Weiner In A Pickle

It was a strange week for Congressman Anthony Weiner, who was faced with question after question about how a photo of a man's crotch had been posted to his twitter account.  The more he waged his "battle of the bulge", the more problems he seemed to create for himself.

 Congressman Weiner is an active Twitter user, who recently made good on his promise to post his 1977 bar mitzvah photo if he reached 10,000 followers.  On of those followers was Genette Cordova, a college student identified as the intended recipient of the waist-down photo of a man in bulging underpants. Cordova is one of just 198 people Weiner himself follows in Twitter, and one of his problems is that he hasn't clearly explained why a 21-year-old female student would be on that short list.

Both he and Cordova insist they have never met in person or had any inappropriate exchanges (interestingly, Cordova did say she called Weiner her "boyfriend" once on Twitter).  Weiner has denied sending the photo, which was directed to Cordova but ended up being posted to all his Twitter followers and publicized by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.

It seems that a Twitter used name Dan Wolfe (aka @patriotusa76) had been harassing Cordova for several weeks, under the belief that she was having an affair with the Congressman.  According to this breakdown of the story, the most likely scenario is that someone (probably Dan Wolfe) hacked into Weiner's Facebook acount (in the same way it was done to Sarah Palin) and downloaded the photo from his private photo area.  Dan Wolfe then posted the picture to Weiner's Yfrog account, which resulted in a tweet (see details here for how easy this is).

Of course, the right-wingers went nuts with the story, calling into question how complicit Andrew Breitbart is on the whole incident.  The twitter user Dan Wolfe  (who originally harassed Cordova and posted the photo online) has since deleted his Twitter account and has refused to come forward amidst the controversy.   Forensic image analysts have determined that the picture in question does not match the profile of Congressman Weiner's Blackberry (but have confirmed that all other photos posted by Weiner to his Yfrog account do match his Blackberry profile).

In interview after interview, Weiner refused to say "with certitude" whether it was a photo of him.   CNN's Wolf Blitzer said it best when he told Weiner, "You would know if this was your underpants." It was such a weird series of events for the normally media-savvy Congressman-- but we are still left  with two unanswered questions-- 1) Is it the Congressman (and his weiner) in the picture in question? 2) Why would Weiner ( a happily-married Congressman) be a Twitter follower of a 21-year-old college student?