The women Weiner sent his photographs to were hardly traumatized. Yet no one has demanded the complete records of their side of the exchange with Weiner. After all, he didn’t just pop onto their Twitter feeds one day, say, shalom, I’m a congressman from Queens, and then shoot off a picture of himself standing in gray boxer shorts with an erection. It could be reasonably surmised that an escalating correspondence encouraged him to think that “erotic” photographs of himself would be welcome. Did Lisa, the 40-year-old blackjack dealer in Las Vegas, call her mother in tears? Or did she boldly send back a picture of herself every bit as vivid as Weiner’s own? And if these women were shocked, why didn’t they just shut the online relationship down?
Instead of ending the relationship, at least one woman passed on a picture that Weiner had sent to her to a conservative blogger. That is not exactly the response of offended virtue. Still, no one has made an issue of looking into whether Weiner was set up by political adversaries. In this vicious atmosphere, it is hard to accept that he wasn’t; astonishingly, in this vicious, paranoid atmosphere, such an elementary question, when it is asked, is not taken seriously. Yet it seems the most natural thing in our increasingly unnatural political atmosphere that a congressman notorious for his “brashness” and recklessness would be a target for online provocateurs.
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