Weiner did TRY to be civil:
“This was a prank that I’ve now been talking about for a couple of days. I’m not going to allow it to decide what I talk about for the next week or the next two weeks, and so I’m not going to be giving any more about that today,” Weiner told reporters outside his office yesterday. “If I were giving a speech to 45,000 people and someone in the back threw a pie or yelled an insult, I would not spend the next two hours of my speech responding to that pie or that insult.”
But it kind of went downhill from there…
“This is now Day 3…” he said. “The objective of the person who is doing the mischief is to try to distract me from what I’m doing … I’ve made a decision. I’m not going to let it happen today. I’m not going to let it happen tomorrow. You’re doing your job, I understand it. Just go ahead and do it, but you’re going to have to do it without me answering questions about this.”
“I’m going to have to ask that we follow some rules here. One of them is going to be: you ask questions and I’ll do the answers that seem reasonable? …You do the questions, I do the answers, and this jack-ass interrupts me?” Weiner said of CNN’s Capitol Hill producer Ted Barrett. “How about that as the rule of the game? Let me just give the answer.”
In other words, Mommy! He kicked me! Make him stop!
Of course, whining to the press about how unfair and annoying it is that they keep asking you questions you’d rather not answer because they make you look like a moron, no matter how you answer them, is kind of the same thing as BEGGING reporters to do nothing but ask you those questions.
But Weiner is fed up and he’s just not going to take it any more, damn it. He was adamant that “I am not going to permit myself to be distracted by this issue any longer.” Not getting distracted by silliness when you’re playing chicken over little issues like the national debt ceiling is probably a good plan, though a savvy news reader might also notice that by “not permit myself to be distracted by this issue,” Weiner means that he’s not going to request an investigation into the hack, and he’s definitely not going to explain why he was following a 21-year-old from Washington State in the first place. In fact, he hasn’t even officially stated that the tweeted groin isn’t his. What he has done is hire a lawyer to represent him in the matter, which might add a few points to the “he’s just that stupid” side of the equation.
Whether Weiner was dumb enough to do a little super public sexting with an intern and got caught at it, or just never changed his Twitter password from password1234 when he got elected to public office, it probably is time to let his groin shot fade into the background noise of the internet and focus on any number of other problems that Weiner and his colleagues have been trusted to deal with that actually affect our livelihoods and the future of this nation. Somebody’s gotta be at the wheel, right? And they really shouldn’t be text messaging or tweeting while they’re driving the bus we call America.
But, considering the fact that Weiner topped off his rant about how much he wants to focus on important issues by making a point to mention that he, “passed Michele Bachmann today in the number of twitter followers,” I think it might be time to take away some cell phone privileges guys.
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