Category: Congress

GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY!

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Luke Broadwater of the Baltimore Sun really wanted to believe Anthony Weiner was innocent . . .

But then I heard Weiner start to explain himself and everything changed. The more he talked, the more it became obvious that not only is the photo of him, but he sent it. . . .
“I think this is one of the worst public relations strategies regarding an embarrassing event for a public figure that I have witnessed,” writes Towson University communications professor Richard Vatz in an email about Weiner’s press interactions. “It is obviously a picture of him, taken for a possible variety of reasons, but his inelegant warding off of the inquiries should have instead been a refusal to engage the issue. That would not have solved the problem, but it would have lessened the humiliating spectacle which exacerbates his problems.” . . .
Weiner says he doesn’t want the police to investigate and tries to make the case that it would be a waste of federal dollars. (Let’s not forget that police are already paid salaries to investigate crimes.) The only reason that makes any sense why he doesn’t want the police to investigate is because he’s afraid they would find out that he sent the tweet and that his hacker claim is a lie. If he was truly hacked and publicly humiliated by a political opponent, he would want that person brought to justice.

Via AOSHQ Headlines. To explain the headline, for kids too young to remember when Doonesbury was funny:

And today’s Washington Post headline:

Who had the worst week in Washington?
With certitude, Rep. Anthony Weiner.

Don’t you feel sorry for the guy’s wife? The New York Post:

Rep. Anthony Weiner’s humiliated wife sheepishly showed her face at a Washington event yesterday, keeping a stiff upper lip amid the swirling scandal surrounding her husband’s tawdry Twitter photo.
Huma Abedin, 34, briefly hesitated at the State Department ballroom door before working up the courage to go in — but she left after just five minutes and steered clear of her boss, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“Seriously, an investigation? Your penis didn’t rob the Bellagio.”

UPDATE: Lisa Graas has a theory, but doesn’t link my blog. Dan Collins has no theories, but does link my blog and, even though Dan’s name isn’t “Ace,” the name of the game here is Link My Blog.

So Dan wins that round, if you’re keeping score at home.

UPDATE II: Lisa Graas has now updated to link me, so she is now even with Dan “I’m Not Ace” Collins. Meanwhile, I’m also linked at King Shamus and POH Diaries — thanks!

UPDATE III: Now that we’re caught up on the Link My Blog game, let’s take a look at some other blogs, shall we?

Ladd Ehlinger Jr. scored an online interview with Dan Wolfe (a/k/a “PatriotUSA76”) whose anti-Weiner obsession explains why he was the first to re-Tweet the now-infamous crotch-shot.

The Smoking Gun has the goods on “GoatsRed,” who was ping-ponging anti-Weiner items on Twitter with PatriotUSA76. Let’s see: Foul-mouthed porn-forum moderator, twice bankrupt, IRS liens, domestic-violence rap sheet . . . .

Well, OK. And this is relevant how?

  1. You gotta be careful who you trust on the Internet; and
  2. People are wrong to think they can maintain multiple identities online, while engaging in atrocious online behavior, and that none of this can ever be connected to their real-life selves.

But this says nothing about the facts of the case in regard to whether Anthony Weiner’s been sending photos of his junk online, except perhaps that Weiner’s supporters are obsessed with the two Twitter users who busted Weiner.

UPDATE IV: It’s kind of weird that the three Weiner threads today on Memeorandum — here, here and here — are scattered up and down the page, rather than aggregated together. Memeorandum is basically run by an algorithmic formula, and I’m not sure what this odd pattern shows about how bloggers are aggregating the story. But I thought I’d point it out.

UPDATE V: Associated Press:

“Weiner Exposed.” “Weiner’s Pickle.” “Battle of the Bulge.”
Those were some of the tabloid headlines lampooning Rep. Anthony Weiner as he struggled to explain how a photo of a man’s crotch had been posted to his Twitter account. The normally media-savvy New York Democrat squandered his chance to make it right with a cringe-inducing TV blitz that raised more questions than it answered.
It’s a surprising turn for the pugnacious 46-year old Brooklyn native, who until this mess was widely seen as one of the smartest members of Congress.

“Surprising”? Maybe “ironic” would be a better word, but when you think about it, how often do smart guys turn out to be a lot less smart than they seem to be? Being smart, they become arrogant, then they start thinking the rules don’t apply to them and  then — bingo! — it all falls apart.

