Category: Politics

URGENT: Police Visit Delaware Teen in Connection With Weiner Twitter Scandal

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* * * BREAKING NEWS * * *

NEW CASTLE, Del. — Police on Friday afternoon came to the home of a 17-year-old high school junior to ask her about direct online communications she has had with Rep. Anthony Weiner.
Two officers from the New Castle County Police Department arrived at the girl’s home around 4:30 p.m. and asked to speak with the girl’s mother about the daughter’s contact with Weiner. Another officer appeared at the home a short time later. A FoxNews.com reporter was at the home when the police arrived.

(Via Drew M. at AOSHQ — now with flaming skull alert.)

UPDATE: Just hours ago, I summarized the background on this case:

Did Anthony Weiner Send Obscene
Messages to Teenage Girls Online?

UPDATE II: Linked by Fire Andrea Mitchell — thanks! It is important to note at this point that we don’t whether Weiner actually did anything illegal.

UPDATE III: Michelle Malkin:

Nancy Pelosi doesn’t seem to care — and declines to back resignation calls from other Democrats.

UPDATE IV: Linked by William Teach at Right Wing News — thanks! As to Pelosi’s expression of seeming indifference, “Let’s see how long she sticks with that position,” says my American Spectator colleague John Tabin.

UPDATE V: Now Patterico is blogging about the story, which he pushed hard on Thursday. Allahpundit at Hot Air is also on the story, which has its own Memeorandum thread. I’ll try to provide complete aggregation, but it seems everybody is blogging it now.

UPDATE VI: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE VII: Big Government and Bryan Preston at PJ Tatler are now blogging the latest news.

UPDATE VIII: Politico got an e-mail statement from Weiner’s spokesman: “According to Congressman Weiner, his communications with this person were neither explicit nor indecent.” But Politico‘s Ben Smith adds: “Sexting with an underage girl would push the Weiner scandal out of the realm of embarrassing consensual conduct and give House leadership reason to credibly threaten expulsion.”

UPDATE IX: Linked by Ed Driscoll — thanks! I first mentioned (but did not name) this teenager on May 30. She has been named elsewhere online. Some blogs that previously named her have since redacted her name. You will see that this angle of the WeinerGate scandal was reported almost immediately (i.e., on May 28) by Verum Serum and Ironic Surrealism.

UPDATE X: New York Daily News:

“She was not targeted in any way and did not receive any inappropriate messages or photos or anything from the congressman,” a source close to the Delaware girl told the Daily News. “If she had, her family would have filed charges.” . . .
“The blogs have taken a few tweets from a 17-year-old kid and put their own twist on messages that were just kid stuff,” the source said. “Her family has gone through all her accounts and not found any inappropriate messages.”

That is a strong denial, although only a thorough law-enforcement investigation — getting access to all records from Twitter — would reveal any messages that the teen previously deleted from her account.


A Special Kind of Stupid: Only ‘Culturally Backward’ People Find Weiner’s Conduct Objectionable, Chris Matthews Says

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The Stupidest Man in TV News™ — the Ted Baxter of MSNBC — has perhaps outdone himself with his latest astonishing foray into the frontier of brain-addled commentary:

This is, to me, the stakes here. If [Anthony Weiner] stays, [Democrats] never get the leadership back. They never get the Speakership back because the people in the rural areas of this country who are Christian conservative culturally – you can say backward if you want – but they don’t like this kind of stuff at all. They’re not part of that 56 percent in Brooklyn and Queens who say, “okay, we can live with this guy.” Your thoughts, Ben? Isn’t that the cutting edge of this?

What did Ben Smith of Politico say in reply? I don’t know. But I hope when he left the studio, Ben sent an e-mail to an MSNBC producer asking, “Exactly why do you continue permitting this babbling fool to host his own TV show?”

Given the evidence suggesting that Weiner was cybersexing teenage girls, is it really true that 56 percent of Weiner’s constituents “can live with this guy”? Or is it rather the case, as I suspect, that many of them are not fully informed about what Weiner was up to online?

