Anthony Weiner resigns!

From the Guardian:

Twenty days after the scandal dubbed "Weinergate" erupted with the sending of a sexually suggestive photograph on Twitter, a rising star of the Democrats was forced to resign his congressional seat in the face of pressure from the highest levels of his party.

From having been ranked as a possible future Democratic leader and the frontrunner to become New York mayor in 2013, Anthony Weiner's fall from grace is spectacular and close to complete. He has spent his entire adult life in politics, having been elected in 1991 as the youngest councillor to serve in New York city then aged 27.

True to his character as an abrasive and at times antagonistic politician, Weiner, now 46, at first tried to lie his way out of the sex scandal he had provoked by sending lewd photographs of himself to several different women. When the rightwing blogger Andrew Breitbart revealed his actions on 28 May, Weiner initially claimed his Twitter account had been hacked into, later changing his story to say he wasn't sure whether the images of a semi-naked man were of him.

After further revelations emerged virtually every day of his sexually charged interactions, he went in front of the cameras on 6 June to admit that he had been involved through cyberspace with at least six different women. But even then he refused to stand down from his New York seat.

Weiner's resignation was made on the day that party leaders had been preparing to strip him of his powerful positions on congressional committees — a move which would have further humiliated and weakened him.

The official line taken by party leaders such as Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic chief in the House of Representatives who has called on him to resign, was that the scandal was distracting attention from important political debates such as the economy.

I just watched this on CNN. 

It was pretty sad even though I have been one of those saying that he had to make this choice all along.

There was some asshole in the audience yelling out insulting questions, that I assume is one of Howard Stern's douchebags.  That was uncalled for in my opinion, and I would have hoped that Weiner could at least have been given some respect on the day that he did what he needed to do for his party, for his family, and for his country.