Weiner Ushers in New Golden Age of Tabloid Headlines

Since the famous Crotch Shot Heard 'Round the World from Anthony Weiner late on May 27, the online social networks have exploded with every possible penis joke possible, especially on Twitter, where it all fatefully began. Still, many of us have always enjoyed the wondrously clever talents of New York Post headline writers over the years, with this likely being the most famous.

Now with the Weiner saga saturating the media, both locally and nationally, the folks at the NYP have stepped up their game and provided some real gems of late, with the headline to Tuesday's editorial already reaching legendary status:

Erections have Consequences

That. Is. Gold.

You think they're resting on that? Pfft.

They bring it strong again today. Some samples:

Disgusted Democrats letting Weiner shrivel

Weiner on Wife Support (the print edition substitutes Weiner with Perv Pol.)

Weiner Likely to Endure Rough Sex Probe

(The notion of rough sex and Nancy Pelosi leaves us shuddering.)

Then you get the not so subtle headlines such as Get the Hell out of Here!

Then we come to today's front page:

When what's left of your career has been reduced to tabloid headlines with images of porn queens, strippers, assorted other women and words like cover up, it's time to go.

Giving credit where due, the New York Daily News does give us this:

Sadly, the Old Grey Hag just can't compete with their witty superiors at the Post. The most lurid wording they can come up with is salacious, a word that immediately reminds us, ironically, of the man who performed Weiner's wedding ceremony: Bill Clinton.

Great company.

During a tense telephone call with Mr. Weiner, during which he apologized, Representative Nydia M. Velázquez of Brooklyn scolded him, as she recalled: “How can you explain that somebody can be so smart but so stupid?”

Asked if Mr. Weiner should resign, she replied, “The most important thing in this business is credibility.”

When Nydia Velázquez is questioning your intelligence (albeit in mangled English), it's over.

Even one of the vaunted all-stars from their opinion pages is stuck in 1999, also calling it salacious. How original.

Absurd Headline of the Day

Scroll for update...

So an angry rent-a-mob led by racist Al Sharpton piss and moan outside the New York Post today issuing threats and Reuters comes up with this entirely misleading headline.

New Yorkers to boycott NY Post over "racist" cartoon

New Yorkers are going to boycott? I don't think so. The joke is, none of Sharpton's mob probably even read the Post, or read for that matter, so how is a group that doesn't read the Post going to boycott it?

Hundreds of demonstrators rallied to boycott the New York Post on Thursday, branding the newspaper as racist for publishing a cartoon that appeared to compare President Barack Obama to a chimpanzee.

Demonstrators led by civil rights activist Al Sharpton chanted "End racism now!" outside the parent company's skyscraper in midtown Manhattan and called for the jailing of Rupert Murdoch, whose international media conglomerate News Corp owns the Post.

Sure, jailing Rupert Murdoch is very realistic.

Idiots.

Update: The Post apologizes ... sort of.

Wednesday's Page Six cartoon - caricaturing Monday's police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut - has created considerable controversy.

It shows two police officers standing over the chimp's body: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill," one officer says.

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

Period.

But it has been taken as something else - as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.

This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past - and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

I suspect they're referring to the fat racist.

Aww: HuffPoster Terribly Offended by NY Post Chimp Cartoon

These liberal wackos are always looking for hidden messages. Clearly unable to understand what satire is, except of course when they rush to use the satire defense themselves. Here's Obama water-carrier Sam Stein, a nutroots blogger who magically found himself seated in the front row at the Obama press conference last week, so you know he's in the back pocket of the administration.

A cartoon likening the author of the stimulus bill, perhaps President Barack Obama, with a rabid chimpanzee graced the pages of the New York Post on Wednesday.

The drawing, from famed cartoonist Sean Delonas, is rife with violent imagery and racial undertones. In it, two befuddled-looking police officers holding guns look over the dead and bleeding chimpanzee that attacked a woman in Stamford, Connecticut.

"They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill," reads the caption.

