On the morning of Feb. 9, 2011, a photo surfaced of a bare-chested Rep. Christopher Lee, R-N.Y., sent to a woman he encountered on Craigslist and to whom the 46-year-old married congressman had presented himself as a divorced lobbyist who was seven years younger. By late afternoon, Lee had been forced to retire, before having a chance to talk to the press, say he was set up by mysterious enemies or display any more body parts.
On May 27, another self-portrait, this one minus a face and focused south of the border, was sent from the Twitter account of Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., to a coed in Seattle.
A week later, Weiner was still talking — and talking, and talking — as more charges surfaced, the story grew more legs than a centipede, and more facts emerged, none of them good.
Clearly, House Speaker John Boehner has leadership skills missing in Democrats, as he knows 1) how to choke off a scandal before it gets started; 2) that there are some situations in which all explanations are counterproductive; and 3) that these photos, while not sins or crimes as of yet, are something much worse — an embarrassment — and that, while attacks can be overcome or forgotten, ridicule lives on forever, and kills.
In no time, the Weiner defense took on the air of a Chris Buckley novel, the platonic ideal of a Washington scandal, in which every attempt to defuse invites further raillery, snickers and scorn.
Weiner embarked on what the Associated Press called a “cringe-making” blitz of the media, inviting the world, as it were, into his underwear, of which it knew rather too much.
He denied sending the picture, and was vague on who took it: On the other hand, only the subject himself could have possibly taken it, and he couldn’t deny that it might be of him.
“Do you remember every time you dropped your pants and took a picture?” asked Jonah Goldberg. “How can we expect him to keep track of all of his groin shots, either in his personal archives, or out there ‘in the world’?”
“You would know if this was your underpants,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer told Goldberg.
“He doesn’t know if he took a picture of himself?” asked ex-Mayor Ed Koch, for whose former job Weiner was running.
“If I were the kind of guy to take self-portraits of this kind, I’d be embarrassed — mortified — to have the whole world know about it,” says the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson. Weiner, alas, knows no such discretion. Which of course makes it all that much worse.
How did the Democrats let this nightmare develop? House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is from San Francisco, where these things may seem normal; Democrats like to say that the sole sin is hypocrisy, so if one has no standards, no wrongs are committed.
And Boehner remembers the Mark Foley fiasco, where the House Republican leadership turned a blind eye to that member’s behavior, only to see the scandal explode at the peak of a very bad cycle, and then take the whole party down.
Political parties are huge, complex bodies, into which millions of people pour their time and their money. Party leaders owe it to them to protect their investments from being rendered irrelevant by the actions of rampaging ids with large egos.
It is for them to tell members with interesting hobbies that the private sector might offer more options for personal happiness. And then quickly show them the door.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
