Anthony Weiner Is Back and He’s as Phony as Ever

The first episode of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner’s new podcast “about the problems facing New York City and the power of ideas” promised to “kick off with the hot issue of the moment, crime.”

So, as a convicted felon and registered sex offender who did 21 months in federal prison for sending obscene material to a minor, Weiner might have been expected to at least mention his own crime in the premiere of Keys to the City.

But Weiner makes only oblique references to any troubles he has had with the criminal justice system. And he offers no insights he may have gained from his time behind bars, followed by a halfway house and probation.

At Weiner’s sentencing in 2017, Manhattan federal judge Denise Cote suggested he could provide “a true public service” by helping others understand what she described as “a disease that involves sexual compulsivity.”

Instead, Weiner’s podcast offered a tired idea about making public data regarding “stop, question and frisk” by the NYPD, which would only affirm what everybody already knows.

Weiner could have been back in time to 2013, when the extent of his depravity was not yet known and he was running for mayor with a platform he called Keys to the City: 64 Ideas to Keep New York City the Capital of the Middle Class.

Weiner had launched that bid for mayor despite having resigned from Congress two years earlier when it became known he had sent women sexually explicit photos of himself. That campaign for redemption in the form of the mayoralty ended after it was revealed he had sexted three other women, in one instance under the unforgettable alias “Carlos Danger.”

And he was not done. He proceeded from confirmed creep to accused felon.

“On three separate occasions in early 2016, the defendant sat in his Manhattan apartment, got online and asked a real 15-year-old girl to display her naked body for him and sexually perform,” Cote later noted at the sentencing.

The judge added, “There are no circumstances under which that is acceptable, excusable, or insignificant. Indeed, what the defendant did is a serious felony, as he knew full well from his decade as a United States congressman.”

What Cote was describing was someone who compulsively committed what he ultimately knew to be a major crime. That would certainly seem to fit a significant portion of the lawbreaking that is presently on the rise in New York.

“This is our first episode and we start with probably the issue that is on most people’s minds here in New York City,” Weiner rightly says. “It comes and goes, but it’s always in the background and that is crime.”

Yet in reviving the concept Keys to the City, Weiner brings no more to the discussion of crime than he would have when he was the politician everybody thought they knew nine years ago.

His ideas are as reasonable now as they were back then, though on the podcast he says there were 2,022 murders in 2013, when there were actually 332, according to city officials at the time. He apparently meant 1993, when homicide hit a record, though the correct number then was 2,420.

But, other than that error, Weiner is remarkably smooth. He channels the old Anthony, just as he does on two other podcasts, those initially airing as radio shows, The Middle as well as The Left and The Right, the latter with another former mayoral candidate, Guardian Angel Curtis Sliwa.

Behind the microphone, Weiner is so much like he once seemed to be behind a podium that you wonder if we are being fooled again, if the actual Anthony of old is still there with his secret self and all his twists, getting the attention he craves, reveling in himself.

In the second half of Episode 1 of Keys to the City, Weiner has a guest, Charlie King, a prominent New York City and Democratic civic leader. King says, “We have to address the elephant in the room,” but he is not speaking of Weiner’s crime or prison time. King is speaking of Weiner using the notion of “Keys to the City,” from “when you ran for mayor the last time.”

“The question is, do you plan to run for mayor again?” King then asks.

“I wasn’t prepared for this curve,” Weiner replies. “Well, no, I have no intention [of] doing it.”

He adds, “I said many times, the only job I really wanted in public life besides being in Congress was mayor… I love my city. I still do. I still believe the things that I did.”

He appeared to be trying to show that he had not changed in the political sense. He remains proof that the political ultimately cannot be separated from the personal.

“But I think practically speaking, given the problems that I’ve had and given just the remarkable success I’m having on radio and podcasting, I think that fate has led me in another direction,” he said.

Actually, it was fake as much as fate. And he himself did the leading.