Weinergate devolves into flood of conspiracy theories

Anthony Weiner‘s got a lot of problems this week, but they’re sorta inflated. First off, the story is kind of at a point where fatigue is very high. However, despite technical evidence, including a very obvious yFrog flaw that would’ve made it easy to post a rogue tweet on Weiner’s account, the congressman’s performance this week has proven to be a complete liability, giving conservatives enough rope to hang him with. (By the way, just wanted to point out — we discovered the @PatriotUSA76 angle 15 hours before DailyKos broke it.) But at this point, only the die-hards are really, truly following this story. One of them, by the way, is a reporter for Mediaite — Tommy Christopher. We criticized Mediaite for their aggressive coverage Thursday but will give some credit today. You guys did some good work that deserves praise. More info:

useful Mediaite’s piece on Dan Wolfe (@PatriotUSA76) makes the strongest argument yet of Wolfe building a Wiener conspiracy … around underage girls. Daily Kos looks really bad in the piece, by the way.
crazy Not long after Wolfe deleted his Twitter account, the blog Ace of Spades HQ posted a screed on why he’s “irrelevant” in the scheme of Weinergate using a kinda-convoluted poker metaphor. Hrm.
crazier Have any patience left? You might lose it after reading the “interview” a conservative blogger did with Wolfe — essentially a long, unedited chat log. Take an Adderall before reading this; you’re gonna need it. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

At a time when the GOP is playing games with the debt limit, a member of the Supreme Court is refusing to recuse himself from matters he has a financial interest in, and middle class incomes are stagnant, many want to change the subject. I don’t. This was a prank, and a silly one. I’m focused on my work.
Rep. Anthony Weiner • Trying to draw a line in the sand on this whole Weinergate story, which has certainly gotten a bit crazier over the past day. The Atlantic Wire has a roundup of the story, which has gotten to the point of farce. CNN also got Weiner on camera today, where he seemed at least a little annoyed to be taking the questions. But ultimately, though, this piece of evidence (grabbed by Soup) is the strongest against Weiner doing anything wrong. Also, has anyone noticed how Mediaite has kinda gone crazy over this story? We love the site and everything, but they got a Photoshop expert to analyze the photo. A bit much, eh? They’re not the only ones, but you know what, we’re going to leave this mess alone for a while. The EXIF data is good enough for us. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

Look, we don’t want the Weiner story to be true. But we’ve done enough tweeting in our day to know all the tricks for reading someone’s social media tracks. We spent a couple of hours digging through tweets to find out more info. And, to us, there seems to be some evidence pointing in both directions on this story. The key thing for us is the existence of the rogue tweet, which was captured by TweetCongress.org even after it was deleted. But there’s also stuff that makes us wonder. The patient zero — the first person to retweet Anthony Weiner’s NSFW tweet — was this guy, who we’ve found in our research to be overly fixated on the congressman even BEFORE the tweet in question. In fact, he posted about a cheating scandal just like this one over TWO WEEKS AGO. Really? How was he so quick to hit the trigger on this? Some other things we noticed from the scandal:

for On Twitter, Weiner noted the Seattle time of his Friday TV appearance. The recipient of the NSFW tweet, from Seattle, retweeted.
for The person at the center of the drama deleted her Twitter account — which was active as of yesterday — after the tweet.
for The girl in question said Weiner was her “boyfriend” in an April tweet. Yeah, so? Her and every other liberal teen female has!
against To disprove that the photo was of Weiner, Daily Kos has a test of the NSFW photo that suggested it was ‘shopped. Hm.

» The important things to take from this: We don’t think Weiner did anything wrong as of yet, but we do think that there is a lot to suggest one of two things: One, this was possibly a scandal planted by someone who had closely followed the congressman’s Twitter account (because, based on our research, people have), and there were somewhat bizarre things that may have connected Weiner to the girl. Given the track record of Big Journalism, where the story originated from, we’d like to see a better source tackle this thing, because we don’t trust Breitbart as far as we can throw him. We rate this an “inconclusive.”

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

From what I’ve read about this script, though not executed, it is patently gross and offensive. It’s not his detractors to whom he also owes this public airing. It’s to his legion of supporters.
Andrew Breitbart • In a post on his “Big Journalism” site yesterday, regarding the whole James O’Keefe-faux-seducing incident involving CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau. While Andrew has been critical of the network in the past, particularly for the coverage of James O’Keefe’s Mary Landrieu incident earlier this year, he noted that Boudreau and her producer “conducted themselves professionally, and I believe James owes them a candid and public explanation.” He kind of left the door open for this to be a big misunderstanding, but it’s pretty crazy that not even Breitbart can back the Hunter S. Thompson wannabe’s behavior this time. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

04 Jun 2011 02:32