Is NY Democrat, Rep. Anthony Weiner, losing the Beltway media now? Based on a conversation that occurred on MSNBC today, I’d say the answer is yes. The conversation was between Liz Sidoti, Major Garrett and Chuck Todd, all major Beltway political journalists. All show a healthy skepticism of Weiner, and Garrett plainly lays out his take.
Sidoti: The public is willing to forgive mistakes, errors in judgment. …What the public won’t stand for is cover-ups and charges of hypocrisy.
Garrett: Hacking. Prank. Distraction. No investigation. Nothing operative is happening at the FBI or Capitol Police. Every indication is that he did it. And because he won’t answer, people are going to jump to that conclusion.
Todd: Until he [has] an answer.
The most reasonable take on all this, from Friday night on, is that Weiner was having some kind of cyber flirt or fling with the comely coed, mistakenly made a private tweet public, and then claimed he was hacked. That cover story unraveled, forcing him to retreat to “prank” and then merely being “heckled.” All of this raised suspicions that he had everything to hide. He has done nothing to convincingly dispel those suspicions, and has behaved at every turn like a guilty man who knows the facts are against him. Yesterday’s disastrous press gaggle was a turning point. He failed to answer obvious yes or no questions, and even insulted a reporter directly, on camera. He is not as convincing a cover up artist as his pal and wedding MC Bill Clinton. He won’t have the army of shameless shills — Paul Begala, James Carville, etc — out there defending him.
Weiner’s not cooked yet, but it might not be a bad idea to keep a fork handy. He has scheduled a series of media interviews today to try to deal with the scandal.
This is the same corrupt and hypocritical Weiner who was stridently calling for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from an expected upcoming hearing on Obamacare, based on some flimsy and disingenuous pretext drummed up by Obama apologists and partisan hacks like Weiner — and while Weiner ostensibly aligns himself with Obamacare on the one hand, with the other hand he seeks to get Obamacare waivers for NY City.
This is a demagoguing, lying, sanctimonious, scurrilous hack.
RikiTiki, Weiner is a congressman and Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court Justice. A Justice is supposed to be impartial and deliberate solely on the legal implications of the case, and that’s why he’s supposed to recuse himself if he’s deeply connected to the issue, (at least financially). Our representatives on the other hand are encouraged to vote based on their own ideology or morals.
Anyway, I don’t know what the truth is here, and I don’t particularly care. I hate Weiner’s politics, but I respect him as a politician. I much prefer a far left progressive like him to Democrat Establishment types like Pelosi and Reid. Plus, he voted against the Patriot Act, and we need more of that.
Time to roast a Weiner
He’s gotten himself into quite a pickle here. It’s clearly a prickly situation, but his staff seems to be on top ot it. We’ll just have to wait and see what the poles say.