Weiner and the Clintons

It had been our hope to get through the scandal of Anthony Weiner without a comment. This stems from a general view about the private nature of sexual relations. We don’t want to belittle the errors of judgment Mr. Weiner has confessed to — and the lying — but a lot of sexual flirtation looks comical or ridiculous or boorish or worse when reduced to print and exposed to the public. So generally we’re inclined to avoid getting judgmental in sexual scandals, absent a charge of serious offenses, such as in respect of, say, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

All that said, the story that runs in the New York Post today under the headline “Clintons Rip Huma Hubby” takes the cake. It turns out the former president and his wife, Secretary Clinton, “are livid with Internet horndog Anthony Weiner and are quietly pushing him to resign” his seat in the Congress, the Post reported, quoting Bill Zwecker’s dispatch in the Sun-Times newspaper in Chicago. The Sun-Times reported that both Clintons “have had numerous long conversations” with Mr. and Mrs. Weiner, and it quotes a source as saying that the talks with the “were very icy and tough — to say the least.”

“What makes this all so uncomfortable for Hillary is how this again reminds people — as if they needed reminding — about Bill and the Monica Lewinsky scandal,” the Sun-Times quotes one of its sources as saying. “Yes, it’s very different, but it’s another case of a top politician doing something wrong that involves the subject of sex.” To which one can demur only to the extent that the misdeeds either alleged against, or confessed by, Mr. Clinton — involving, as they did, lying under oath and committing adultery inside the president’s office at the White House — were much worse than the online flirtations confessed to by Mr. Weiner.

Yet Mrs. Clinton basically wrote the book on standing by one’s man in such circumstances and doing so in the name of her own political ambition. Now it is just breathtaking to see Mrs. Clinton, while enjoying the fruits of that ambition, turn around and become icy with Mr. Weiner because, as the New York Post has it, she regards Mr. Weiner’s wife, who is her aide, as like another daughter. All one can say is that for hypocrisy it takes the cake — or at least what is left of the cake after the part that was taken when President Clinton got judgmental about Mr. Weiner.

It seems like one of the few bastions of common sense is the 9^th congressional district, where, according to a NY1-Marist poll, something like 56% of registered voters in the district oppose Mr. Weiner resigning. Our guess is that they have been sending him to congress because despite his narcissism and goofiness and personal weaknesses, they tend to like his policies and earnestness and passion for politics. Our guess is that they enjoyed his romance with Huma Abedin are now thrilled that the couple is going to have a baby. Not the sort of circumstance in which one rushes to fire someone. The more logical approach is to give them the chance to work things out and to grow up — the way the country did the Clintons.