Isn’t that what happened to John Edwards, for example?

UPDATE VI: Linked by Dave C. and Republican Redefined — thanks!

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

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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? Continue reading Wow! Strange Plot Twists in #WeinerGate’s Third Act →

Brutal. Simply Brutal.

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Something I hadn’t previously noticed is how Rachel Maddow employed the word “creep” against Anthony Weiner:

(Hat-tip: PoliticalPAW.) Meanwhile, the latest spin on WeinerGate provokes Ace of Spades to lay down an incredibly brutal interrogation on the Prime Suspect — an instant blogospheric classic.

And, yeah, I’ve got a new WeinerGate column up at The American Spectator that includes props for Ace and Andrew Breitbart, which I hope you’ll go read.

Finally, Weiner Calls the Police!

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No, he didn’t ask the cops to start an investigation of the insidious hackers who stole his crotch-photo and Tweeted it to a 21-year-old. But when a reporter for WCBS-TV in New York started asking questions . . .

Weiner’s Office Calls The Police
After CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer
Asks For An Interview

As you can imagine, Ace of Spades has loads of fun with this news. Meanwhile, CNN’s Jack Cafferty is asking another question: Can Weiner survive this scandal?

Dan Collins at Piece of Work in Progress has an excellent round-up of today’s WeinerGate news and commentary. And by “excellent,” of course, I mean: He linked me.

UPDATE: Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg see — what else? — a vast conspiracy!

Scott Whitlock has the transcript at NewsBusters.

UPDATE II: Linked by If You Seek Peace — thanks!

UPDATE III: Linked by Nice Deb — thanks! — and this story is now the top thread on Memeorandum.

#WeinerGate: Who Is @PatriotUSA76? @AndrewBreitbart Wants to Know

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Much suspicion in the WeinerGate scandal has focused on the Twitter user @PatriotUSA76, who identifies himself as Dan Wolfe, but who is unwilling publicly to confront questions about his role.

It was @PatriotUSA76 who, some weeks ago, specifically predicted an online sex scandal involving Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), and then quickly spotted the Friday photo-Tweet that launched the scandal. Several liberals have accused Wolfe/@PatriotUSA76 of having “hacked” Weiner’s account to create a hoax, which Wolfe denies. But, as the Smoking Gun reports today, Wolfe “claims he is fearful that his leading role in ‘Weinergate’ will focus attention on a multitude of his own ‘major personal problems’ that he is “afraid…will all come out.'”

Some have claimed that Wolfe is part of a right-wing conspiracy involving Andrew Breitbart, whose Web site BigGovernment.com first broke the story Saturday that the photo of a man’s crotch had been Tweeted from Weiner’s account. Breitbart strenuously denies this, and yesterday began asking if anyone knows anything about the mysterious Wolfe, and pushing @PatriotUSA76 to come forward:

Meanwhile, independent filmmaker Ladd Ehlinger Jr. shares his own e-mail exchanges with @PatriotUSA76, shedding light on the mystery man whose role in the WeinerGate scandal is arousing curiosity among journalists in Washington, New York and elsewhere:

Anyway, I firmly believe that the accused has a right to face the accuser. Even for someone as despicable as RAW. Without that, anyone could be tormented for life by anonymous creeps and sock puppets. . . .
When Patriot and I were originally e-mailing on Sunday and Monday, I was under the impression that he was just a guy seeking to expose corruption in higher office. Cool. But the more I started looking at the story, and the more I started looking at his cyber-behavior, the more I realized that he-she-it was using tactics I am thoroughly against. He ceased communications with me entirely when I pressed the urgency of going to the FBI and discarding the mask and tactics of the anonymous Twitter stalker. . . .
Come out of the shadows, point with index finger to the sun and shout, “J’accuse!” And get it the hell over with. Alas, that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. . . .

Read the whole thing. I expect to have much more later today, as several other people are now following this same angle on the WeinerGate story. If you know anything about @PatriotUSA, you can send tips to me by Twitter ( @rsmccain) or send tips to @AndrewBreitbart.

