MOVE ON
Anthony Weiner to Bernie Fans on ‘Colbert’: ‘Stop Complaining About the System!’
The former Democratic congressman emerged on night one of the DNC to call for party unity on ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.’
If there is anyone who knows what it’s like to have his private communications become suddenly public, it is Anthony Weiner. That made the former Democratic congressman, who is also married to one of Hillary Clinton’s top aides, the perfect guest for Stephen Colbert’s post-DNC live show Monday night.
They began with Bernie Sanders’ attempt to unify the party with his speech on night one of the Democratic National Convention. When Weiner asserted that Sanders “did great,” Colbert asked, “Can I trust anything you’re saying, by the way, because you’re married to Hillary Clinton’s closest advisor?”
“What, are you going to vote for Donald Trump?” Weiner said of the “Bernie-or-bust” folks who say they won’t vote for Clinton in the fall. If they choose not to vote, he argued, “that’s essentially a vote for a xenophobic, narcissistic, racist, anti-Semite.” And that’s coming from a man who once received campaign contributions from Trump. Weiner proceeded to blame Colbert, as part of the “mainstream media,” for giving Trump the “oxygen” he needed to go this far.
Things got more interesting when Colbert pivoted to the DNC’s email hack, which exposed some nasty comments about Sanders and may have been committed by the Russians to sway the election towards Trump. “As someone who’s not a big fan of revelation through electronic media, do you think this is a fair thing for the press to be talking about?” Colbert asked the man who once accidentally posted a photo of his own penis on Twitter.
“I don’t like this trend of criminals hacking into Sony or hacking into the DNC, leaking selective things, and then we just treat it as if it’s regular news,” Weiner said. But more than that, he said he believes the DNC itself is “irrelevant” because it “doesn’t have authority” over who wins the party’s nomination.
“Barack Hussein Obama got elected through this system so stop complaining about the system!” Weiner said, getting more and more agitated. “Your candidate did very well. We adopted a lot of Bernie’s ideas, we’re a better party, now we’re going to go on to win the election. That’s the way it’s supposed to work!”
It was the same message that Sanders fan-turned-Clinton supporter Sarah Silverman made in just three words from the DNC stage earlier in the night: “You’re being ridiculous!”