The weird thing here is, Chris Matthews is one of the few people at MSNBC who even acknowledges WeinerGate as a legitimate and politically significant story. Ace of Spades observes:

Most of MSNBC’s hosts . . . are on a campaign of minimziation.
See, especially, Rachel Maddow, who insists there’s nothing to see here and it’s all a laugh.

But how the hell is it, I ask, that the people who know the most about what Weiner has actually done — including Andrew Breitbart — are those who find it most objectionable? And why would Chris Matthews suggest that the “culturally backward” people in “rural areas” might be offended?

Is Breitbart a dimwitted backwoods clodhopper? Are 56% of voters in Queens and Brookly really more sophisticated than Breitbart?

Permit me to suggest that anyone attempting to “minimize” WeinerGate consider how the story has unfolded to date, and ask themselves: What new surprising revelations await?

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

PREVIOUSLY:

Did Anthony Weiner Send Obscene Messages to Teenage Girls Online?

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“Just perfectly innocent. A married 46 year old Congressman private messaging a smitten, hero-worshipping, bad-girl-talking 17 year old girl who ‘loved’ him. What could be more innocent than that?”
— Ace of Spades

Before proceeding to examine the really troubling question here, let’s begin by reviewing what we already know:

  • Anthony Weiner’s “online relationships” (as he called them in his June 6 press conference) apparently “fit a pattern,” according to the New York Times: “[I]n rapid and reckless fashion, he sought to transform informal online conversations about politics and partisanship into sexually charged exchanges, at times laced with racy language and explicit images.”
  • A transcript of Weiner’s Facebook exchanges with Lisa Weiss (the accuracy of which has not been disputed) shows Weiner asking if “your p**** [is] still tight and w*t for me baby?” and talking about “my rock hard c***.”
  • Weiner admitted at his press conference that the May 27 Twitter message including a link to a photo of his bulging crotch, which began the so-called WeinerGate scandal, was accidentally sent as a public message, when he intended to send it as a private direct message (DM).
  • The intended recipient of that May 27 message, 21-year-old Gennette Cordova, has repeatedly denied having had any “inappropriate” private communications with Weiner.
  • Another of Weiner’s “online relationships,” porn performer Ginger Lee, says Weiner urged her to lie about their communications, sending her an e-mail suggestion that she issue a statement saying, “‘This is silly. Like so many others, I follow Rep. Weiner on Twitter. I don’t know him and have never met him.” (In fact, Ms. Lee says she and Weiner “exchanged scores of sexual emails over a long period of time.”)
  • Among the messages Weiner sent to 26-year-old single mother Meagan Broussard was a nude photo showing his erect penis.

From these facts it seems obvious that Weiner’s online sexual adventures were so recklessly indiscriminate as to demonstrate an out-of-control compulsion. This is particularly true if we accept Cordova’s assertion that none of her private communications with Weiner were “inappropriate,” so that the congressman would have been sending her that bulging-crotch photo unsolicited, without any previous indication from Cordova that she had a sexual interest in him. (Broussard has also said that none of her communications with Weiner could reasonably have been viewed as an invitation for the congressman to send her the penis photo of himself.)

Weiner’s complete disregard for the dangers of sending these kinds of photos and messages to women he never met is important to note because, by his own public admission, he also disregarded other dangers:

Q: These were young girls, very young, 21 years old. Does that bother you, that they’re — the youngest —
REP. WEINER: I don’t know the — I don’t know the exact ages of the women, and they —
Q: Young enough to be your children.
REP. WEINER: I don’t know the exact ages of the women, and I don’t know if you do. I’m going to respect their privacy. But they were all adults — at least to the best of my knowledge they were all adults — and they were — and they were engaging — and they were engaging in these conversations consensually.
Q: But if you don’t know how old they are, how do you know they’re adults?
REP. WEINER: Well, all I know is what they publish about themselves in social media. Someone could theoretically be — have been — have been fibbing about it, and that’s a risk.

