Should Anthony Weiner resign?

Rep. Anthony Weiner

I have said that I would lay off on the Anthony Weiner brouhaha, but it doesn’t seem to go away… and now some major Democrats are joining virtually all Republicans in saying Weiner should resign his post. I expect that from Republicans… even though they didn’t express the same kinds of thoughts when their officeholders were revealed to have sexual affairs in the past year or so (I’m thinking especially of creeps like Eric Cantor who, it would seem, thinks the main fault with Weiner is that he is a Democrat.

His constituency, on the other hand, as polled doesn’t seem to want the resignation as much as his colleagues. The last figures on the news last night put Keep Weiner at 50% and Dump Weiner at 28% with the remaining 22% undecided. In interviews on the street in Brooklyn and Queens, television reporters found many who said they would vote for Weiner again.

Of the 500 voters surveyed, 61 percent say Weiner’s behavior was unethical, but not illegal. Only Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz shared kind words for Weiner with NY1 on Wednesday, but he also expressed some relief that he was not in the same predicament.

However, 56 percent of those polled say he should not run for City Hall. Weiner was thought to be a front runner for mayor before the scandal broke.

So far, there has been no comment from Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, who is on a European tour with her boss, Hillary Clinton. It is thought that she is the last judgement on the situation and that Weiner would resign if she wanted him to. What kind of advice do you think she is getting from Hillary, who stood behind her husband who didn’t resign during the scandal that almost brought him down?

In my opinion, what he did was both extremely stupid and amazingly juvenile. It was not, however, a crime. It was more of an embarassment, and, as such has no legal grounds for his leaving office. There is the social stigma that this affair puts on Weiner’s character which some would find insufferable… but Weiner seems ready to, as they say, stick it out. It is highly doybtful that he will be able to run for Mayor of NYC in 2013 as he had intended.

So I think he should stay in and see if he can get reelected in 2012. I think his constituents should decide his future and his republican colleagues should support him (unless they are as personally clean as they claim.)

One big result of the Weiner scandal is the drop in use of Twitter by the Congressman’s colleagues. Elected officials tweeted about 28 percent less the week of May 30 to June 3 than the previous week, according to a study by TweetCongress.

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• The Long and the Short of the Strange Case of Anthony Weiner (irondice.wordpress.com)
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