"The reason Chuck and Hakeem have been so slow to endorse Zohran is because they don’t want to harm their moderate candidates all around the country..."

"... which are the ones they need to take back the House and Senate. That’s a political question for them."

Said Anthony Weiner, quoted in "Disgraced ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner makes blunt prediction about Zohran Mamdani, top Dems in NYC mayoral race: 'It’s inevitable'" (NY Post).

And then there's this: "The one thing that the left hasn’t shown that they can do – if you look at Chicago and San Francisco – they haven’t shown that they can govern yet. The bigger problem is what outcomes are we going to get as citizens and taxpayers if these candidates are successful? Unfortunately, it looks like we’re going to find out in New York City."

"The recording obtained by CNN begins with Trump claiming 'these are bad sick people,' while his staffer claims there had been a 'coup' against Trump."

"'Like when [Joint Chiefs General Mark] Milley is talking about, "Oh you’re going to try to do a coup." No, they were trying to do that before you even were sworn in,' the staffer says, according to the audio. The next part of the conversation is mostly included in the indictment, though the audio makes clear there are papers shuffling as Trump tells those in attendance he has an example to show. 'He said that I wanted to attack Iran, Isn’t it amazing?' Trump says as the sound of papers shuffling can be heard. 'I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him. They presented me this – this is off the record but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.' The indictment includes ellipses where the recording obtained by CNN shows where Trump and his aide begin talking about Clinton’s emails and Weiner, whose laptop caused the FBI to briefly re-open its investigation into her handling of classified information in the days before the 2016 election she lost to Trump. Trump then returns to the Iran document, according to the audio recording and indictment transcript. 'I was just thinking, because we were talking about it. And you know, he said, "He wanted to attack Iran, and what…,"' Trump says. 'These are the papers,” Trump continues, according to the audio file."

From "Exclusive: CNN obtains the tape of Trump’s 2021 conversation about classified documents" (CNN).

He's back.

Advice for returning to Twitter

— Anthony Weiner (@repweiner) June 22, 2022

I found that after reading "Anthony Weiner returns to Twitter after 9 years away — but followers say ‘just don’t’" (NY Post), which says "Though the competition was stiff, “Just don’t” was the clear winner, rising to the top of the poll as the choice of 62% of respondents." 

I voted for the least popular choice: "Update your bio, then run." He pleaded guilty to a crime and served his sentence. He's a registered sex offender. But he has a right to free speech and social media is for everyone. 

I'm assuming "then run" means get on with tweeting. Not run for office.

ADDED: I wondered, how's Huma Abedin these days. I see she filed for divorce in 2017, when he pled guilty, but she withdrew the case in 2018. Years later, there is still no divorce. The Guardian published an interview with her last month:

In or out?

"Low-level employees were asked to perform duties they described as demeaning, like washing her dishes or other cleaning — a possible violation of Senate ethics rules, according to veterans of the chamber."

I'm afraid I must do a third post on the NYT article "How Amy Klobuchar Treats Her Staff."

I just want to focus on the subject of a U.S. Senator asking low-level staff to do cleaning and the journalism of calling it "a possible violation of Senate ethics rules, according to veterans of the chamber."

Why can't we have better reporting? Who are these unnamed people who make vague statements about ethics rules? Is this good journalistic ethics? What makes someone a "veteran of the chamber"? Could you be more specific?! Did you find out how little cleaning tasks like collecting coffee cups and rinsing them out are handled by other Senators?

It strikes me as unfair to waft "a possible violation of Senate ethics rule" without telling us what the rule is or committing to exposing and casting aspersions on all the Senators who ask staff to clean things.

If low-level staff think this kind of work is demeaning, let's talk about that. If there's no specific rule against assigning them cleaning tasks and there should be, then make a rule. Don't mobilize a fake rule for the purpose of taking down a candidate that you want out of the way.

For a while, I've had a tag "NYT pushes Kamala," where I've been collecting evidence of my hypothesis, and this post gets the tag. Does Kamala Harris have staff who are asked to do things like clear away coffee cups? Please check that for me and apply the same standard of newsworthiness and sneering at her if she does, because I think you're trying to clear away Amy to help Kamala.

And by the way, that's not going to help Kamala. Quit acting like she needs help, and quit pre-destroying her competition. Kamala could fail, and Kamala fans might need Amy.

