New York Times: 'Yeah, We Don't Get Why Huma Is Still There Either'

They really, really, don’t want this guy to be mayor.

Then the discussion turned, as it did in conversations all across New York City on Wednesday, to Anthony D. Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin.

As her companions nodded, Noebeth Toro, 30, said she could understand how Ms. Abedin chose to stand by her husband in 2011 when he was first discovered sending explicit messages to women online. But she was puzzled to see her beside Mr. Weiner once again on Tuesday, defending him despite new revelations of more recent online encounters.

“Fool me once, shame on you,” Ms. Toro said. “Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Her colleague, Jessica Marrocco, 26, suspected another motive.

“I think she’s really just doing it for the publicity, and she wants a husband in office,” she said. “Because no self-respecting woman would stand up there and say that something like that’s O.K.”

Since Mr. Weiner began his unlikely comeback bid for mayor of New York City, Ms. Abedin has served as his crucial character witness, a glamorous and widely admired figure who reassured New Yorkers, in glossy interviews and at campaign stops, that her husband deserved their trust.

But as the city absorbed the disclosures this week that Mr. Weiner had continued exchanging sexual messages online — even after he resigned from Congress, checked into therapy and pledged to re-devote himself to his wife and child — the high regard for Ms. Abedin turned to bafflement.

“It’s hard to watch her still encourage people to vote for him,” said Arita Balaram, 22, of the Bronx, as she sipped a caramel latte by Borough Hall in Downtown Brooklyn. “It’s hard to watch this as a woman.”

This is a publication that helped launch Weiner 2.0 with a fluff piece about the happy couple in its Sunday magazine last April. It speaks volumes about what a reprehensible human being Weiner is that they are now devoting space to being negative about his wife, a Hillary Clinton confidante.

A liberal New Yorker became indignant with me yesterday when I said Ms. Abedin was pathetic for continuing to participate in the charade. This article is pretty much saying the same thing, just less succinctly.