The Anthony Weiner Episode of SVU Is Dick Pic-errific

Chung chung, everybody. It’s time for another rrrrrripped from the headlines episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit! Up this week: The Anthony Weiner scandal! Hooray!

It’s mayoral election season in the SVUniverse and the candidate/man to beat is Alex Munoz (Vincent Laresca). Munoz is charismatic, liberal and, if elected, he’ll be the first hispanic mayor of New York City. He also happens to be the childhood best friend of Assistant District Attorney Rafael Barba — which is why Barba gets so bummed out when the SVU detectives stumble upon Munoz’s history of sexting through his online alter ego Enrique Trouble. (Nicely done, SVU. NICELY DONE.)

The discovery leads to interesting debate over how much a politician’s sexual proclivities should matter when they’re running for office — especially if the politician could do as much good as Munoz could. The answer, of course, should be “not at al”l unless their sex scandals demonstrate genuine stupidity (like Weiner’s did) or they’ve built a political career out of denying other people their rights to sexual freedom (Mark Foley).

But because this is SVU and the SVU world is one where people are either GOOD or EVIL, Munoz can’t be both a bad husband and a good politician. As the detectives dig deeper into the web history of Enrique Trouble, they find that he’s used his political power to set up his sext partners in cushy government jobs and — worst of all — that he exchanged naked pictures with a fifteen-year-old girl. Yeesh.

Oh, well — while the writers weren’t so much able to maintain a nuanced debate about sex and politics without bringing child porn into it, they were able to incorporate a well-known Amanda Bynes-ism into the episode and that’s good enough for me.