And, NYT, you'd better make sure none of this coverage is sexist. Why am I hearing about the woman who expects her staff to clean up after her? Is it because the male Senators never do such things or is it because — on some level of consciousness — you expect a woman to do the cleaning?

"He ordered a $9.50 dish of homemade lasagna and $10 penne alla vodka with grilled chicken, along with two Snapples at $1.50 apiece to wash it all down."

It's Anthony Weiner, half free now, and never to be free of the jokes about his name



"'Hold on a second here. Hold on a second. They’re in here?' Weiner grilled the deliveryman around 2 p.m. after he was handed a large pizza box and brown paper bag with straws poking out at the door of the GEO Care Inc., facility in Fordham Heights."

I guess "in here" and "straws poking out" are additional penis jokes.

"After grabbing his food, Weiner couldn’t beat it fast enough." See what I mean? That kind of thing will go on forever.

"To think, just a few short weeks ago, we were getting lectured about how unfair, sexist, and racist it was to judge a woman for expressing anger during a tennis game."

Wrote Lyssa in the comments to yesterday's post "The intemperance of the law professors' 'judicial temperament' letter."

I had to go back to see what I'd written about Serena Williams back on September 9th:

I felt that Williams was trying — very hard — to intimidate the umpire. She was actively bullying him. Hey! That reminds me of Trump. People say he's lost it and is raging when he's using a style of emotional manipulation.

As I've already written (somewhere in the Kavanaugh posts and comments) that I think Kavanaugh made a decision — after his calm, bland interview on Fox News — to allow his experience of emotion to be visible during the Senate hearing. He's getting criticized and mocked for letting emotion show, but that doesn't mean he'd have been more successful if he had maintained a stoical front.

As I said, above, about Serena Williams and Donald Trump, I think the emotion is displayed as a means to an end. The emotion isn't completely fake, but it's not out of control. There's real emotion, but it is also performed, with an idea of getting something the emoter wants. We need to be careful not to get conned, so we're right to be somewhat skeptical of those who let emotion show. But everyone's trying to get something they want, and people who suppress their emotion aren't inherently trustworthy.

Someone who truly loses control belongs in a different category. But you have to watch out for the accusation that someone has truly lost control. The accusers — like everybody else — are human beings with a will to get something they want. Sometimes their game is so obvious — like the lawprofs' "judicial temperament" gambit — that no one is fooled (though many are fooled into thinking that others will be fooled, because what they want is for those others to be fooled).

IN THE COMMENTS: Noting my statement, “But you have to watch out for the accusation that someone has truly lost control," Kevin writes: "Because those accusations are civility bullshit." Yes. Thanks for reminding me that this is the "civility bullshit" problem I've written about so many times. Calls for civility — don't get angry and emotional, speak only with cool rationality — are always bullshit. In our present-day American political discourse, it's always an effort to get your opponents to unilaterally disarm. When the tables are turned, and expressing emotion is what the people on your side are doing, you'll vaunt their passion and commitment and scorn your opponents for their bloodlessness.

ADDED: Remember when liberals thought this was exactly what was needed:

"This is the third year Louisiana crawfish have been seen in Berlin."

"City wildlife officer Derk Ehlert says when crawfish first appeared, the city released eels into the waterways, hoping they'd catch the crawfish and eat them. But then the next year, there were still 3,000 crawfish in the parks. This year there are 10 times as many and they seem to be spreading. At one point, hundreds of crawfish clambered out of the lake and ambled along the Tiergarten's shaded paths.... To the west of the Tiergarten, in the Spandau borough, Olaf Pelz cracked the shell of one of Hidde's red crawfish in his restaurant, called Fisch Frank... 'When we serve it here we make it with salad and bread and typical sauce,' he says. He puts dollops of mayonnaise and cocktail sauce on the plate, and tops the crawfish with a thin slice of lemon. Despite his efforts, customers are skeptical. Erika Klugert rises from her outdoor table to watch Pelz uncover the soft tail meat of the crawfish. 'This food requires too much work,' Klugert says."

From "For Berlin, Invasive Crustaceans Are A Tough Catch And A Tough Sell" (NPR).

I wanted to give this post a "crustaceans" tag, but I didn't want to create a new tag. So I started typing out the word in the place where I add my tags, and by the time I got to "crus-," there was only one tag the software was suggesting, and it wasn't "crustaceans," so that's it for the potential "crustaceans" tag.

