Anthony Abedin For Mayor

Weiner should really change his name to Adedin. There is nothing that says that a husband can’t take his wife’s surname. Sure it could be Weiner-Abedin. That’s the politically correct way to do it, but choosing Abedin would show that Anthony Weiner is making a commitment to being a new person. Anyway there are too many Weiners in New York and we are on the verge of saying good-bye to a Bloomberg. Maybe NewYork's had too many nice Jewish boys or would be nice Jewish boys running for the mayoralty. Maybe the message is that it's time for Weiner to transform himself, to graduate. Remember The Graduate? Abedin is a nice Muslim name and if New York wants to show that it’s a truly cosmopolitan city and also the mecca of finance and the arts, we need to elect a Muslim sounding mayor. Anthony Abedin--the name has a certain gravitas and it doesn’t hurt that his other half is a prominent member of Hillary Clinton’s team. Just let it run through your lips Hizzoner Anthony Abedin. Sounds a lot better than Huma Weiner, by the way, and maybe someday Abingdon Square will be renamed Abedin Square. Abedin can also compete nicely with Jewish sounding names which connote a facility with commerce. Where are you going to shop if you are given the choice of Macy's or Saks? Why of course the answer is none of the above. You’re going to Abedin’s since it’s a little different. If I were at the airport and wanted to buy my wife a necklace, would I go to H. Stern or the new boy on the block?

Weiner Spitzel

Luchow’s was a New York institution. Located on East Fourteenth Street, it was popular with business leaders, politicians and just plain folks. It was probably one of the last bastions of the German- American restaurants which catered to a wide swathe of New York appetites. Wiener Schnitzel was one of Luchow’s signature dishes. Too bad Luchow’s isn’t still around. To celebrate the announcement that the formerly disgraced former city council member and House rep, Anthony Weiner and the formerly disgraced governor, Eliot Spitzer, are running respectively for mayor and comptroller, the restaurant might have served Weiner Spitzel with spaetzle. But let’s imagine what City Hall would be like with Anthony Weiner as mayor and Eliot Spitzer as comptroller. Would the team be like a big crunchy slab of meat--a wiener, Weiner could proudly Twitter. Spitzer was a hands on, if somewhat arrogant governor as well as one would suspect a hands on John, but one wonders about his budgetary acumen. How much will someone who paid thousands of dollars for sex fork out for something as mundane as the toilet paper used in municipal buildings? As for Weiner has anyone suggested that he change his name to Anthony Abedin—something which will give him a step up when, after retiring from the mayoralty, he seeks to get a cabinet position in the Clinton administration. For those who think anything’s better than Christine Quinn or Joe Lhota, Weiner Spitzel is a no brainer.

Guys Just Wanna Have Fun

Add Crystal Harris and Hugh Hefner to the list of high-profile breakups that includes Tipper and Al Gore, Mark and Jenny Sanford, John and Elizabeth Edwards and, most recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver. Will Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner make it through their own recent scandals? And whatever happened to Silda Wall and Eliot Spitzer? It’s Scenes From a Marriage (or would-be marriage in the case of Hef) American style. Let’s analyze the ashes of some of these marriages on a case-by-case basis. There’s a 60-year age difference between Hef and Crystal, and the breakup comes on the eve of the release of her single “Club Queen.” Hef had previously been married to Mildred Williams (the mother of Christie Hefner) and then, much later, to Kimberly Conrad. But his former girlfriend Holly Madison was the Cassandra when it came to his most recent nuptials. “I think it’s possible Crystal could break Hef’s heart,” PopEater quoted Madison as saying. Moving through the list: Schwarzenegger fathered a child with his maid and Sanford fell in love with an Argentine woman and abandoned the state he was elected to govern. Could Al Gore’s troubles have had anything to do with the kind of behavior he exhibited towards his masseuse, Molly Hagerty? Could John Edwards have been one of those men whose infidelity hides a darker truth, the inability to cope with illness, even though he insists that he strayed while Elizabeth’s cancer was in remission? Ironically, sex is the apparent pitfall for everyone but the geriatric Playboy himself. Not that reports about Hefner and Crystal’s breakup have explicitly ruled out the couple’s sex life as a cause, but one can’t help thinking that the yawning generation gap was the ultimate factor, particularly in a youth culture that Hefner himself helped to spawn. On the other hand, age didn’t deter Dominique Strauss-Kahn when he made his unreciprocated advances on the then 21-year-old Tristane Banon. And then of course there is Humbert Humbert and Lolita.

In the Media

Question: will Anthony Weiner take over Eliot Spitzer’s slot on CNN’s In the Arena and will Alan Berger, the agent who handled Katie Couric’s new deal with ABC, be able to sell syndication rights for her new show to one of Silvio Berlusconi’s television stations? And what about a Spitzer/Weiner report modeled on NBC’s old Huntley/Brinkley or PBS’s Macneil/Lehrer News Hour? If they bring on Dr. Ruth Westheimer as executive producer, there is no doubt that Spitzer/Weiner could provide the first real competition for two HBO warhorses, “Real Sex” and “Taxicab Confessions.” With Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger dominating the news in the way that Pamela Anderson once did with her famed Tommy Lee honeymoon tape, there will be a need for seasoned commentators to handle the flood of impropriety generated by office holders on the international, national and state levels. For some of us it seems like only yesterday that Bill Clinton was asking Monica Lewinsky to light his cigar (or was it the other way around?), but impeachment proceedings now seem quaint compared to a two-time presidential candidate possibly on his way to jail for allegedly using campaign funds to cover up his affair. It wouldn’t be surprising to hear that Huma Abedin was covering the Edwards debacle for Al Jazeera.