Weinergate Update II

Mickey Kaus Columnist
Font Size:

Underpants in the Undernews!

a) Weiner’s latest media foray contains a bit of possibly brilliant misdirection. The press is focusing on his strange statement that he doesn’t know if the photo in question is of him. This does two things for him. First, it distracts attention from the central development, which is that it is a security firm he has hired that is going to do the “investigation.”  I guess Sen. Stennis is unavailable. What are the chances that his own firm is going to conclude that he did it? His enemies should concentrate on bringing in the neutral third party he obviously wants to avoid.

Second, admitting that there might be a picture of his junk out there seems to buttress his credibility–it’s an admission he didn’t have to make, after all. If he was lying about everything else, he might as well have lied about that too.

b) Left wing bloggers have discovered that it’s not hard to get yFrog to send out twitters with photolinks that appear to come from someone else. At least some right wing bloggers and their occasional allies appear to have bought this theory, and now suspect Weiner didn’t send the offending tweet. But to pull of this trick the pranksters would apparently need to know Weiner’s yFrog address, which contains a string of randomly generated characters–not that different from knowing his password.

c) At this point the greatest evidence of Weiner’s guilt is Weiner’s own damage control effort. Why is he acting so squirrely? If it was a prank, why not claim your rightful airtime on MSNBC to get mad and call in a third party to find out the truth (which probably would not be hard)? Why stage Tuesday’s ‘move on’ meltdown where you refuse to answer questions? Why not…  answer them? Why the repeated pretense that it’s all about the name “Weiner”? Just because Weiner could conceivably have been framed doesn’t mean he was. If he really is innocent and has only managed to make everyone think he is guilty, then he’s engineered the worst PR performance in recent history. I still don’t believe he’s that stupid. But maybe he was advised by Chris Lehane!

d) All eyes turn to Breitbart. … P.S.: But what is the “strange behavior” on the part of anti-Weiner tweeter PatriotUSA76 to which Breitbart associate Lee Stranahan refers?

Mickey Kaus