Racial undertones? In case Stein isn't aware, that chimpanzee story is big news in the New York area. Was the left using racial undertones when they called George Bush a chimp for eight year? Or was that simply satire?

These idiotic racist liberals are always the first to see racism where it doesn't exist.

Meanwhile, never one to miss an opportunity to demagogue, racist huckster Al Sharpton chimes in.

"The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist."

Sharpton called the cartoon "troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys." He said the Post should clarify what point the cartoon was making.

He did. It's a parody.

besides, didn't Nancy Pelosi write the porkulus bill?

Commenters at the Daily Kos are already calling for his career to be terminated.

Such tolerance.

Update: Some leftwing douchebag with a bad case of projection decided to link. Figured you folks could use a good laugh.

But Jammie Wearing Fool will generally say what you think he would say. His pseudonym suggests a self-awareness for which no other evidence has been found. We imagine him as a disheveled, feety smelling man of 5′6″ or so and a silhouette like a fireplug, drinking endless cups of bad coffee as talk radio yells and chatters around him in an endless blare, like the radio in Bad Lieutenant. We like him and think of him in a way as a friend, as our hypothetical Everynut.

Gee, they're on to me. Only off by nine inches. And, well, everything else. I doubt they're bright enough to figure out the genesis of the name, either, so let's just let small minds wander.

Idiots.

JWF Goes Mainstream

The nefarious house organ of the ruthless Murdoch empire saw fit to quote me in today's edition. Thanks for the pub, guys.

In the meantime, they slap around the Silky Pony a bit more, including another heretofore unknown tidbit.

The Edwards campaign has refused to answer questions from The Post seeking information about how all of the advance and expense money was spent.

The book was "edited" by Edwards with his daughter, Cate, and Jonathan Prince, an aide. The campaign also refused to answer questions about Edwards' work on the book and whether his daughter and aide were paid.

Meanwhile, the Edwards campaign said he will not return the campaign donations he collected through his networking page on MySpace.com, which is also owned by News Corp.

RIP, Niles Lathem

Former New York Post reporter Niles Lathem has passed away, the third great Post reporter to die in the past several months.

Niles Lathem, a long-time Washington correspondent for the New York Post, died yesterday after a battle with lung cancer. He was 51.

Lathem covered some of the biggest stories of the last 30 years, including on-the-scene reporting of the 1999 Kosovo war and of President Ronald Reagan's 1987 "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech in Berlin.

He later became The Post's security-affairs expert and tracked the rise of Osama bin Laden and international terrorism long before Sept. 11, 2001.

"He was a fine journalist and a treasured member of the staff. He'll be sorely missed," said Col Allan, The Post's editor-in-chief.

Lathem was raised in Brooklyn and lived for a time in England while his father served as a doctor at the U.S. Embassy. After Colorado College, he broke into journalism at the Paterson News..

"He cut his teeth in New Jersey, covering school boards and stuff," his wife, Ellen, recalled.

In 1980 he was hired by The Post. After three months in New York, he was promoted to Washington bureau chief.

After Reagan was elected that fall, Lathem became a frequent flier on the president's trips to the Soviet Union, China and to Alaska, when Reagan met Pope John Paul II.

A Post editorial marks his passing.

The Post's Washington correspondent Niles Lathem was a genuinely nice guy in a profession noted for its hard-bitten cynics. As a reporter, though, he was a genuine workhorse.

Lathem died yesterday at 51, after a brief battle with cancer.

Sadly, he's the third Post veteran who's left us in the past few months, following the untimely passing of Middle East correspondent Uri Dan and Washington Bureau Chief Deborah Orin-Eilbeck.

Niles joined The Post in 1980 as a general-assignment reporter and was named Washington Bureau chief after Ronald Reagan's election. He served in that position throughout Reagan's terms in office, chronicling one of the most significant presidencies in American history.

He filed story after story, many of them exclusives. Early on, he was the subject of a front-page Style story in The Washington Post that made him a celebrity.