Rep. Anthony Weiner finally called the police Thursday —
but not to investigate the hackers who the New York Democrat claims
hijacked his Twitter account to send a lewd photo to a coed last
week. Instead, Weiner’s staff sicced Capitol Police on Marcia
Kramer, a reporter for New York’s WCBS-TV who showed up in the
Brooklyn congressman’s D.C. office and
tried to get an interview. “All I want is for him
to say something to his constituents, the people who have to vote
for him,” Kramer told Weiner’s press secretary, who responded by
saying that his boss had done all the interviews he intended to do
about the so-called “WeinerGate” scandal.
Kramer managed to talk her way out of being arrested, but
her experience Thursday in some sense symbolized Weiner’s problem:
Every time he talks to reporters about last Friday’s incident, he
digs himself a little bit deeper into a hole of implausibility.
Even his staunchest political allies can see that Weiner is lying
— or at least trying to hide some guilty secret — and so he finds
himself increasingly at sword’s point with the media, which has
gone into feeding-frenzy mode at the irresistible scent of an
apparent cover-up. This is intensely ironic, given that the
seven-term Democrat has long been one of the liberal media’s
favorite members of Congress.
For the benefit of readers who perhaps don’t have a TV and
who today logged onto the Internet for the first time, a brief
recap: Late last Friday night, on the online social networking site
Twitter, a message from Weiner’s account (@RepWeiner) was sent to
the attention of a 21-year-old college student. The only content of
that tweet (as Twitter messages are called) was a link to a digital
photo of a man in gray underpants, shown only from the waist down,
whose turgid phallus was bulging quite prominently. Within minutes,
the offensive tweet was deleted, although not before being seen and
copied by several of the congressman’s more than 40,000 Twitter
followers. Weiner quickly claimed that he was the victim of
computer hackers, but the incident was reported as a
news story at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com site, and by
Saturday afternoon had become a major topic of
conversation among bloggers. The intended recipient of the
crotch-shot tweet was Gennette Cordova, a
student at a community college in Bellingham,
Washington. Ms. Cordova issued a statement
Sunday evening to the
New York Daily News in which she denied being
Weiner’s mistress. (Weiner is married to a top aide to Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton.) Ms. Cordova said she had never met the
congressman, and explained that her claim on Twitter of being his
“girlfriend” was meant as a joke.
Because it was Memorial Day weekend — with Congress out
of session and most reporters on holiday — there hadn’t been much
mainstream media coverage of the story as of Tuesday morning when
The American Spectator asked, “Is
America Ready for WeinerGate?” That quickly changed, however,
when Weiner met Tuesday with a small scrum of reporters in the
Capitol and suffered perhaps the worst
press-conference meltdown in political history. While the
congressman now attempted to dismiss the offensive tweet as a mere
“prank,” CNN producer Ted Barrett kept trying to ask the obvious
question: If Weiner was the victim of an online identity thief, why
hadn’t he reported this apparent crime to law enforcement? Weiner’s
response was to call Barrett a “jackass,” ensuring that video of
the press conference became a viral Internet sensation. Appearing
the next day on CNN,
Barrett said that because Weiner “didn’t appear to be
forthcoming… our flags went up.”
Many other flags went up as well. The piranhas in the
political press corps smelled blood in the water and, when Weiner
scheduled a daylong round of TV interviews Wednesday — including
Luke Russert of NBC News and Bret Baier of Fox News — he faced
more questions to which he refused to give straight answers. Asked
by Russert if the now-infamous photo was actually him, Weiner
answered: “You know, I can’t say with certitude.” Referring to the
claim that his computer had been “hacked,” Baier asked:
“Do you have suspicions of who did it?” and Weiner
answered: “I’m not an expert at this stuff.”
If Weiner was innocent, he was certainly giving a
world-class imitation of a guilty man. And even in the friendliest
media venue possible —
Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC program — Weiner managed to make matters
worse by trying to joke his way through the interview. As Andrew
Breitbart said in a telephone interview late Thursday, Weiner’s
appearance on the Maddow show was “Eddie Haskell
hiding behind a lot of snark.” (Weiner’s tendency toward
inappropriate humor was also noted by
Washington Times
columnist Emily Miller.) Some liberal bloggers
seeking theories of how Weiner might indeed be a victim of hackers
have openly accused Breitbart himself of orchestrating a smear, but
the conservative Internet entrepreneur laughed off their
speculation as demonstrating their deficiency in deductive logic.
“They must not have watched ‘Murder She Wrote’ or read any
Encyclopedia
Brown mysteries,” said Breitbart, whose new book Righteous
Indignation describes his one-man war against what he
calls the “Democrat media complex.”
Members of that media complex, however, appear to be
losing patience with Weiner’s increasingly desperate attempts to
deflect questions about his online embarrassment. 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.” Even those who felt sympathy for Weiner could
scarcely resist the conclusion that he was in a mess of his own
making. CNN’s Jack
Cafferty said watching Weiner’s Wednesday interview with
that network’s Wolf Blitzer “was sort of like watching
one of those Buddhist monks set himself on fire. You feel bad for
the guy, but it’s impossible not to watch it.”
Among those watching Weiner’s self-immolation with obvious
satisfaction was the award-winning conservative blogger known as
Ace of Spades. His notoriously
rowdy blog, whose commenters proudly proclaim themselves “AOSHQ
Morons,” has been a must-read source on the WeinerGate scandal for
the past six days. In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, after
Weiner’s press-conference meltdown, Ace recounted the behavioral
evidence of the congressman’s guilt. Early Thursday, after the
congressman’s Wednesday round of interviews had done nothing to
quell the media furor, Ace compared Weiner’s
situation to that of rock singer Hayley Williams. A year ago,
Williams similarly blamed hackers for sending out a topless photo
of her via her Twitter account. That particular mystery was quickly
solved when it was discovered the singer had made a simple mistake:
Sending the photo as a public Twitter message, when she
actually intended to send it as a private direct message
(DM) to her boyfriend.
The evidence that Weiner might have made some such mistake
has been accumulating for nearly a week. When the congressman’s
office announced Monday that he had “retained counsel” to advise
him how to handle the case (which most obviously could be solved by
reporting the alleged “hacking” to the FBI or Capitol Police), it
was Ace who observed: “Victims call cops. Perps
call lawyers.” What remains to be seen is whether reporters for
the mainstream press will play the role of hard-boiled detectives
and continue interrogating the suspect until he finally breaks down
and confesses.