I'm not creating a new tag, because I don't want to bother with adding it retroactively, searching for crustaceans in the 14-year archive. Sometimes I do create new tags and do that work. For example, I did it yesterday with Kathleen Turner. But that was a matter of doing a search for "Kathleen Turner."

"Crustaceans" would not be so easy. I'd have to look up which animals are crustaceans and search for them individually.

And I already have separate tags for some of them — lobsters (with 41 posts!) and crabs (with 17 posts!). But I don't have a "shrimp" tag. And I've mentioned shimp quite a few times.

Should I now create a "shrimp" tag and a "crawfish" tag? But today's post is only the second mention of crawfish in the history of the blog. The first was "Barack spent so much time by himself that it was like he was raised by wolves" (from 2010). Excerpt:

In the end the story of Barack Obama will make perfect sense. It will all fit together. The lonely man — raised by wolves — swept up into our American psychosis.

“Even though I’m president of the United States, my power is not limitless,” Obama, who has forced himself to ingest a load of gulf crab cakes, shrimp and crawfish tails, whinged to Grand Isle, La., residents on Friday. “So I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.”

What's weird is that I included that 2009 photo of myself that I also reused 3 days ago. It's funny how things cycle around in blogging. Leaving tags along the way can help tie things together, but some of the tagging just leads to weirdness. So, when I was starting to write "crustaceans," and there was only one suggestion left when I got to "crus-," can you imagine what it was? It was "husbands crushing their wives' aspirations"! As noted above, that tag had only one post. It was: "Anthony Weiner says he 'crushed the aspirations' of Huma Abedin."

That was just last September. What was I thinking? That it was funny to do that as a one-time tag or that the tag would cause me to notice this phenomenon and amass evidence of it? If the latter, it couldn't work unless I remembered the tag, which I didn't. Maybe now I'll remember it, and the aspiration-crushing husbands will be noticed and collected as they clamber out of the lake and amble along the shaded paths.

ADDED: On rereading this post, the one tag I'd like to create is "straw." Obama "can’t suck it up with a straw," there's the recent straw-related environmentalism, and I know I've blogged about not liking how people look sucking on straws.

"American history shows that, in the long run, weasels and liars never hold the field, so long as good people stand up."

I agree. In the long run... etc. etc.

But living in the middle of a short run — and the quote is from a James Comey tweet yesterday — we have to always wonder: Who among us are the weasels? And: Am I really one of the good people? Do the good people know they are the good people or is thinking you're a good person one of the characteristics of a weasel?

The tweet is reported here in the NYT, which also says:

Comey has also used language about "weasels" before, most notably in a September 2016 congressional hearing when he defended the FBI's handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

"You can call us wrong, but don't call us weasels," Comey said. "We're not weasels."

Don't call us weasels. We're not weasels had a Trumpian ring to it. I was moved to search Donald Trump's twitter feed for the word and look what I found (note the date):

Keep an eye on Anthony Weiner. Weasels are hard to get rid of.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 6, 2012

MEANWHILE: Here's Trump's new tweet, showing 2 can play who's-the-weasel:

The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans - something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2018

Love is love and I love this.

"Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner withdraw their divorce."



IN THE COMMENTS: Lyssa steps on my dreams:

So, no reasonable person believes that this is about anything other than testimonial privileges in marriage, right?

Al Franken! Don't make the Anthony Weiner mistake and resign!

His fellow Democrats are forcing him out, for their purposes.

Should a Jew feel responsible for the bad behavior of other Jews — like Harvey Weinstein, Leon Wieseltier, and Anthony Weiner?

Harold Pollack (of University of Chicago and The Century Foundation) says he feels responsible (and questions Glenn Loury about whether he feels responsible for the bad behavior of other people in his group):



At one point, Loury suggests that Jews should feel some pride in what Harvey Weinstein did because it shows that they're not all nerds!

Pollack responds that he "would take more pride" if Weinstein were "a swaggering playboy."

Yikes.

"Anthony Weiner got 21 months of hard time."

That's The Daily News, stooping to the "hard time" joke.

The disgraced pol, crying and grabbing tissue after tissue, was sentenced Monday by Judge Denise Cote for sending sick messages to a 15-year-old.

Worth a click to see the courtroom sketch of the disgraced pol, crying, with Kleenex.

Weiner had sought probation. He argued he is sick and needs therapy, not incarceration.