UPDATE: Ace of Spades excoriates lazy reporters for refusing to fact-check Weiner’s assertions about what happened (and when) on Friday:

Weiner has now lied repeatedly about this tweet going out “while I was tweeting about hockey.” Not only has he lied serially about the timing, but the Make Believe Media, not citing him but asserting as fact based on its own investigation, has claimed this, repeatedly.
I think they just took Weiner’s flack’s word for it and said “Eh, that’s probably right.”
Um, it’s now six days since the story broke. Can you now check the actual time-stamps and determine if this claim is, what is the German word for it….?, true?In fact, it is not true. Weiner was publicly silent for three and a half hours before the dic-pic tweet. He blogged about the tivo eating his hockey game four minutes after that event, thinking, I guess, that would be a nice cover for him.
Assuming the Make Believe Media wouldn’t even check.
And by God, he was right, wasn’t he? . . .

There’s much more where that came from. Apologies to readers for my having fallen behind on WeinerGate coverage today but, as I explained in a wee-hours message, my wife is sick and that required me to spend time tending to family business. Your tip-jar contributions will be greatly appreciated, and thanks to those who have already given to help this reader-supported journalism project.

There is now a Memeorandum thread about the @PatriotUSA76 mystery, and many more developments that I’ll be aggregating in updates here throughout the afternoon.

UPDATE II: We all know that there are two ways that Anthony Weiner could end this scandal:

  1. Call for a law-enforcement investigation of who “hacked” his account; or
  2. Admit that, indeed, it was he who sent the crotch-photo Tweet.

But he won’t do either of those two things, which is angering somebody’s mother:

The furious mom of the Seattle college coed at the center of Weinergate yesterday demanded that the cocky congressman come clean about the lewd photo.
“I’m really upset. I feel like he’s a person of power and influence, who can make a statement and make all this go away,” Carol Mizuguchi said, blasting Rep. Anthony Weiner for his continued snarky sidestepping.
“As her mother, I’m really upset,” Mizuguchi told The Post. “I’m pissed off at that.”
Mizuguchi’s 21-year-old daughter, Gennette Cordova, got the surprise package — a close-up of an underwear-clad crotch — over the weekend in a tweet from Weiner’s account.
After days of dodging, Weiner yesterday admitted he “can’t say with certitude” that the photo isn’t of him.
But he continued to deny he sent the picture.
The pol’s refusal to clarify things has made a bad situation more difficult for her daughter, Mizuguchi said.
“It’s a distraction [for Gennette],” she said. “It’s during her finals and she’s 21 years old.”

Hat-tips to Ace, Jammie Wearing Fool and Hot Air Headlines.

UPDATE III: Joe Brooks at Wire Update also exchanged e-mails with @PatriotUSA76.

UPDATE IV: Mickey Kaus jumps aboard the Who Is @PatriotUSA76 Bandwagon. This is, perhaps, a sidetrack to the main story — i.e., when will Weiner do the right thing? — but it is important, if you take seriously the left-wing bloggers who claim that @PatriotUSA76 orchestrated a hoax.

And doesn’t everybody take left-wing bloggers seriously?

The Media Research Center provides this video compilation of Anthony Weiner dodging the key question of whether the now infamous Tweet-photo is actually him:

And the editors of Big Government say that Weiner’s private investigation of this incident is insufficient:

Hacking into private accounts, impersonating a federal elected official, and deleting evidence that may be subject to federal investigation are each criminal offenses. Failure to report suspected cybercrime is also a breach of House of Representatives rules.
The American people deserve to know whether these violations, having been alleged or described, actually occurred.

UPDATE V: Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review joins the call for an investigation:

Congressman Weiner is no doubt a strong supporter of Attorney General Holder’s aggressive efforts to root out computer crime. He could perform a valuable public service by doing what the government he is part of encourages all citizens to do: Report this outrage to the authorities!

UPDATE VI: While I was out today running errands (i.e., with the wife sick, I’m on taxi duty for the kids), I stopped in at a convenience store and picked up a copy of the Washington Post, which played WeinerGate on the bottom of the front page:

That’s a story by Karen Tumulty and Felicia Sonmez, the online version of which is headlined, “Anthony Weiner’s plan to cool Twitter furor backfires.” It’s a good summary of the story up through Wednesday evening, but includes little that you didn’t already know, if you’ve been following the story online. The Post also had a story on the front page of their popular Style section:

That’s the Post‘s dating-advice columnist Carolyn Hax, and the online version of that story is headlined, “Listen up, fellas: Naked man-parts? Not so sexy.”

