Dear Representative Weiner, I appreciate everything you've done for America, and more so since Alan Grayson was pushed out: you’re outspoken, you aren’t afraid to call a lie what it is, and you aren’t scared to stand up for your convictions. We can't afford to lose you.
You’re probably aware that your penis is in the national news right now. See, this is the kind of "news" that even the less-partisan networks love – it's got strippers, it’s got scrotal references, it has somebody in a position of power looking bad. They're not going to let it go easily.
So the word is that you tweeted a picture of Weiner's wiener to a coed. I don't care what the reality is, the rumor is that your cock is flopping across the internet. You should probably deal with that.
And unfortunately, you're hurting yourself a little bit, too. Dealing with this like the Republicans do (deny, shuffle your feet and feign outrage) would only work if Democrats had a dedicated network pushing their agenda (* cough * Fox) and a battery of top-rated right-wing radio blowhards lying to the public.
I'll admit, the fact that Andrew Breitbart was the first person to air the story makes me instantly assume that it's a lie. Unfortunately, you aren't really coming across in interviews well with your "I can't win answering questions" attitude. And I've got to say, when you go on Rachel Maddow's show, and instead of saying "that's not me," you say:
"Well, it could be or it could have been a photograph that was that's taken out of context or manipulated or changed in some way... So, maybe it did or maybe it's a photograph that was dropped into an account from somewhere else, I mean, I can't say. I don't want to cast this net wider by saying it's someone else."That just doesn't look good. Kinda makes me itchy, and I'm on your side.
Instead, perhaps you should point out the following fascinating information, turned up by Charles Johnson over at Little Green Footballs.
Apparently it’s possible for anyone to post a picture to anyone else’s account at the yfrog.com picture hosting site — without a password. The trick is to email a picture from a Blackberry to the user’s yfrog.com email address, with the word “@subject” in the text. This results in the picture being posted at yfrog — and a tweet being posted at Twitter with a link to the picture....Interestingly, yFrog has since closed off access to this particular "feature."
It turns out that you don’t have to email from a Blackberry — you just need to use MMS to send the picture, from any device that supports the protocol. I’ve now confirmed that this technique also works on an iPhone... It also turns out that this is not really a security hole in yfrog; it’s a documented feature that’s been public knowledge for at least 2 years.
There's more to it, but I'll let you do your own research. In the meantime, stay strong, and for the love of G_d, just say "That's not me. I have a penis, but that one isn't mine."
See? Was that so hard?
__________
Update: No answer (not that I expect one - they never call, they never write...), but I'm finding my eye drawn to more stories about the Crotch of Doom, which I'd been ignoring up to now.
For instance, Joseph Cannon has some interesting points, on lawsuits, the origin of the picture, and why the GOP is pulling this particular chain as hard as they are (you know, outside of the obvious...)
Perhaps any politician who tweets is a twit. Too many chances for things like this to happen and who the hell needs Twitter anyway?
ReplyDeleteTwitter is useful if you’re caught up in the middle of a revolution and need to get some news out in a nanosecond. It’s a communication tool and people can be creative in a very short space if they’re good at it and yes, the essence of winged poesy itself is skilled compression, of course with the Jurassic-sized caveat being that internal editing is a big part of even the most inspiration-based poetry writing, while it isn’t so for Twitterers, whose emphasis would be on the immediate, the ephemeral, the eye-and-ear candyworthy, the snap-judge possible. That’s just what the medium encourages, right? This is how I’m feeling, or what I think, right here in James Joyce’s “here and now of the land of the space of today.”
ReplyDeleteI don’t suppose the philosophy of this micro-blog concept is anything like that of Orwell’s nemesis Big Brother Government in the Appendix on Newspeak: the whole point of the Newspeak Dictionary is to reduce the English language to a minimalist level at which nothing unorthodox can be said and, ultimately, thought. You can only say things like “Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc, doubleplus ungood.” The idea behind Twitter is constructive: instant public communication. As for way people really use it, well, I suppose that often leaves much to be desired. Evidently, some folks manage to say (and show, via links to images) more than they really should even in 140 characters.
I don’t know what the suggestively named representative did or didn’t Tweet – I like Anthony Weiner and will just take his word for it that he didn’t send the ludicrous and slightly lewd image in question; it would have been idiotic for him to do so -- but his waffling about whether the image is of his own weenie is right in The Daily Show’s wheelhouse. It makes him sound as silly as the otherwise dignified and ultra-capable William Jefferson Clinton did with all that nonsense about “the meaning of ‘is’” and whether or not a certain kind of sex is really sex, and so forth.
