When the “Carlos Danger” story broke, all eyes inevitably turned to Senor Danger’s wife, Huma Abedin.
The woman constantly described as “intensely private,” who had her whole life exposed two years ago when her intensely public husband sent photographs of his genitalia to women on the Internet — what would she do?
By now we’re used to the humiliated wife, standing next to her philandering husband at his press conference, looking like hell has been unleashed onto her. Some standouts of recent years have been New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey’s wife by his side as he explained he’s a gay American and Silda Spitzer, shell-shocked beside Eliot “Client 9” Spitzer. (Yes, it happens with the wives of Republicans, too, like Sens. Larry Craig and David Vitter.)
And we know the Hillary Clintons of the world, who defend their husbands in the face of all logic and reason.
What makes Huma Abedin different isn’t that she stood by her man, while pregnant, as he publicly disgraced their marriage, and lied about it repeatedly while blaming the same “vast right-wing conspiracy” as Hillary.
No, Abedin took it a step further. She didn’t want him to resign, according to what Anthony Weiner later told The New York Times — plus, she encouraged him to jump into the mayoral race.
Mind you, from what the couple now tells us, she knew when she was pushing him to run that he’d kept up the sexting for months and months after he left Congress.
And, as the two were plotting his political comeback, Abedin posed for soft-focus People Magazine photos painting the picture of a happy family that had moved on from Weiner’s indiscretions.
Moved on? Shortly after their publication, he sent new pictures of his privates to new women.
On Tuesday, Weiner was telling everyone that he told Abedin everything. Was he lying again, or has she known all along? If she has, then when she told People, “Anthony has spent every day since [the scandal] trying to be the best dad and husband he can be,” she was lying.
And if she wasn’t lying then, she’s lying now, because she’s backing his claim that he told her everything.
Bad enough that he apparently loves embarrassing himself and his wife so much he couldn’t wait to do it again. But it’s her awareness that he’d kept up the sexts, long after he’d resigned and even as he was busily pretending he was a changed man, that’s so shocking.
When Abedin says “I love him. I have forgiven him. And as we have said from the beginning, we are moving forward,” the question becomes: When exactly was this beginning?
When she says, “I have my own life,” we wonder why then is she standing beside him?
When she pens an article for Harper’s Bazaar saying, “New Yorkers will have to decide for themselves whether or not to give him a second chance. I had to make that same decision for myself, for my son, for our family,” we know that it wasn’t a second chance she gave him. It was a third — at minimum.
No one would attack Abedin for staying in her marriage and defending her husband — if it weren’t for the fact that she’s trying to foist an unstable man on all of us.
Her defense of him is so over-the-top that the only conclusion that can be drawn is that she is as power-hungry and deranged as he is. It’s reminiscent of Elizabeth Edwards, willing to ignore her husband’s affair and obvious love child, so long as he still had a chance to become president.
Huma Abedin once inspired pity, but now the growing public feeling toward her is anger. Anthony Weiner has no self-control and no business being New York City’s mayor. The woman who enables him shouldn’t be first lady of our city.
Karol Markowicz blogs at alarmingnews.com
Twitter: @karol