Replacing Anthony Weiner

As I write this, they are showing now former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s last hurrah in front of the hot lights as he resigns from congress for the crime of “sexting,” at least that is the reason that the media keeps on reporting. Actually this is not true.

Anthony Weiner showed poor taste in sending images of himself to young women, and poor judgment, but that isn’t why he is resigning. He is resigning because he could no longer be a fully functional congressman who could serve his constituents effectively. The spewers of hatred and vilification were not going away.

No, the only thing to my mind that Anthony Weiner is guilty of, besides bad taste, is concocting one lie after another to everyone around him and to party leaders.

As I mentioned it before coming up with a complete fabrication is bad, retelling it over and over to your friends, peers and party leadership is worse. But I still thought he could weather this out and serve out his term. Then his district would be eliminated in the 2012 election.

And obviously this was mainly in view of the fact that his constituents would lose their voice in congress until a special election could be called, something that takes several months.

But listening to the hecklers in the crowd, you could see that he was never going to weather this because the storm was here to stay.

What the hecklers’ motivation was is anyone’s guess, but I don’t rule out Republicans hounding him out of office so they could get a chance win the seat back in a low turnout special election. It nearly worked for them in 2009 when (now) Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s congressional seat nearly went to a Republican who lost by a mere 726 votes.

Now we all have to move on and wonder how long it is going to take for a special election to be called and who will run in it. I don’t expect the district to be flipped because not only is NY-9 an urban district but also has a fairly comfortable 10% voter gap between Democratic voters and Republican voters. And while Gillibrand was re-elected to her seat in 2008 with 62% of the vote, this mostly rural district was traditionally Republican. Her win in 2006 was an upset, retiring a 4-term Republican.

So Congressman Anthony Weiner is no more, so now maybe the hecklers can go and crawl back under their rocks and the rest of us can talk about two wars and economic recovery. Oh, and not to forget to mention the end of public education, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. You know… those red meat Republican issues I will be bringing up from time to time.