Weiner: damaged goods

Now that Weiner is damaged goods, the Democrats’ knives are coming out. Case in point, this Salon article by Steve Kornacki, which digs up an incident from the beginning of Weiner’s political career in which he won his first Democratic primary with an attack against his opponents that appealed to racism. The incident reminds me—not in its charges of racism, but in its implication that Weiner was probably a ruthless bastard from the start—of another story you don’t hear much about, involving Obama’s political beginnings: how he managed to knock previous mentor Alice Palmer and all his other Democratic rivals off the ballot in his very first primary.