Calling Anthony …Anthony…Carlos Danger

From the public files of, “It’s Only Fiction `til It Happens…”

The master of intelligent suspense, author Linda Fairstein, was recently on the radio discussing her new book, Death Angel, when she related a story to the show’s host that in her first draft she had created a character that was a New York political type who had gotten mired in a Sexting scandal. Her agent pushed for and succeeded in getting her to remove the character from the manuscript because it was, and I am paraphrasing, “too unbelievable” or some such expression of, ‘far fetched’… it should be noted that Linda Fairstein was chief of the Sex Crimes Unit of the district attorney’s office in Manhattan for more than two decades as well as a brilliant author!

Welcome Anthony Putz:

In case you haven’t heard, here in New York, we got a guy from Brooklyn running for Mayor, Anthony Wiener.  He’s a freak of the highest order. His ego knows no limits, matrimonial or legal.  He practices a form of “electioneering” that takes all the wrong lessons from our political past and combines them into one very ugly new paradigm.  He’s a object lesson of why sometimes technology in the wrong hands, his hands pointing back at himself, doesn’t deliver on the promised utopia it might otherwise had achieved.

In short, he is a social pariah attempting to take control of one of the largest cities in the world.

He will WIN!

Either way.  He’ll either be propelled into office by an unprecedented number of young people who show up for the first time, actually caring to vote for Mayor. The thinking being that he is the first “adult” to give ‘street cred’ to Sexting. Something the “kids” have no problem with and many have been engaged in since they started “OMG”-ing years ago. He is their unrestrained, unashamed, unabashed hero! He may then be addressed as the “not so” honorable, Mayor Wiener.  But hey, ‘Honor’ is a relic of the past; I saw a tweet that said so.

Or he may lose. Weiner may never make it through the primary. In which case…

He WINS even bigger.

Welcome to the great apology tour! – the public speaking fees and the TV appearances. Oprah will surely dust off the couch, they might even reanimate Phil Donahue to look deeply in his eyes, take a dramatic pause then screw up his facial mask and ask, “What the heck happened?” He may even get his own TV show (See client Number Nine… er, New York’s former governor, Elliot Spitzer, turned TV co-host, who had the bad taste not to use a smart phone when he did the un-smart thing of frequenting a prostitute as he cheated on his wife).  So old school, so retro. Oh, and he may be on the same Democratic party line ballot! He is running for Comptroller of the City of New York at the same time. (That’s not a joke, we have two of these guys in one election!)

So either way, Anthony “The Putz” Wiener is a winner. The rest of us… not so much.

Editors note: We assiduously avoided any easy puns about Anthony Wiener’s run for office and subsequent scandal. Those have become the cliché and well trodden grist for the New York tabloid mill. Unless of course you understand Yiddish!

Possible “whatever headline”. You may already be a Wiener! – if you’re under thirty.