A close reading of that brief exchange raises real problems. Weiner seems to believe that, in light of the graphic content of his online communications, all that matters is whether “to the best of [his] knowledge” the recipients were adults. Continue reading Did Anthony Weiner Send Obscene Messages to Teenage Girls Online? →

Impossible to Parody

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Anthony Weiner’s disgrace goes from tragedy to farce, as he finds himself absurdly defended by Alec Baldwin:

He exists under a constant pressure cooker of self-analysis and public appraisal. Like other politicians, he needs something to take the edge off. For some people, regardless of occupation, that could mean booze, drugs, gambling, food or shopping. For high functioning men like Weiner and other officials who have lived through such scandals, who are constantly on the go, that leaves one tried and true source of a reliable high. The affirmation that comes when someone lets you know they want to sleep with you. Or even cyber-sleep with you.
This is sex for many people now. No time for Mateus and cheap spaghetti. No time for slowly moving toward one another with a combination of hope and caution, lust and integrity. One can push a button and get something beyond porn. Porn is essentially two dimensional. One sees and hears. Internet sexting can be perceived as three dimensional by adding the component of “feel”, regardless of how cheap and unearned those feelings are. That person on the screen is doing whatever they’re doing… just for you.
Weiner is so busy, he forgot the important rule that everyone you interact with on this plane becomes a co-conspirator. You rely on them to remain confidential.
Weiner is the modern, high functioning man. The fact that he is married is just one, albeit a huge, factor.

Let’s stop for a minute, first, to consider the character of the man offering this defense of Weiner: Alec Baldwin, who had these cheerful thoughts for his own 12-year-old daughter:

“Once again I’ve made an a– of myself getting to a phone to make a phone call … I’m tired of playing this game with you. You have insulted me for the last time …You’ve made feel like sh– and you’ve made feel like a fool over and over again … I’m going to straighten your a– out … You are a rude, thoughtless little pig.”

Baldwin is a profoundly flawed human being and therefore defends the profoundly flawed Weiner as a comrade — a defense that liberal Baldwin would never offer to any Republican similarly exposed, but let’s go ahead and admit that conservative bloggers are loving this scandal precisely because Weiner is a Democrat.

Yet the partisan parallels are not perfect. One cannot merely say “tu quoque.” Why? Because liberals repeatedly assert that conservatives are stupid, ignorant, unsophisticated, etc., which makes it incumbent upon liberals to justify their pretensions to intellectual superiority.

This is why Joan Walsh is so risible. So long as Weiner stuck by his denials, Walsh continued to insist that this was just a phony scandal ginned up by Breitbart and “his army of political sewer workers.” You might have thought that, endowed with the insuperable mental excellence inherent to liberalism, Walsh would have been able to examine the available evidence and conclude, “Hey, maybe there’s something going on here.” But that didn’t happen, did it?

Nor did Alec Baldwin, before publicly empathizing with Weiner as a “modern, high functioning man,” hesitate long enough to examine the full extent of the suspicions swirling around the embattled congressman.

IYKWIMAITYD.

But that disturbing topic, which others recently have developed in some detail, deserves a post of its own. I will, however, ask if you think that a majority of Weiner’s constituents — who told a pollster the congressman should not resign — are more fully aware of the facts than Alec Baldwin. Because I don’t think they are.

Herman Cain Speaks Bluntly: ‘I Believe Homosexuality Is a Sin … Their Choice’

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In an interview on CBS News:

“I believe homosexuality is a sin because I’m a Bible-believing Christian, I believe it’s a sin. But I know that some people make that choice. That’s their choice.”

OK, I know for a fact that Herman Cain has GOProud supporters, and it will be interesting to see their reaction to this.

Cain is trying to focus his campaign on jobs, the budget and economics — these are his strengths, as a business executive — but he necessarily gets asked by reporters about all sorts of issues. A key factor in Cain’s appeal is his plain-spoken nature and, when asked about homsexuality, he stated (a) his personal belief as a Christian, and (b) his libertarian understanding that people have to live their own lives according to their own choices.

