07 Jun 2011

Weiner Roast

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Anthony Weiner in full denunciatory mode on the House floor.

Victor Davis Hanson welcomes Anthony Weiner to the ever-lengthening list of fallen liberal moralists.

Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a host of others. What do their tax hypocrisies, sexual indulgences, and aristocratic socialist lifestyles all have in common?

Collectively, they represent a self-appointed or elected global elite that oversees, lectures about — in sanctimonious fashion — the ethical responsibilities of the redistributive state.

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Allahpundit reports that ABC news has been forwarding vindictively to everyone the following video from a little ways back in which Weiner asserts his innocence and defiantly confronts his interviewer. AllahPundit tells us that he himself feels uneasy watching Weiner’s unabashed and brazen dishonesty, that there is about it a disturbing abnormality, a whiff of the Bates Motel… something that makes his skin crawl.

How creepy? Creepy enough that ABC posted this footage (which was recorded a few days ago, of course) just within the past hour and then sent around the link via e-mail. I didn’t go hunting through their archives for it, in other words; they’re pushing it on people tonight themselves because, understandably, they (a) want to atone for having aired this guy’s lies as news last week and (b) presumably want the world to see what an almost pathologically fluid liar he was when cornered. The last 80 seconds of it will have you squirming in your seat — not only the way he claims to be the innocent target of a hoax but his insistence on lecturing the interviewer for assuming the worst, taking care to maintain accusatory eye contact the whole way. It’s genuinely disturbing.

If, like me, you felt bad for him when he choked up at his presser today, spend four minutes watching this. It’ll straighten you right out.

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The New York Post wins the headline-of-the-day award.

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The Anchoress comments on the impact of the Weiner scandal on the press, particularly on Barbara Walters.

To my way of thinking, the saddest part of this story is Barbara Walters devolution; this once-respected newswoman nears the end of her distinguished career by playing as ghastly a non-sequitur as I’ve ever heard, saying (in essence) if Sarah Palin ‘can ride around on her bus,’ Weiner Can Stay in Congress.

When Joy Behar, of all people has to defend Sarah Palin from your bizarrely gratuitous swipe, you know you’ve let your hate lead you too far into Whackyland.

Listen (if you can stand the noise of this show) to Walters talking about how she “knows” Weiner and “knows” his wife, who of course works for Hillary Clinton, whom she also knows.

This is the problem with the mainstream media in a nutshell. They “know” the people they’re supposed to be covering, and they consider themselves “friends” of those people. And it has ruined them. As you listen to Walters, all you see is passionate advocacy; not a newswoman concerned with the truth of a story, but a partisan doing everything she can to divert attention from a story she doesn’t like — even to comparing a private citizen on a bus to a sitting congressman having some sort of cyber-engagement in his office — and championing her “friend.”

This has never been a nice story, which is why I haven’t written about it until now. But I still am less interested in Weiner than in how the press reacted to this story. Some were willing to believe him, simply because he said they should. Some seemed like they didn’t want to believe him, but didn’t want to not believe him, even more. The usual partisans tried to blame and smear the usual partisans.

We don’t actually have a genuine press any more.

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SDD

The reflexive reaction of the press is even more fascinating when you consider the prior probabilities involved here. Surely after watching the endless parade of politicians to the microphones of shame, it would occur to them that the odds were overwhelmingly good that Tony Weiner would be found out. Yet they defended him anyway. Even lefties like Barbara Walters ought to be capable of doing the math.
Now perhaps the public looks at Walters and shakes their collective heads, but I suspect within the circles that she travels she will even today get nothing but kudos for rising to Weiner’s defense.



Thalpy

Equivalencies are flying from all directions in vain attempts to provide cover for this evil little man. Weiner is a bully; he’s receiving exactly what he deserves. There are so many more like him, but this is a good start.



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