"I victimized a young person who deserved better,” Weiner said in court. “I am not asking that I be trusted ... I ask you for the opportunity on probation to keep my sworn oath.”

There's something terribly wrong with that man. People need protection from him, but I feel sorry for him.

Remember — it was so long ago — the big impression he made back in 2010 when this clip came out:



There were those who adored that vigor and aggression. Watching it again now, I'm trying to imagine what it must feel like to be him. What a colossal screwup.

Anthony Weiner says he "crushed the aspirations" of Huma Abedin.

In a letter to the judge who will sentence him for transmitting obscene material to a 15-year-old girl: "My continued acting out over years crushed the aspirations of my wife and ruined our marriage."

From his lawyers: "He responded to the victim's request for sexually explicit messages not because she was a teenager but in spite of it.... He responded as a weak man, at the bottom of a self-destructive spiral, and with an addict's self-serving delusion that the communications were all just internet fantasy." Like he's the victim.

The link goes to The Chicago Tribune and is worth clicking to see the photo of Huma and Anthony in court (on Wednesday). She's in profile looking away from him. The expression on her face is somewhere between impassivity and anger. He's turned toward her, but his eyes seem to be aimed somewhere around the back of her head. The expression on his haggard, wrinkled face seems to be in the vicinity of self-pity and some kind of disgust other than self-disgust.

When he says he "crushed the aspirations of my wife," I can't help hypothesizing that he wanted to crush the aspirations of his wife. And while we're on the subject, did Bill Clinton want to crush the aspirations of his wife? Let's be on the lookout for the aspirations-crushing impulse in the husbands of ambitious wives.

Yeah, we tease him a lot cause we've got him on the spot, welcome back...

Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back....

Time to talk about Anthony Weiner again.

He's pleading guilty to "a single charge of transferring obscene material to a minor."

A likely result of the plea is that Mr. Weiner would end up as a registered sex offender... The charge carries a potential sentence of between zero and 10 years in prison, meaning Mr. Weiner could avoid prison...

Go to the link to see the artistically hilarious photograph of Weiner the NYT chose to illustrate its article. It's not one of Weiner's selfies, but a portrait by a NYT photographer, Damon Winter, that has Weiner looking greasy and defeated.

"We don't want your tiny hands/Anywhere near our underpants/We don't want your tiny hands/Anywhere near our underpants..."

A very minimal anti-Trump song by Fiona Apple gets an article of its own in The New York Times.

ADDED: I was glad to have a chance once again to use my underpants tag.  I hadn't used it since March 1st of last year. Oddly enough, the post was about Trump. I was linking to something in the NYT, something tragically titled "Inside the Clinton Team’s Plan to Defeat Donald Trump":

“They’ll flip their top, and they’ll flip their panties...” read the subject line of a recent news release from Emily’s List, a group that works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights. The quote came from comments Mr. Trump made about women on “The Howard Stern Show” in the 1990s, unearthed by BuzzFeed last month.

Those types of comments, spoken by Mr. Trump over the years as he served as a tabloid regular and reality TV star, could help Mrs. Clinton excite suburban women and young women who have been ambivalent or antagonistic toward her candidacy....

The excited suburban and young women will need to content themselves with the women's march. Apple's tiny-hands-underpants song is intended to be chanted by the marching women.

Before that, there was a Jeb Bush interview in February 2015:

When Hannity said he had one more question, Jeb said "boxers." (Bill Clinton's answer to the famously inappropriate question, by the way, was "Usually briefs. I can't believe she did that." Obama's answer was:  "I don't answer those humiliating questions. But whichever one it is, I look good in 'em.")

And remember that sculpture of a man stumbling about in his underpants that disturbed the women of Wellesley College?

And all the posts about Anthony Weiner's underpants? And references to the underpants gnomes? There was the underpants bomber.

And there was the time The Gatsby Project — should I bring back The Gatsby Project? — got to a sentence with underpants:

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back.

And "Hey, look! It's my giant underpants!"



ALSO: I do want to give Fiona Apple credit for inventing a new chant. "We don't want your tiny hands/Anywhere near our underpants" really is chantable. I'd like to see marches with new chants. I'm really tired of the continual repurposing of: 1. "What do we want?/X!/When do we want it?/Now!" and "Hey, hey, ho, ho/X has got to go." (The Wisconsin protests of 2011 were notable for their distinctive chants: "What's Disgusting?/Union busting" and "This is what democracy looks like.")

