KICK 'EM WHEN THEY'RE UP, KICK 'EM WHEN THEY'RE DOWN

A breaking story from yesterday's New York Daily News (not even the Post!):

Disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, were spotted dining at La Bottega in Chelsea's Maritime Hotel on Saturday -- but she "looked miserable," according to a witness.

The couple were sharing a plain pizza, a salad and pasta but spent most of the meal chained to their cell phones, said the witness.

They were both sporting wedding rings....

I don't recall the "liberal media" following, say, Larry Craig around obsessively after his fall, hoping to catch him in the disgraceful act of eating dinner with his wife. You?

More:

After brunch, the couple, who are expecting their first child, strolled hand in hand through Madison Square Park -- he even carried her tan bag at one point.

They later stopped at a Baskin Robbins, where she ordered mint chocolate chip ice cream while he opted for mocha.

Y'know, there are all sorts of effete, elitist foodie desserts on offer in Madison Square Park -- Momofuku Milk Bar has a stall (I highly recommend the corn cookies, although the everything-in-the-pantry compost cookies are awesome as well), and Mario Batali's Eataly sells some serious high-end gelato right there.

But they had Baskin-Robbins. Liberals! Baskin-Robbins! What could be more regular-American than that? They might as well have gone to the salad bar at Applebee's. Can they please get some love for this from David Brooks?

There are a couple of paparazzi photos as well. I wouldn't have blamed Weiner and Abedin if they'd done a Kanye West on the photographer. I think a certain percentage of the public would have cheered. I certainly would have.

*****

And don't get me started about Jeremy Peters's gushing profile of Andrew Breitbart, which disgraces the business section of today's New York Times. Read it without any foreknowledge and you'd think that the only fact-fudging done on the ACORN videos was that the videos "appeared to show a man walking into Acorn offices dressed as a pimp, when in fact he was not." (Keep scrolling here for the full list of falsehoods and distortions.) We also learn, from reading the article, that in the Shirley Sherrod video "the crowd applauded when Ms. Sherrod said she did not help the man" -- how hard would it have been for Peters to go to YouTube and discover that, while there was some laughter as Sherrod told her story, there was no applause? But there seems to be a belief that the basic rules of journalism -- y'know stuff like an effort at accuracy -- don't apply to writers of "soft" stories like this. I won't even ask why it needs to appear at all, except that Breitbart's fifteen minutes of Weiner fame have now ended and the Times graciously offered to keep his name in the papers to get him over that hump. Appalling.