AN OPEN LETTER TO REP. ANTHONY WEINER

EWWWWWWWWWW! Now, go away.

Dear Congressman,

You are cordially invited to resign office as one of New York’s representative in Congress.  I think I join a growing chorus of those who are sorry we got to see your nipples and grey underpants.  We hope to forever wash your icky twit pix from our memory.

I’m sorry you turned out to be just another narcissistic buffoon with a zipper problem.   I’m sorry for your constituents, I’m sorry for your great wife. What a great political team you two would have made: the Jew and the Muslim as the new power couple for the ages.

Sadly, that you have no impulse control makes you unfit for office, unfit to be the husband of the fantastic Huma, a woman whose very name means “bird which brings joy.”  How pathetic that her beauty, her grace, her savvy and her joy wasn’t enough to distract you from your obsessive compulsive behavior on the internet.

Wake up Weiner: we’re sick of cads like you.  If you need an engraved invitation to step down, I’ll call you from the printer’s and confirm the time of the announcement.

Please don’t rationalize that such behavior can be traced to our founding fathers.  No, they were among the great romantics, not nipple-flashers.

It took Thomas Jefferson twelve handwritten pages, not a 140-character tweet,  to proclaim his love to a married Englishwoman he met in Paris, Maria Cosway.  No, Jefferson didn’t draw her a picture of his penis.  He wrote of the pain of his predicament in a dialog in which his throbbing heart debated with his more rational head.

Compare your overtures to Jefferson’s, whose  words were written clumsily with his left hand — he’d broken his right wrist jumping out of the carriage to show off for Mrs. Cosway. Here’s just a small sample:

Head. Thou art the most incorrigible of all the beings that ever sinned! I reminded you of the follies of the first day, intending to deduce from thence some useful lessons for you, but instead of listening to these, you kindle at the recollection, you retrace the whole series with a fondness which shews you want nothing but the opportunity to act it over again. I often told you during its course that you were imprudently engaging your affections under circumstances that must have cost you a great deal of pain: that the persons indeed were of the greatest merit, possessing good sense, good humour, honest hearts, honest manners, & eminence in a lovely art; that the lady had moreover qualities & accomplishments, belonging to her sex, which might form a chapter apart for her: such as music, modesty, beauty, & that softness of disposition which is the ornament of her sex & charm of ours, but that all these considerations would increase the pang of separation: that their stay here was to be short: that you rack our whole system when you are parted from those you love, complaining that such a separation is worse than death, inasmuch as this ends our sufferings, whereas that only begins them: & that the separation would in this instance be the more severe as you would probably never see them again.

Heart. But they told me they would come back again the next year.

Head. But in the meantime see what you suffer: & their return too depends on so many circumstances that if you had a grain of prudence you would not count upon it. Upon the whole it is improbable & therefore you should abandon the idea of ever seeing them again.

Heart. May heaven abandon me if I do!

Head. Very well. Suppose then they come back. They are to stay two months, & when these are expired, what is to follow? Perhaps you flatter yourself they may come to America?

Heart. God only knows what is to happen. I see nothing impossible in that supposition. And I see things wonderfully contrived sometimes to make us happy. Where could they find such objects as in America for the exercise of their enchanting art? especially the lady, who paints landscapes so inimirably. She wants only subjects worthy of immortality to render her pencil immortal. The Failing Spring, the Cascade of Niagara, the Passage of the Potowmac through the Blue Mountains, the Natural bridge. It is worth a voyage across the Atlantic to see these objects; much more to paint, and make them, & thereby ourselves, known to all ages. And our own dear Monticello, where has nature spread so rich a mantle under the eye? Mountains, forests, rocks, rivers. With what majesty do we there ride above the storms! How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! And the glorious sun when rising as if out of a distant water, just gilding the tops of the mountains, & giving life to all nature? I hope in God no circumstance may ever make either seek an asylum from grief! With what sincere sympathy I would open every cell of my composition to receive the effusion of their woes! I would pour my tears into their wounds: & if a drop of balm could be found on the top of the Cordilleras, or at the remotest sources of the Missouri, I would go thither myself to seek & to bring it. Deeply practised in the school of affliction, the human heart knows no joy which I have not lost, no sorrow of which I have not drunk! Fortune can present no grief of unknown form to me! Who then can so softly bind up the wound of another as he who has felt the same wound himself? But Heaven forbid they should ever know a sorrow! Let us turn over another leaf, for this has distracted me.

So, dear Congressman, I do understand, even forgive cheaters. It’s not even that you lied.  I get why people lie about their indiscretions.  I don’t even care whether or not you used government phones, computers or taxpayer time.  It doesn’t matter to me whether or not you violated rules of the House.  I just don’t like cads.

That Franklin D. Roosevelt lived with Missy LeHand in the White House while Eleanor Roosevelt lived her separate life doesn’t mean we will  embrace the behavior of Arnold Schwarzenegger or John Edwards or you.  Please study the difference.  If you like, I’ll send you a copy of “Fall From Grace: The History of Sex, Scandal and Corruption from 1702 to the Present.”

The book came out before you entered office so let me explain where you fit in.  You’re not an exasperating “bad” boy.  You’re vulgar.  You’re not a man of passion, you’re a predator.

Spare us the rest of the script in which Huma is the rescuing heroine.  Don’t expect when she forgives you as a husband, that we will give you a pass in political office.
And one last favor.  Please do not get your own cable talk show or join any political round-tables after you finish with the sex addiction treatment program you don’t yet know you’re going to enter.   Once that is done, feel free to join the Clinton Foundation and be the public servant you set out to be.

Please live happily ever after with Huma, or let that bird of joy fly free.

Sincerely,

Shelley Ross