For two decades at least, gay activists have used the “born that way” argument in an effort to gain civil-rights protection for homosexuals, attempting to make sexual preference a hereditary factor analogous to race. So Cain’s remark about sexuality as a “choice” is likely to offend gay activists as much as his remark about “sin.” But I think it’s important to grasp the libertarian sense in which he uses “choice.”

Beyond that, will this help or hurt Cain?

Remember that Iowa is the No. 1 objective for Team Herman. If he were to win the Iowa caucuses, that would be a political earthquake, and his campaign leadership really believes that they can make that happen with a volunteer-based grassroots effort.

So, consider what Cain said, and ask yourself: Is this likely to offend the typical grassroots conservative Republican in Iowa?

Nope. Not even a blip on the radar.

By the way, Herman Cain will be one of the featured speakers at Right Online, which starts June 17 — a week from Friday — in Minneapolis. You should sign up now.

UPDATE: GOProud activist Christopher Barron:

The truth is that Herman Cain is running on a campaign centered on conservative policies that would improve the lives of all Americans – including gay Americans.

UPDATE II: Linked by Lisa Graas — thanks!

When Will Weiner Quit?

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My hunch says today but, rationally, politicians always prefer to save bad news for after 7 p.m. on a Friday. That way, the story doesn’t make the evening news on a weekday, and ends up in Saturday’s newspapers, which almost nobody reads. However, as I mention at The American Spectator, it seems impossible that Weiner can delay his resignation much longer than that:

Weiner’s scandal “has become a national embarrassment for Democratic leaders,” Devlin Barrett of the Wall Street Journal reports, citing unnamed “Democratic aides” as saying that if the embattled congressman “continues to resist calls to resign, the situation could reach a boiling point Monday when House members return to Washington.”

Right: Nancy Pelosi can’t have this thing drag out forever, stepping on her message. She wants him out — ASAP, PDQ, yesterday.

The problem is that Weiner knows this as well as anyone, and therefore can drive a hard bargain. I expect he’s negotating behind the scenes for something in the way of a “severance deal,” with a guaranteed six-figure salary for a no-show job at some progressive 501(c) non-profit, as the price for going away nicely.

According to the New York Post, Huma’s trying to keep Weiner in Congress, a story that seems incredible to me, and as Ace says, “[I]t’s one thing for a wife to be supportive. It’s another thing to be war-rooming it.”

Therefore I’m thinking the Post story is just a way for Team Weiner to send a signal to fellow Democrats that they’d better sweeten the pot on the “severance” payoff or else, The Human Stain is willing to hang around the Capitol and keep effing up their message just for spite.

The Democrats know how to play this game, and so they’ll give Weiner whatever it takes to get him to go quietly, a move I expect to be announced today, or by Friday evening at the latest.

If Weiner hasn’t resigned by Saturday, then, I’m wrong — and this scandal sails into terra incognita, that part of the map where it says, “Here Be Dragons.”

Feminism and the ‘Friendly Stranger’

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“How many coeds do you have to dick-dial behind the back of your pregnant wife before someone notices that maybe that’s not exactly congruent with the teachings of Gloria Steinem?”
— Ace of Spades, “In Which I Confess Some Doubts”

Having resisted the temptation to re-open my long war with Little Miss Attila over the history and meaning of “feminism,” I’m wondering if Weinergeddon isn’t waking some people up to what a lot of people have long suspected about guys who kowtow to feminists. That is to say:

Guys who make a big show of being on board with
the feminist agenda are just doing it to ingratiate themselves
with women, perhaps with the worst sort of ulterior motives.

