The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Wow! Strange Plot Twists in #WeinerGate’s Third Act

Posted on | June 3, 2011 | 24 Comments

A sentence you won’t see me write very often: Tommy Christopher has done some excellent reporting.

Tommy’s story about @PatriotUSA and a 16-year-old girl who (falsely) claimed her friend was involved in Twitter “sexting” with Rep. Anthony Weiner is an absolute must-read. (BTW, Mediaite has posted Tommy’s story as five different pages, without a “single page view” or “print all” function, which annoys me, but that’s not Tommy’s fault.) One quote that stood out to me was this:

“I saw many other girls in the news and I wanted to be famous.”

Yeah. The desire to get fame for fame’s sake – fame without talent, fame without achievement, fame you don’t actually have to work for — is one of the great evils of our age. Nowadays, I’m often reminded of a line from Gone With the Wind, where Scarlett O’Hara says of one of her envious rivals: “She’d walk down the street naked if she thought anybody would look twice at her.” But we’ll save Ginger Lee for later . . .

I should probably write an essay about the underlying lesson here: How inexperienced, irresponsible and unscrupulous people, trying to play citizen-journalist, muck things up for everybody else in the “Army of Davids.” On the other hand, maybe we wouldn’t have this problem if the regular media could be trusted to do their job with minimal competence and fairness.

The statements from the girls and one of the girls’ parents are, I think, subject to criticism, but I will leave that to others for now. The failure of Markos Moulitsas to respond promptly to Tommy Christopher’s e-mail warnings is also likely to get enough criticism from others without me jumping on the dogpile.

Responsible reporting requires a sense of news judgment, even if that sometimes means foregoing a possible scoop.

Last Saturday, when the WeinerGate story first broke, some people sent me DMs or e-mails with phone numbers for Gennette Cordova and I thought to myself: Should I call?

Well, I didn’t call. It seemed likely to me that many other reporters would be contacting Cordova soon enough. While I didn’t hesitate to publish her name once I was certain of the ID — she had, after all, publicly declared herself Weiner’s “girlfriend” on Twitter — the last thing I wanted to do was to be cold-calling a complete stranger merely to get a few hours ahead of a story that I knew would be breaking anyway without my further assistance. And, by the way, the New York Post has an interview today with Cordova:

“I’m just collateral damage,” Gennette Cordova, 21, lamented . . . .
“I just want this to be over,” she told The Post yesterday during an exclusive photo shoot and interview near her Bellingham, Wash., college campus.
Cordova thinks the package-hugging picture — which Weiner “can’t say with certitude” isn’t his — was meant for somebody else and landed in her Twitter account by mistake. . . .

Cordova offers the theory that Weiner meant to send the now-notorious picture to stripper/porn star Ginger Lee instead of to her, both their names starting with “G,” and perhaps some sort of bizarre auto-complete malfunction explaining the mix-up.

You don’t have to buy that theory, of course, but just add it to the pile of potential explanations for how and why that picture of Weiner’s junk ended up on Twitter. Nor do you need to have any theory of that incident to conclude that Weiner is kind of skeezy:

On Thursday, liberal pundit Jonathan Chait of the New Republic recalled previous accounts of Weiner’s womanizing reputation. “Understanding Weiner’s character makes it very easy to believe that he would tweet a lewd photo to a young woman,” Chait wrote, concluding that “it’s hard to generate much sympathy for the man.”

UPDATE: Ladd Ehlinger Jr. informs us that the Twitter account of @PatriotUSA76 a/k/a “Dan Wolfe” has now been deleted. And, having promised to “save Ginger Lee for later,” I am pleased to inform you that ”later” will be an update within an hour or so.

UPDATE II: Now, for Ginger Lee the . . . er, adult entertainer who boasted of exchanging Twitter DMs with the congressman. Ms. Lee is a somewhat more sympathetic figure than you might otherwise suspect. She suffers from lupus, and has written at some length about her nightmarish experiences with stalkers.

A keen-eyed reader sent me a file with scores of Ms. Lee’s public Tweets about Weiner, including this:

Which links to her March 8 blog post feature this artwork:

And then there was this March 20 Tweet:

Which links to her blog post featuring this video of Weiner’s March 1 speech at a Planned Parenthood rally:

So it seems to have been, at least in part, Weiner’s support of taxpayer funding for America’s largest abortion provider that helped win Ms. Lee’s admiration. Better be careful there, Ms. Lee: Lots of creepy people in the pro-abortion movement.

UPDATE III: More WeinerGate blogging today from Piece of Work in Progress, Michelle Malkin, Hot Air and American Power.


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Category: Anthony Weiner, Congress, Democrats, Journalism, Ladd Ehlinger, Media Bias, New York, Planned Parenthood, Scandal

Comments

  • http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0601/Twitter-scandal-a-mess-for-Anthony-Weiner-a-lesson-for-Congress Anthony Weiner

    I am a sexy beast.  I just sent my twitter to the wrong address.  Hey there is only so much you can do with one hand on your cell phone. 

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    I still say she’s the one that tweeted it. How many followers does Weiner have? More than one of them would have to have seen it if he sent a public tweet, either accidentally or on purpose.

