Opinion

Twitter = zero tolerance

Yes, the footage is horrible, and the vulgar confrontation it depicts deeply discomfiting, but the truth is that Anthony Weiner got what he deserved yesterday in a resignation event almost as gross as his personal and public conduct.

Having sent unsought text messages about and photos of his private parts, Weiner found himself facing hecklers screaming questions at him about their size.

That was bad. This was worse:

Having spent days insulting those who sought only the truth, having lied in the most blatant manner and having instructed others to lie for him, Weiner then had the astonishing lack of grace to stand before the world and thank his parents for “instilling in me the values that got me to this point.”

That choice of words — which seems nice at first glance but which, in effect, unconsciously puts the blame for his behavior on his own mother and father — may represent the most disgusting thing he’s done so far.

But enough about him. Seriously. The question really is what this entire event says about American political life.

The answer: zero tolerance.

No politician is going to survive a sex scandal any longer. No one. Not after Eliot Spitzer’s 2008 humiliation was followed by South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s extramarital “walk along the Appalachian Trail” in 2009, which was followed this year by the revelation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child, which was followed in turn by the indictment of 2004 vice-presidential candidate John Edwards.

Consider this: Weiner is the third married member of Congress to resign his seat this year due to behavior resulting from sexual peccadillo. He follows Rep. Chris Lee (who went trolling for exotic partners on Craigslist) and Sen. John Ensign of Nevada (who resigned before the Senate Ethics Committee could bring him up on charges of having bought the silence of the husband of a staffer with whom he’d had an affair).

Like Ensign, whose misbehavior first became public knowledge in 2009, Weiner thought he could tough it out until the spotlight fixed on something else, or until his defenders became as vocal and powerful as his opponents.

That’s what Bill Clinton did back in 1998. More recently, it’s what David Vitter, the Republican senator from Lousiana, was able to do after getting enmeshed in a prostitution scandal in 2007. Vitter apologized with his wife standing next to him in humiliating subservience to his ambitions, and was reelected last year.

But the truth is that Vitter would not have survived if he’d been caught four weeks ago, instead of four years ago, and I doubt Clinton would have survived a day after the revelation of the blue Gap dress if he’d been president in 2011 rather than 1998.

Twitter is the reason. The citizenry’s disgust with political misbehavior has an entirely new kind of populist outlet, one that is uniquely resistant to mainstream-media efforts to choke off the oxygen of a story.

We all know Weiner was undone by Twitter, the same social-media system he misused when he mistakenly exposed a soft-core-porn photo of himself intended for a college kid in Washington state to the entire Twitterverse.

But Twitter didn’t destroy Weiner just because he’d done his dirty work on the site. It destroyed him because of what Twitter has become — a kind of national town hall of a sort and on a scale we’ve never seen before.

When the Vitter scandal hit in July 2007, Twitter was in its infancy; only 20,000 people were using it regularly. Those of us who weren’t had great difficulty understanding what it was and how it worked.

In the years since, Twitter has become the closest thing we’ve ever seen to a national town hall — a cacophony of voices that merges every now and then into a banshee wail.

That wail penetrated Weiner’s thick hide and overwhelmed the whiny protests of his ludicrous defenders. It could not be stilled or quieted, and it got its man.

Weiner won’t be the last.

johnpodhoretz@gmail.com