There — I’ve said it as bluntly as possible and, as I say, a lot of people share that suspicion. Being a cynic means that one expects others to act in their own interests, so that whenever you see someone make an ostentatious display of altruistic idealism, your gut-hunch instinct is to suspect a scam: What’s in it for them? Continue reading Feminism and the ‘Friendly Stranger’ →

Weiner’s Secret Desire
UPDATED: ‘X-Rated’ Photo Emerges; Weiner’s Wife Is Pregnant; More Democrats Now Calling for Resignation

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“To be sure, Weiner stayed true to his 1996 pronouncement when, 14 years later, he wed a member of the cognitive elite, a high-powered career woman. But the details of his online shenanigans suggest that he harbored secret desires for female admiration and deference — that he was a closet male chauvinist.”
— James Taranto, “Can’t Feminists Be Hypocrites?” Wall Street Journal

UPDATE: Well, well: I had wanted to ignore this, and I’m sure no sane person actually wanted to see it, but Ace of Spades linked to Dave Weigel and . . . OK, so now Anthony Weiner’s “Full Monty” shot is at the top of Memeorandum. And just coincidentally, top Democrats have begun demanding Weiner’s resignation.

Today, I was talking to a Republican operative who said, “Who cares whether he resigns now or not? He’s been neutered. Can Weiner accuse Republicans of wrongdoing now? . . . I say, let him stay.”

Solid reasoning there, but Weiner’s political uselessness as a liberal attack dog, now that he’s been “neutered,” is precisely why Democrats will be utterly ruthless in throwing him under the bus. As Da Tech Guy pointed out, the consistently clueless Joan Walsh is still blaming the wrong people:

“If we let the other side take scalps, the right wing is choosing our leaders for us.”

No, ma’am. You liberals chose Weiner as your own leader. And as an embodiment of Democratic Party beliefs and values, he’s perfect.

UPDATE II: Weiner’s wife is pregnant. To quote Ace: “Oy.”

UPDATE III: Donald Douglas at American Power:

There’s likely to be a flood of calls for Weiner’s resignation now. And now more than ever, if only for his wife’s privacy, and for the well-being of his unborn child, Weiner should quit Congress, get away from the hostile media glare, and start rebuilding his life.

Absolutely. He should have resigned days ago, but there is absolutely no reason his wife — now the mother of his unborn child — should be dragged through this mess any longer. And the only way to end it is for Weiner to do the right thing and resign.

UPDATE IV: Andrew Breitbart issues a statement:

Earlier today, a photograph resembling one that I had withheld from publication in the Weinergate saga was released without my knowledge or permission.
Prior to the publication of our story on BigGovernment.com and BigJournalism.com this past Monday morning, it was necessary to show the pictures I had received from our source to several news producers, including several at major news networks, to prove that the additional material I described really did exist, which some have continued to doubt.
This morning, I showed a photograph, which our source claims Weiner sent her, to radio hosts “Opie and Anthony” of the Sirius XM radio network on my mobile device. Somehow, without my knowledge or permission, apparently a picture was taken of my mobile device, and subsequently published by Opie (Gregg Hughes) on Twitter.
His co-host, Anthony (Anthony Cumia), stated today:
“In regards to the photo of Anthony Weiner that was leaked by members of The Opie And Anthony show on 6/8, I want to make it clear that Andrew Breitbart had no knowledge that this photo was being made public. A phone with the photo was being displayed and a camera in the studio caught it. It was then uploaded to twitter [sic], again, without Andrew Breitbarts [sic] knowledge.”
I regret that this occurred.

UPDATE VII: Got a fork? Stick it in Weiner now:

“Anthony Weiner lied to the country about his sexual misconduct online. He also lied to me. I had been defending him, based on what he told me, but no more. Weiner must resign from Congress immediately.”
— Kirsten Powers

UPDATE VIII: Et tu, Joan Walsh?

Just now, I was watching Hardball on MSNBC and former DNC Chairman Ed Rendell was also throwing Weiner under the bus “for the good of the party.” Democrats are ruthless that way. They are far more shameless in their cynical partisanship than Republicans.

UPDATE IX: Thanks to @AngelaTC for this tip: Yet another Weiner “sexting” partner has reluctantly come forward: 34-year-old Georgia teacher Traci Nobles.