    Here’s something I don’t think many people get. If Weiner sends a public tweet to     @GennetteCordova, him putting that on there doesn’t mean she is the only one that gets it. Everyone that follows Weiner will get it. Same if he was to send the link to the picture on his yFrog account as a “Reply” to one of her public tweets. Again, all his followers would get it as well, and you know a good many of them are going to see it.

    That’s why I don’t buy this business of him meaning to send a DM and accidentally sending a public tweet instead. It doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t anybody else see it? Why isn’t at least fifty or sixty, or ten or twenty, or five or six of his tens or thousands of followers talking about it?

    I’m telling you he probably did send her a DM, then she copied and pasted it as a public tweet to her relatively very few followers, probably as a joke on him or something. That’s the only “prank” involved here. Because of that, USAPatriot76 saw it, and the silliest scandal in all of human history was born.

  • http://getalonghome.com/ GAHCindy

    Auto-complete malfunction doesn’t sound bizarre to me at all. I tweet the wrong people by mistake all the time, with ridiculous results. Sometimes I’m not paying attention to Tweetdeck’s auto-complete, other times it’s because the column scrolls just when I click and I don’t notice I just clicked the wrong person’s button. It happens. Sometimes I even forget to put the ‘d’ before the “@” so a direct message goes out as a regular tweet.

    I guess if I were DM’ing messages like that one, I’d be a little more careful, but what do I know? I’m just a dumb hillbilly, not a high-powered politician. Seems very likely to me that this girl probably really did get drawn in to all this by dumb luck.

  • Anonymous

    Wiener, I’m now thinking that you outed yourself. The life of being a mafia strongman . . . errr . . . hyper-partisan Democrat is stressful and morally disorienting.

    It’s okay, I understand. You just couldn’t live with yourself anymore. The stuff you did in your spare time, like sexting porn stars and coeds, was bad enough. But never knowing whether Don Pelosi would call you in the middle of the night, with instructions for a new job, was finally more than you could handle.

    The first step is admitting you have a problem.          

  • http://www.soopermexican.com Soopermexican

    Andrew BreitBart turns on Patriot… Patriot turns off twitter… Cordova turns on Weiner… Weiner fails to turn on Cordova… GingerLee tries to turn on EVERYbody!!! This is pandemonium!!! Has the whole world gone CRAZY?!?! Am I the only one who cares about the RULES?!

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_MDS72AN4O4FQMM4YMI32IPU4PI BillF

    Umm…..who is this woman who would walk down the street naked? I’ll look twice.  Heck, I’ll settle for Victorian underwear…..

  • http://2011.ak4mc.us/ McGehee

    I only ask that it not be Rosie O’Donnell.

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    The point I was making is not that its impossible for him to have accidentally tweeted when he meant to send a DM. Anybody could make that kind of mistake.

    My point is, Weiner had and has tens of thousands of followers. If he had tweeted it, ALL of them could have seen it. As it stands, there’s no indication that anybody saw it more than just a few people. Actually there’s no indication anybody saw the original tweet other than Weiner and USAPatriot76.

    Gennette Cordova only had maybe a few hundred followers. In fact, the last time I saw her page she had something like 600, so she might have had considerably less than that at this time, maybe just a handful. So its entirely possible she could have tweeted it after he sent her the DM. All she had to do was copy the post along with the link to the yFrog photo, then paste it into the tweet function, then tweeted it.

    Only her followers would have seen it, not Weiners. But they both had at least one follower in common, USAPatriot76, so since he followed her as well as him, he saw it.

    As for why she would do that, maybe she was high or drunk and just wanted to have a good laugh at his expense. She probably deleted it right after he saw it and freaked out, but by that time USAPatriot76 got the screenshot.

    Weiner didn’t even take it that seriously at first, he sat there wherever he was joking about hockey games, which one of his appliances would turn against him #AtLeastTheToasterIsLoyal, etc.

  • http://hipsterjew.com/files/2010/08/340x_anthonyweineryearbook.jpg Anthony Weiner

    Ginger Lee Hearts Me! 

  • Anonymous

    Ewwwww!

  • http://thepagantemple.blogspot.com/ ThePaganTemple

    Somebody ought to start a new Twitter account, @AnthonyWeinersDick, sort of like somebody did for the Bronx Zoo Cobra. Even use that screen shot for an avatar. That would really get the Weiner’s goat.

  • Anonymous
  • http://hipsterjew.com/files/2010/08/340x_anthonyweineryearbook.jpg Anthony Weiner

    Ginger Lee hearts me! 

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  • Anon Y. Mous

    (BTW, Mediaite has posted Tommy’s story as five different pages,
    without a “single page view” or “print all” function, which annoys me,
    but that’s not Tommy’s fault.)

    Agreed 100%. I do find it ironic that you placed that complaint in a post where I had to click the “Read more” to be able to read the whole post. Oh well, I guess we all have our little crosses to bear. :)

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  • Anonymous

    “Lots of creepy people in the pro-abortion movement.”

    Ever been to an Operation Rescue meeting?  Or Lambs of Christ?

  • http://2011.ak4mc.us/ McGehee

    I hereby award you a black belt in tu quoque. Wear it with pride.

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