Ross Douthat may have found one of the keys that unlocks the mystery that is Anthony Weiner. His acts of infidelity aren't really noteworthy, he writes. "What’s more striking is the form his dalliances took — not a private surrender to lust or ardor, but a pathetic quest for quasipublic validation. In all the tweets and transcripts that have leaked to date, there’s no sign that Weiner was particularly interested in the women he communicated with — not as human beings, certainly, but not really even as lust objects either. His “partners” existed less to titillate him than to hold up mirrors to his own vanity: whether the congressman was tweeting photos of his upper body or bragging about what lurked below, his focus was always squarely on himself. ... In this sense, his tweeted chest shots are more telling than the explicitly pornographic photos that followed. ... Facebook and Twitter did not forge the culture of narcissism. But they serve as a hall of mirrors in which it flourishes as never before."
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