• by July 26, 2013

With all the salacious puns and unsavory visuals floating around the Internet this week, I realize that we all need a Weinervention — me most of all.

Therefore, I promise that this is my last posting about Weiner — at least until he pulls out of the New York mayoral race.

That last line is just the kind of infuriating, self-justifying, doublecross-filled (and double entendre-laced) announcement the man himself has been relying on since this latest sexting/ phone sex scandal has materialized.

This time, one of the “up to three” relationships he was having (while supposedly chastened, at home with his newborn son, being, as his wife told People Magazine, “the best father” and “best husband” he could be)  involved Sydney Leathers, a name you can’t make up. She claims they were having phone sex twice a week. Whereas a name like “Carlos Danger,” aka Weiner, you obviously can make up, but so wish he hadn’t (Letterman subsequently dubbed him “Carlos Danger, Gaucho of Love.”)

What’s new to say? Well, there is  the technology angle. Originally, Weiner  broke some ground in advanced Congressional genitalia capture on Twitter.

Once he stepped down, he moved on to the medium of Formspring. (Which doesn’t seem to have survived long enough to profit from the Weiner news.) But Formspring sure sounds dirty — like a combination of foreskin and Rumspringa, the year off  for 18-year-old Amish kids who are allowed to go wild with the English people.

But he used other platforms, too. As Jimmy Fallon recounted it, "It was revealed that Anthony Weiner sent nude pictures of himself to this woman using a 'Carlos Danger' Yahoo email address. His wife was shocked. She said, 'You still use Yahoo?'"

So far, the New York Daily News and the New York Times have called for him to get out of the race. The New York Post has yet do to that. Its very existence as a tabloid at this point seems to be based on front page Weiner coverage. How could they deny themselves headlines like “Polls support shrinks to 16 per cent—Hard Numbers,” while showing a mostly naked Leathers from the back, taking selfies of  her pink-thonged tush?

Speaking of tushes, Weiner himself has said that these questionable behaviors are  “behind him” and that his wife has it in her “rear view mirror,” and that they are both moving ahead.  He also says he’s working  it out privately, and the issues are between him and his wife.

I don’t understand how anyone can agree that his private life is his private life, when he was the one who insisted on repeatedly making his privates public.

And though the possibilities of Weiner jokes never end, it really is getting clinically ill.

The fact that he upped the ante on the whole charade by making his smart and attractive wife, Huma Abedin, stand by his side at the news conference, professing her love for him, proves that they are both, at best, caught up in the same  sick reality distortion field. 

From this point, you’d expect some contrition, or at least for him to lie low for a bit. Instead, exhibiting the traits of a psychopath, Weiner seems not only NOT to be humiliated in any way, but instead he’s acting turned on and energized by all the attention he’s getting.

He even went as far as saying that this second eruption came about during a “rough patch in my marriage,”  strategically moving the blame to his wife.

As one expert, Andrew Vachss, wrote in the New York Times back in 1993 about such psychopaths, “Sexual predators are already narcissistic; they laugh behind their masks at our attempts to understand and rehabilitate them. We have earned their contempt by our belief that they can change—by our confusion of 'crazy' with ‘dangerous,’ and 'sick' with 'sickening.'"

 And it is bad for the Democrats. It brings back all the hesitation people like myself had for Hillary until she proved herself as a senator and Secretary of State.  People so desperately want to believe in Huma, and believe that she is strong and her own person in this relationship.

But at the press conference, she acted like a woman who recently escaped from sexual slavery in a basement, but still wants to please her abuser.  She is Abedin the abettor and enabler. Without her, he could not have run, because she drew on her Clinton contacts to fund-raise, and has used many of the Clinton operatives in the campaign.

Gloria Steinem posited that perhaps Abedin is suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome.” But many feminists are trying hard not to knock her. (There’s even a “Huma for Mayor” movement afoot.) 

A post on Time.com actually gushed that at the press conference, Abedin looked “radiant,” and wasn’t standing “behind” her man, but instead was , “horizontal” to him. Way to stand your ground, Huma.

Score one for our brave new digital world: It’s much easier to spot the markings of a psychopath if he is  using all of his tricks flagrantly on social media, as Weiner has done.

Certainly, there’s no shortage of available, ambitious young women in small towns who can’t get themselves on a reality show and are eager to start getting attention from powerful, married politicians. Like Leathers, they can now come of the woodwork and be paid and treated like media stars for their revelations.

It’s a sickening new cycle.  Weiner is a terrible distraction from the needs of New York City.

 I don’t get why men like him and Spitzer feel they belong back in politics, as if it’s their birthright. Why don’t they use their talents and time to pursue philanthropic work for a while? They could earn some credibility by doing some good. 

Meanwhile, as with his largely invisible mayoral opponents, we are all feeling crowded out, tired of hearing about Weiner’s wiener.