Thanks, Andy!

Weiner is gone. A hearty thanks is due to to Andrew Breitbart for breaking the story and tenaciously hanging on to it. From the National Journal:

Rep. Anthony Weiner’s decision to resign brings a scandal that consumed Washington for several weeks to an end—and no one benefited from it more than controversial conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.

Breitbart, who first publicized the lewd photo that Weiner accidentally sent on his Twitter feed, achieved a measure of redemption from the episode—after being marginalized in the mainstream media for releasing videos maligning liberal figures and organizations that were misleadingly edited.

At Weiner’s first press conference on June 6 where he confessed to sending the photo, Breitbart declared, “I’m here for some vindication.” He received an apology from Weiner, but what Breitbart was looking for was vindication from his peers.

Now Breitbart is watching his credibility rise thanks to Weiner’s misdeeds. He provided the primary source material that made the story one of the most heavily covered on the cable newscasts over the past several weeks. He shared some of the more compromising pictures with a mainstream media organization (ABC), which ran with the story.

“One of the reasons I went to ABC, believe it or not, was to take this out of the partisan rancor realm,” Breitbart said in an interview with The New York Times.

On the other hand, he held back juicy information as insurance in case he needed to defend himself. "You know, I'm not thinking of it that way, but I certainly have it in my possession,” Breitbart told NBC’s Today, on the explicit photo of Weiner. “I guarantee you he would use this against me and the people on the left side of the blogosphere would have used this against me. I could have put it out there and his career would have been over today.”