Just sharing that because (a) what you see online may not give you a good idea of how the story is playing out in the actual dead-tree newspaper, and (b) #WINNING!

Which is to say, how many people on Saturday, when this story first broke online, believed it would be front-page news in the Washington Post on Thursday? Like I said, they can’t ignore it. Weiner’s too big for his own good.

However, Jimmie Bise Jr. is disappointed and frustrated:

At this point, I’m actually angry that this story has dragged out for so long and I’m convinced that the only reason it has is because the subject of the story is media darling Democrat Anthony Weiner. If some Republican had sent a crotch picture to a co-ed, the MSM would have his scalp on the wall today. Don’t even think of arguing with me on this. You know it’s true.

Yes, that’s true. But they can’t just brush this off, and it’s not going away. Just enjoy the ride, man.

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Who’s Winning #WeinerGate? (Video)

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It ain’t Anthony Weiner, that’s for sure. Here’s a video highlight reel from Politico:

And here is the ABC Evening News version of the story:

Didn’t I tell you this story would not just “go away”? And wasn’t I right? Look at the Google News queue. Look at the Memeorandum aggregation.

In case you are tempted to buy into some complicated theory of how Weiner might possibly be innocent, Internet Detective Ace of Spades has solved the mystery.

Oh, My: In NBC Interview, Weiner Won’t Deny Authenticity of Lewd Photo UPDATE: Interview Video Added

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UPDATE 3:50 p.m. ET: Here is a video clip from the interview with NBC’s Luke Russert in which Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) refused to say “with certitude” that the photo of a man’s bulging underwear sent from his Twitter account was not actually his own crotch:

Hat-tip to Ace of Spades who asks:

What? Andrew Breitbart had a picture of his junk? How did Andrew Breitbart get that? What other people does Andrew Breitbart have junk-pictures of?

The sarcasm is kind of thick there.

UPDATE 4:27 p.m. ET: The New York Post:

Denying he ever sent a bawdy crotch photo of himself to a co-ed via his Twitter account, embattled Rep. Anthony Weiner said today he “can’t say with certitude” whether or not he is the person in the picture.
Asked in an interview with MSNBC that aired this afternoon whether he could confirm or deny if the crotch shot was his, Weiner said, “I can’t say with certitude.”
Despite the bizarre claim, Weiner added, “I didn’t send that picture out.” . . .
“We don’t know exactly what happened here,” he said in the interview, repeating what he has said over the past four days. “It was a prank.”

With this admission — and if he’s not denying it, isn’t that the same as admitting it? — Weiner has deepened the mystery, and thereby given new life to the story. Reporters can’t just leave this hanging there, unexplained.

Donald Douglas at American Power calls attention to this ABC News video. Notice how George Stephanopoulos (scarcely a right-winger) featured the WeinerGate story today on Good Morning America:

You see that, as Stephanopoulos says, Weiner is a “high-profile Democrat” whose avowed ambition is to become mayor of New York City — America’s most lucrative media market.

The supply-and-demand incentives for coverage of this story are therefore so strong that, liberal bias or not, the major news networks can’t simply ignore it. In fact, I had the TV in my office tuned to MSNBC for a couple hours today, then turned over to Fox News, and MSNBC actually had more coverage of the story than Fox!

You might say that Weiner is too big for his own good.

UPDATE 7:50 p.m. ET: Now a Memeorandum thread, and thanks to Left Coast Rebel who found a better quality video of the Russert/Weiner interview.

PREVIOUSLY (2:10 p.m. ET): The things you learn watching MSNBC. Just saw clips of Anthony Weiner’s interview with Luke Russert of NBC News, and here is a brief item from Huffington Post:

A day after telling reporters that he’s “not going to talk about this anymore,” Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) broke his silence Wednesday about the controversy surrounding a lewd photo sent from his Twitter account.
“This was a circumstance where someone committed a prank on the internet,” he told MSNBC’s Luke Russert. “I didn’t send [that] picture out” the congressman said, though he does not know who did. Is the photo of him? “I can’t say with certitude” he told Russert.

