Nobles, one of six known Weiner Twitterettes, told a clearly astonished Ann Curry that she was “flattered” by Weiner’s attention and that she had, in obvious homage to Edith Piaf, no regrets (“Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”). So much for a parade of victims.

In fact, there are victims. One is due process, which envisions a procedure other than a lynch mob for Congress to rid itself of a miscreant. Another is common decency, which means you stand up for someone who’s done no legal wrong. And you have to ask yourself what sort of precedent is being set. What sort of world is it where a digital Peeping Tom such as Andrew Breitbart gets hold of a picture meant for others and displays it to the world — not to reveal a crime but merely to titillate and mortify? For this, Breitbart even took over a Weiner news conference, acting as if he had done a public service and deserved recognition — maybe a Pulitzer Prize. Rupert Murdoch can make the presentation.

Anthony Weiner and Bill Clinton have much in common. Both had their private lives invaded. Both men were clamped in the stocks of mortification, Clinton by his conservative political enemies and that latter-day Javert, Kenneth Starr, and Weiner by Breitbart and other conservative stalkers. In both cases, the persecution was supposedly justified because both men had lied. But they had not lied to cover up a crime, but to cover up an embarrassment. There is a difference, and while Clinton crossed a line — he lied to a grand jury — Weiner did no such thing. He lied to save face. Here and there in Congress might be someone who’s done something similar.

We live in a world where there is precious little privacy. Sony has been hacked; so has Citibank and even the CIA. Every click of the keyboard commoditizes you — leaving info for someone to sell or steal. Over in England, Murdoch’s minions hacked the voice-mail of a 13-year-old abducted girl (later found murdered), finally rousing a cowardly political establishment to wails of hollow protest and compelling Murdoch to close his News of the World: Headless Newspaper in Spineless Nation. Here, there or anywhere, no one is safe.

You would think that just one member of Congress would suggest that Weiner’s privacy was worth protecting, even if his actions were not and the man himself a creep. You would think there’d be a chorus denouncing the parasites in the media whose sustenance is the misery of others and insisting that not until a law is broken should citizens be deprived of representation. After all, polls taken at the time suggested Weiner’s constituents still supported him, somehow distinguishing between his private life and his public service. More than a tree grows in Brooklyn. Common sense does, too.

Whole weeks — eons in the age of Twitter — have gone by since Weiner resigned, so that we now have some perspective. We may ask, “What was that all about?” It was about many things, not the least of them being what Clarence Thomas once appropriately called “a high-tech lynching.” The rope surely will be used again.

Multiple polls now have the Dems loosing the seat...is there any chance of Polosi admitting that she fucked up.....of her admitting that her desire to not deal with Weiner cost the party power...and that the whole exercise was over BS that she should have let slide ?

Edit: I could ask the same question about Obama, but we all know better than to expect for him to ever admitt to a mistake..ala clinton all we will get out of Obama is the victim card...