Stop Me Before I Vote Again

I really wanted to stay away from the Weiner's-wiener scandal, but it's actually quite piquant to me, for entirely personal reasons.

Oh, don't get me wrong -- I don't send penis pictures through Twitter, or anything else. Nor have I received any of Anthony's. The personal connection I had in mind is that Anthony once did me a favor. Well, not me personally, but a little anti-car activist group that I was part of, called Right Of Way, whose butt-ugly still-extant Web site -- maintained by me, which is why it's so ugly -- has the piquant name of cars-suck.org.

Right Of Way had the ambitious scheme of doing an in-depth analysis of several years' worth of pedestrian and cyclist deaths under car wheels. We needed to get a comprehensive series of police reports from the state Department of Transportation. Now the Freedom Of Information law, in New York, is a pretty toothless affair -- unless you're an elected official. In that case, you can get most anything you ask for.

As it happened, we numbered among our ranks in those days a young, energetic chap named Harris Silver. And Harris was some kind of old pal of Anthony's, and Anthony was then an 'umble member of the city council.

Harris prevailed on Anthony to request the documents, which we duly received, and after a good deal of work, wrote a rather good pamphlet about.

So we owe Harris and Anthony a debt of gratitude. Harris went on to become a Segway shill, and Anthony a pervy congressman, and I a blogger -- and which is worst, God alone knows.

Harris was a bit of a hipster avant-la-lettre, a very cool dude, but you had to stay off the topic of Israel with him. He was a complete Likudnik, as far as I could tell, on that question, and his coolth would drop away like a butterfly's discarded cocoon as soon as the subject came up. He married outside the tribe, however -- to a very fetching Persian girl.

Oddly enough, Anthony did something along the same lines. Though he is a frothing mad-dog Zionist, he married a Muslim girl from Pakistan.

Kinda thought-provoking. These two gents both personally did the thing that "American Jewish leadership" most deplores -- they intermarried. Which shows that they're both sensible people, at least up to a point. I don't know Anthony's wife, and it's true that she does work for Hillary Clinton, but surely she's a long step up from, say, Hadassah Lieberman, spouse of the Man From Bridgeport. And I can tell you for sure that Harris' wife is a prize.

Harris and Anthony both had the Zionist chip firmly lodged on their respective shoulders -- though maybe Harris has changed; it's been a while since I've seen him; but I doubt it. Yet here are two guys whose ideological attitudes led them one way, and whose eminently reasonable personal choices led them another way.

All good news, on balance.

If Weiner ends up leaving Congress -- as he probably will -- I won't weep; regression to the mean, if nothing else, is likely to replace him with somebody slightly less insane about Israel.

But his woody-shots are less discreditable to him than the nauseating Pecksniffery of, say, a Nancy Pelosi, who wants to investigate whether any of these boner.jpg's were transmitted over taxpayers' fiber. She can't really make much of a case that tweeted stiffies are such a Bad Thing, but the misuse of office equipment...!