Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), who on Monday admitted that he lied about sending lewd pictures of himself via Twitter to a woman he didn’t personally know and that he had other assorted improper contacts with various women, still has at least one supporter left in Hollywood.
Weiner, whose close friends initially defended him until his confession last week, maintained the support of liberal comedian Janeane Garofalo while many in Hollywood shied away from the thoroughly disgraced Congressman.
The Hill reported that Garofalo appeared on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” and told the uber liberal host that “Anthony Weiner deserves to be supported and hopefully he will be mayor of New York one day. I’m serious. He is a Democrat [who] actually fights for the things liberals and progressive and rational people care about.
“I don’t know why he’s being thrown under the bus. He hasn’t done any — he hasn’t broke any laws,” she said.
While it’s true that he hasn’t broken any laws, as far as we know, he may be subject to investigation for cyberstalking, using government property for personal use, lying to Federal investigators and lewd conduct that could potentially lead to charges.
Plus, there are calls for a House ethics investigation to determine whether or not Weiner broke any House rules by his conduct.
Then there is the general letter-of-the-law versus spirit-of-the-law argument — even if Weiner didn’t technically break any laws or rules he certainly skirted them to the best of his ability.
Garofalo wasn’t done though, and told Maher that everyone lies about sex and blamed the media for being “overly obsessed” and that this story was the fault of “hypocrite Republicans” for keeping the story alive.
Maybe everyone does indeed lie about sex, as Garofalo states, but not everyone is an elected Representative like Weiner who vehemently denied that he was guilty of sending the naked pictures, lied to his friends and then tried to shift the blame for the incident, in this case to conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.
The media for its part was obsessed with the Weiner story, not just because it was another Congressional sex scandal in the making, but because they thought that this was their chance to expose Breitbart for smearing Weiner.
And as far as Garofalo’s charge that the Republicans are hypocritical, just wait until the next Republican gets caught up in a sex scandal and we will see who the real hypocrites are.
Don Irvine is the chairman of Accuracy in Media and its sister organization Accuracy in Academia. As the son of Reed Irvine, who launched AIM in 1969, he developed an understanding of media bias at an early age, and has been actively involved with AIM for over 30 years.
