July 15, 2013

"She approached in a knit white top and navy-blue business skirt, her dark, almost black hair down to her shoulders."

"She wore bright-red lipstick, which gave her lips a 3-D look, her brown eyes were pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent in the history of the human race."

#1 on a list of "The Four Silliest/Creepiest Huma Abedin Descriptions in 'New York' Magazine's Weiner Piece," compiled by Isaac Chotiner, at The New Republic, who says "Abedin always gets good press, but this piece takes it to a new level." But it's not true that "Abedin always gets good press." Chotiner's wrong about that. And the selected lines from the New York piece (which is written by Mark Jacobson) are so gloriously absurd, that they must be intentional satire and not a new level of good press, so Chotiner must also be wrong about that. I'm giving the win to Jacobson, and I haven't even read his article yet. It's a tad early on a Monday for that. Here's one pull quote:
If it was a mystery why Huma Abedin decided Anthony Weiner was the man for her, there were clear practical reasons to stay with him. It was far more than the fact that she worked for Hillary, learned the haute Tammy Wynette drill from the best. Weiner was, after all, the father of her child. If the candidate didn’t want Jordan to grow up hearing how the naughty pictures had ended his father’s political career, why should his mother feel any differently? Then again, they could just love each other.
I suspect that by the time Jordan is grown up, he and all the young people he knows will be sending photos of themselves in their underpants as the normal friendly way to say "hello." What will be hard — hard — to explain is why his father had to resign from elected office for such a thing. Why didn't Huma leave him? Maybe it was to say to the people of the future — including her grown-up child — that she knew, even back in the old days, that sexting is trifling, and the only real infraction was the husband idly flirted with other women. Who resigns from Congress or gets divorced over that?