The Battle of the Weiner is Over, But the War Isn’t Yet Won.

So Anthony Weiner took the long walk to the microphone today and resigned his position as member of the House of Representatives. If you haven’t been following the story, well, God bless you. You’ve missed a real mess — a tale of arrogance, sex, a porn actress, some young girls, lies, politics, more lies, and body parts that none of us really needed to see.

You only really need to know three things about this story.

1) It wasn’t the sex (or the sexts) that doomed Weiner, but the arrogant piling on of lie upon lie. The headlines today don’t reflect that, but it’s the heart of the story. If Anthony Weiner had come clean, instead of making up ridiculous stories about a hacker, making crude jokes in front of female reporters, and saying he couldn’t say for sure if it was him in the initial picture, the story would have gone away. Sound familiar?

2) If not for new media — Ace, Patterico, Andrew Breitbart and his Army of Bigs, and Stacy McCain — Anthony Weiner would still be in office today. They worked the story until it got so big that the MSM couldn’t ignore it, though they tried their hardest to do just that. Sound familiar?

3) The MSM earned special marks of shame with their efforts to duck the story or explain it away without even the most cursory attempt to investigate it. Meanwhile they flooded the zone to dig through Sarah Palin’s years-old e-mails like they could find the antidote to their plunging revenues and approval ratings somewhere in them. Special Merit of Shame awards to go Howard Kurtz and Joan Walsh (along with her minion Alex Pareene) for their intentional mendacity and/or dereliction of their journalistic duty. Sound familiar?

I keep asking that little question at the end because it struck me that this scandal played itself out very much like the Bill Clinton perjury scandal played out in the 1990s. Indeed, Weiner himself seems to have run the Clinton playbook even while it was obvious that the old rules would no longer work in the era of new media. I wouldn’t have thought they’d be quite as obtuse as they have, but it’s obvious they couldn’t adapt to the new rules. But is that terribly surprising given that they continue to ply us with policies that have failed over and over again since the days of Wilson and FDR?

Anthony Weiner is out of Congress, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone. He, like so many other Democrats before him, will land in another job — maybe as a consultant, maybe in a think-tank, maybe as a host of a brand new show on CNN or MS-NBC, or maybe even as a candidate in another election not far down the road. Democrats of his stature never go away. They just shuffle into a new place where they can ply their old trade until they can weasel their way back to the levers of power again. And the mainstream media will be right there helping him, covering for him, ginning up distractions they hope will keep us from noticing what’s happening behind them.

Then again, maybe not. Like I said, this is a new media age, an age where a bunch of pretty ordinary folks can find a story and run it to ground despite every effort by the professional media to stop them. And believe me, the pros don’t like that one bit. They have a pretty cushy gig as the unofficial chaff-generator for the Democratic Party and they will not give it up easily.

I want to finish this post with a quote from Ace’s Twitter feed. I think he’s hit the nail right on the head when it comes to what we can expect from the MSM between now and Election Day, 2012. The Story of Weinergate was only the beginning.

This is going to be 18 months of Conservative Christmas. The media will undergo The Great Unmasking. Their terror will be palpable. There’ll be a mighty losing of furious shit. The media will devolve to what they are but hide from being, nakedly, transparently, finally. They are already losing the plot, off their trolley, sputtering in white-flecked rage, hurling curses like gypsy hags. And it’s only June. It will be like Weiner. First will be anger, but then will come laughter, and then you will begin to take pity on these low creatures.

Indeed it is, but that doesn’t mean we conservatives can sit back and enjoy the implosion. We have to keep up the pressure so that when the meltdown finally comes, it is so public and so spectacular that they will never, ever be able to recover.

Tags: Anthony Weiner, Democrats, Media Bias