No Surprise Here

Raise your hand if you were surprised at this:

Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York said today he has engaged in "several inappropriate" electronic relationships with six women over three years, and that he publicly lied about a photo of himself sent over Twitter to a college student in Seattle over a week ago.

"I take full responsibility for my actions," Weiner said. "The picture was of me, and I sent it."

Rep. Anthony Weiner: 'The Picture Was of Me and I Sent It'

Now, if you're a woman, go ahead and put your hand down. If you've still got your hand raised, please answer the following question:

How many times have you photographed your own crotch?

A few days ago, in his denial that he sent the photograph that we've seen far too much of, Weiner admitted that he wasn't sure whether he had actually taken the photo or not. Which, for those who didn't sleep through their introductory philosophy course, implies pretty strongly that he had, indeed, taken some pictures of this subject.

Of course, it's possible that I'm the only man in America who owns a digital camera and yet hasn't taken a photo of his groin, but this just strikes me as one of those things that many of us could deny without having to hedge very much. As in "it's theoretically possible that I, when I was either blind drunk or otherwise completely out of my mind, had someone take a picture of my groin while I was in my underwear." I think that's as much qualification as I'd need to apply to an answer to such a question. And frankly, given the questions that would result from that qualification, I think I could have avoided using it. Yet Rep. Weiner couldn't do that, despite having denied having sent the photo.

So I had to wonder why he would have taken such a thing, if he didn't want to e-mail it somewhere.

Why do I bring this up now, you ask? Because I really didn't care about this until the truth finally came out, and I realized that Weiner is probably going to have to explain far more to his constituents now than if he'd either told everyone who was asking about this to go screw themselves, or had just come clean to begin with. And I kinda liked the guy, as much as I like any Democratic politician these days.

So, here we are. Another promising career seems to be in jeopardy, if not in ruins, because America seems to be far more fascinated with this stuff than with what Rep. Weiner and his colleagues are doing about unemployment, Medicaid, or any of about a hundred other things that mean far more to us as citizens than anything Weiner is likely to do with a Twitter account. Plus, of course, we're here because another Democratic politician couldn't handle this sort of thing any better than John Edwards did.

As I wrote to another New Yorker a few years ago, in vain as it happens, it's not the crime, it's the coverup, kapisch? Heck, this wasn't even a crime, was it? Of course, our political class still haven't learned the fundamental lesson of the Vietnam War, why would I expect that they'd learned the lesson of Watergate?