Weiner told Russert that the pattern of who he follows — a pattern that the New York Post noted today — is “completely random.”

Yeah. Right.

UPDATE: First things first: Let’s just state the obvious, OK? If Weiner will not deny “with certitude” that the now-infamous photo is of his own package, we can safely conclude that it is his package.

But watching the whole interview — and we’ll have the video soon enough — I think I’ve finally developed a theory of the case. If my theory is correct, then there is an obvious reason why Weiner would not want law enforcement agencies to investigate this incident.

Ask yourself this: If that was a photo of Weiner’s package, and yet he was not the one responsible for that Tweet to Gennette Cordova, how did someone else get that photo of Weiner’s package?

Time for members of Congress to demand that law-enforcement agencies investigate this incident.

UPDATE I: You will see that, in the comments below, “Charles Johnson” (who may or may not actually be the Charles Johnson) explains a theory of how Weiner’s YFrog account could have been used by someone else to send that photo.

That theory was first related to me via an e-mail tip over the weekend. I didn’t report it previously, because it wasn’t necessarily relevant. Now that Weiner has point-blank refused to deny the authenticity of the photo, however, it becomes quite relevant.

Also now arguably quite relevant? The fact that Anthony Weiner was exchanging private Twitter direct messages (DMs) with porn star Ginger Lee. I’m not prepared quite yet to explain my whole theory of this scandal — still want to aggregate more news here — but if Weiner was in private communications with women such as Ms. Lee, we might fairly suppose that he also communicated in similar manner with other women.

And here’s the key: What if some of Weiner’s lovely female Twitter “fans” were not actually fans? What if, in fact, they were quite the opposite? Could this explain how a photo of Weiner’s package ended up in the hands of the congressman’s enemies?

It’s a “honey trap,” in other words. Permit me to suggest that there must be at least one more shoe to drop — someone must have a cache of DMs or e-mails in which Weiner communicated privately with a female he presumed to be a fan. The exposure of Weiner may, therefore, only be beginning.

As Ed Driscoll says, “Plenty of Room Left on Fredo’s Boat.”

UPDATE III: Politico and CBS News are now both reporting Weiner’s “can’t say with certitude” interview (hat-tip: Donald Douglas at American Power). There is a crappy video version of the Russert interview at Real Clear Politics, but not yet an embeddable version.

Linked by Nice Deb — thanks!

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#WeinerGate: Where the Story Goes Next

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Weiner calls lewd photo
on Twitter a ‘distraction’
— Washington Post

Lawmaker in Twitter Case Assails Reporters
— New York Times

Yesterday’s televised meltdown was, I think, complete vindication for those of us in the online community who spent Memorial Day weekend trying to convince people that #WeinerGate was an honest-to-goodness genuine news story.

It’s not only real, it’s spectacular.

(Bryan Preston: “So, yeah, this story has gone mainstream.”)

A question I asked on Twitter last night: Does anyone still believe that Anthony Weiner was the innocent victim of hackers? Anyone?

Ace of Spades last night delivered a seminar to the “reality-based community” about the behavioral clues that made him so intensely suspicious of Weiner’s reaction to this alleged act of online identity theft:

I love how we’re all wingnutz because we’ve been out of the house enough to know how human beings behave. Like if they’re seriously victimized in a malicious crime, they tend to get rather angry. They don’t toss off casual jokes about it and try to change the subject right away. . . .

You should read the whole thing, because what else is the difference between conservatives and liberals, except our different understandings of human nature? Conservatism fundamentally involves a belief in the tragic permanence — the fixed and flawed quality — of the human condition. It is irremediable. There is nothing new under the sun, and people will tend to react certain ways under certain conditions.

Whereas, every day is a new day for liberals, who are always so surprised when an allegedly selfless humanitarian seeker of social justice turns out to be as flawed and corrupt as those mere mortals whom he professes himself capable of redeeming through his heaven-on-earth schemes.

What matters to the liberal is that he has good intentions. The conservative smiles at this, and asks the liberal if he knows where that road paved with good intentions proverbially leads.

OK, sermon over. If I’d wanted to be a moral philosopher, I’d have gone to grad school. Instead, I’ve spent the past 25 years in the news business and you know what? Experience matters. Continue reading #WeinerGate: Where the Story Goes Next →