Should Representative Anthony Weiner Resign? Absolutely!

Should Representative Anthony Weiner resign? Absolutely. The reason has little to do with the scandal and more to do with what might have been.

Here is a man who commits a bizarre little act, that may or may not have been illegal. However, he blamed what turned out to be a phantom hacker. His strategy did not work, but what if it did? This man is a congressman and to hack into his Twitter account as he claimed happened would be a serious act. An innocent man would have had to defend himself against false charges with a federal prosecutor doing all he could to take down the man in order to defend the integrity of the US Congress.

Rep. Weiner at one point was willing to let that all happen. For that reason he needs to resign.

Have these people not heard of Charles Stuart? The famous story of the man who shot his wife and then blamed the incident on an innocent black man. The case ultimately fell apart when one of the accomplices came forward and Stuart committed suicide by jumping off the Tobin Bridge that connects Boston with the North Shore via US Route 1. However, until that moment the Boston Police combed the poor black neighborhoods in the area looking for the phantom black man. It was a low point in Boston history and the media drove the search for the black perpetrator acting as Stuart's ignorant accomplices as well. Later one alternative newspaper admitted that the reason why the Stuart case almost worked was because the "victim" was a middle class white couple and the accused perpetrator was a poor black man with a history of incarceration. In the words of the newspaper, the "victimized" couple was us. The media bought Stuart's lies hook, line and sinker.

Rep. Weiner's constituents need to ask themselves what would have happened if one of them was accused by their representative. Lives would have been turned upside down, careers lost and if the accused was a black man, a latino, a muslim, an undocumented person; a rich, white male attending Duke University or even a catholic, he or she would have been fodder for the media everyday. Just ask any of the above demographics who have been falsely accused, they know how much the media would have gone along with the gag and how easy it is for less than honest people to manipulate them.

Maybe we should all be thankful Michael Nifong was not on the case.