"Yes, we were highly critical of Hillary Clinton in the runup to Election Day. But that was the race for the White House..."

"Not so in New York, where she’d be dead-center in the city’s Democratic majority. Progressive, but not obsessed with proving it.... The incumbent has handed the work of running the city off to one or two deputies, while he spends his time on politics and p.r. stunts.... Clinton is a fighter and a problem-solver... What’s in it for her? Well, her presidential run shows her appetite for continued public service. And while Gracie Mansion isn’t the White House, it’s no consolation prize: New York’s mayor is famously 'the second-toughest job in America' — and you traditionally have your own foreign policy, too."

Say the editors of The New York Post. 

I've got another answer to "What's in it for her?": She can antagonize Donald Trump from that position.

The NYC mayoral race is this year. The incumbent, Bill de Blasio, is eligible to run and has said he's running. Wikipedia has a nice list of declared and potential candidates. I'll just highlight the ones that got my attention. From the potential Democrats, in addition to Hillary:

Anthony Weiner, former U.S. Representative for New York's 9th congressional district and candidate for Mayor in 2005 and 2013

Yes! What could go wrong? There's no further depth of humiliation. Anthony, anything you do will feel like redemption. Say yes!

From the potential Republicans:

Donald Trump Jr, businessman and son of President-elect of the United States Donald J. Trump

Oh, yes! The time is ripe. Building a dynasty is not something you drag your heels on. And what if the Democratic nominee is Hillary? The Trump vs. Hillary show was a big hit last fall. I want to watch another season. Make it happen, people. It's a slow year for election action. The spotlight is on you. Bill de Blasio richly deserves a big challenge. Come on, New York City. We political spectators need some variety. The Washington show is worth watching: President Trump, Trump's Congress, the Democratic Party in Trumpland. But all that governing can get tiresome. A nice active NYC mayoral campaign would be great.

And I'm saying that as someone who reacted to the 2016 election by saying at least Hillary will go away.

I'm skeptical about this story that Anthony Weiner left sex-addiction treatment early because he ran out of money.

Page Six says he was supposed to stay 90 days, but he bailed out after 35 days because he ran out of money.

I assume the reason for leaving is that the election is over, Hillary lost, and there's no reason for him to hide away and pretend to be reforming himself. Freed from the obligation to stop impairing Hillary and Huma's rise to power, he can lunge toward freedom.

Page Six calls him "unemployable," but I assume he's writing a memoir. Tell it all, Anthony. You've got great material, and you love to write about yourself. You're not shy about sharing sexual details. I'm sure you'll be just fine. What a great tragicomic character!

I know, it will be a problem not hurting Huma and the son you two had together. Maybe you can't write the great memoir you have the material to write. Maybe you'll end up bullshitting about addiction and treatment and hawking it on women's TV, duly abasing yourself. Please don't do that. Write a real memoir. Tell the truth.

As David Foster Wallace wrote in "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart":

Obviously, a good commercial memoir's first loyalty has got to be to the reader, the person who's spending money and time to access the consciousness of someone he wishes to know and will never meet. But none of [Austin's memoir's] loyalties are to the reader. The author's primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends....

Is this a pro-Clinton argument?

"How Men Behaving Badly Have Held Hillary Clinton Back."

It's intended as a pro-Clinton argument. It's by Jill Filipovic and published in Time (which seems to be trying to distinguish itself as the go-to place for women-oriented pieces that actually insult women through the implication that women will buy material like this).

Look, I think it's bad that so many women throughout human history have been held back by men, but that's no reason to make one of the held-back women President. A woman can be President, but it better not be a woman who's vulnerable to men holding her back. The presidency is not a sympathy prize. We need a President to protect us from bad men.

Filipovic begins:

The first woman is just days away from (probably) being elected President of the United States, and so of course her candidacy has been fraught by two guys obsessed with their own penises, including one whose last name is literally Weiner.

And she ends:

[T]he hard-ons of has-been men and the hard heads of quietly powerful ones might just screw Clinton’s shot at the White House.

By the way, the 2 men whose penises she's asking you to think about do not include Bill Clinton. BC is not mentioned in the article. Somehow, Filipovic imagines that she could get that penis-y and we wouldn't think of the man closest to Hillary.