New York City's newspapers have had enough of Anthony Weiner following Tuesday's revelation that the former-congressman-turned-mayoral-candidate continued his sexting ways after he resigned from office.
In a series of scathing editorials, the newsprint gang demands that Weiner leave the race to run the Big Apple and accuses him of hiding the truth about his Internet peccadilloes.
The editorial board of the New York Times, which in April devoted over 8,000 words of its magazine to an article about how Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, moved past his 2011 scandal, urged Weiner to pull out of the mayoral race, writing: "the serially evasive Mr. Weiner should take his marital troubles and personal compulsions out of the public eye, away from cameras, off the Web and out of the race for mayor of New York City."
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The editorial went on to spell out, very frankly, why the paper thought Weiner was no longer an appropriate candidate to lead the city:
He suggested that people should have known that his sexting was an unresolved problem well into 2012. That’s ridiculous and speaks to a familiar but repellent pattern of misleading and evasion. It’s up to Mr. Weiner if he wants to keep running, to count on voters to forgive and forget and hand him the keys to City Hall. But he has already disqualified himself.
Mr. Weiner says he is staying in the mayoral race. To those who know his arrogance and have grown tired of the tawdry saga he has dragged the city into, this is not surprising.
The New York Daily News was similarly disgusted, writing, "Anthony Weiner led all New Yorkers to believe that he stopped recklessly, immaturely and compulsively sexting after his resignation from Congress in abject humiliation. Lie."
He is not fit to lead America’s premier city. Lacking the dignity and discipline that New York deserves in a mayor, Weiner must recognize that his demons have no place in City Hall … He is a man whose word is accepted less readily than that of a nameless, faceless social networker. He cannot be mayor.
And the Wall Street Journal asked Weiner, who its editorial board described as "not a normal human being," to exit stage left:
Anthony Weiner ought to drop out of the New York City mayor's race simply because of what he's forced his wife to endure.
"I said that other texts and photos were likely to come out, and today they have," Mr. Weiner said in a news conference that would go down as one for the embarrassing ages if it were possible to embarrass Anthony Weiner. At least this time he admitted that, "Some of these things happened before my resignation, some of them happened after." Oh, and he said he has no intention of leaving the race, as if there were any doubt.
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The New York Post's editorial also addressed Weiner, but did not outright demand that he leave the mayoral race:
At yesterday’s presser, Weiner claimed there's no news here because he’d admitted at the outset of this campaign there were more women out there. As we can now see, those were weasel words, because the couple knew most people would simply assume his contact with these other women had taken place before his humiliating resignation from Congress.
The editorial concluded: "In another day, Weiner would be a punchline instead of a leading candidate for mayor. Which is as revealing of New York politics as it is of Anthony Weiner."
On Tuesday, Weiner apologized for the latest revelation of genitalia photos sent to women who were not his wife, admitting that they "extended past [his] resignation from Congress." The admission came after gossip website The Dirty revealed that Weiner had another Internet relationship with a 22-year-old woman, sending her photos of his genitalia over various social networks last year — after he left Congress and while he was supposedly working to repair his marriage.
The site also claimed that Weiner used the alias "Carlos Danger" in some of his online correspondences. That particular handle has become a favorite punchline among the city's pun-loving tabloids.