Politicians probably shouldn’t get too comfortable interacting in a medium that’s inherently liable to result in unscripted foolishness. We live with a 24/7 pseudo-media cycle, so any iffy Tweet can and will be used against the politician who sends it, or is even accused of having sent it. The only way to fix that problem is not to have an account in the first place.
Chris Matthews of Hardball said something perceptive the other day about the Twitter issue – to paraphrase him loosely, he wondered out loud why seemingly mature adult politicians would allow themselves to be sucked into a communication-universe whose essence is juvenile “cuteness,” what with all the abbreviations, acronyms, and silly salutations like ‘sup and “C U LTR.” It’s a bit like wearing ridiculously baggy jeans, as if you were a fourteen-year-old city kid trying to look like a gangster.
“Speak (or show) before you think” isn’t a good protocol for a politician, and if I were an office-holder, I would have nothing to do with Twitter and its emphasis on the immediate and ephemeral. Direct, unscripted emotion and language are effects that skilled orators generate with the idea (at best) of making a real connection with their audiences. To indulge in it raw, so to speak, seems to me a mistake – the idea of egalitarian spontaneity is a fine one, but it’s also dangerous to someone involved in political discourse.
I agree -- I think Twitter is a serious waste of time. Then again, I feel the same way about Facebook.
ReplyDeleteSee? Was that so hard? - Apparently it was!!
ReplyDeleteTwitter is a serious waste of time - much in the way any advertising is a waste of time. It's just an opportunity to get your name/face out there in the public. (How many of these celebrities actually write their own tweets, anyway?)
ReplyDeleteFacebook, on the other hand, has its uses - aside from wasting time. My wife, as a musician, uses it to communicate with her fellow cast members before a performance, to message her students, keeps up with friends and relatives out of state (or in the city, for that matter); she's reconnected with people she literally hasn't seen in decades; finding entertainment news that she's interested in (as opposed to wading through miles of crap she isn't; and I'm sure she could come up with more if I asked her.
(Me? I mostly post links and vids, and occasionally communicate with Favorite Daughter, who doesn't always answer her phone or check email - so, yeah, mostly a time-waster for me...)
It is never easy to adjust to the proliferation of a new communication technology. I’m old enough to remember when answering machines were new, and most of the messages recorded were something along the lines of “I … um … never know what to say to these things. Um? This is, this is me, uh, and … call me?” The invention of the printing press enabled all manner of unseemly pamphleteering that I’m sure was very upsetting to the establishment at the time. And imagine the conflicts that arose when people started using language and drawing pictures on walls instead of grunting and pointing.
ReplyDeleteTwitter is new, or at least, new-ish, but it has become so mainstream that no public figure with an interest in reaching and holding an audience can avoid it. The biggest problem in this particular case is that only a tiny percentage of the population even understands what a YFrog is, let alone how it works, or why it is (or was, since they've since closed the hole) the easiest way to insert a fraudulent tweet into someone else's account.
Based on this conversation, I'm going to go ahead and estimate that I spend more time on Twitter and Facebook than everyone else here combined, and multiplied by a number larger than I'd care to admit. I may be old, but I'm from the internet, and I also work here, so when I am doing this, it's the opposite of a waste of time.
I personally don't see a problem with people hiring professionals to tweet for them. It's obviously something that is best handled by people who know how to work the interwebs.
Godlizard, I love your comment. I was about to point out to my colleagues that broad comments about how Twitter and Facebook are a waste of time is a put down of all who spend time using those methods of communication. You did that so much more politely than I would have.
ReplyDeleteWaste of time? So what does that make those of us who are adept at using these new forms (newish?) of communication? Hate Twitter and Facebook all that you want and don't feel any obligation to use either, but do pause before you sweepingly condemn perfectly legitimate methods of communication because you don't find them useful.
My father refuses to use a cell phone. After our mother died, my sister and her husband purchased a phone and a year's worth of service for him so that we could easily contact him when he was out and about town. He refused to carry it with him. We finally accepted that he just wasn't going to use it because he perceived it as unnecessary. He got along "perfectly well before there was ever such a thing as a cell phone!"
He also imagines that he is superior because he refuses to invest in either satellite or cable. It really just means that he can only get three channels clearly. However,whenever he visits my sister, or my brother, or me, we can't tear our remote controls out of his hand and he is glued to the television.
Oh, and I agree with Godlizard, I don't see a problem with people hiring professionals to tweet for them. Welcome to the 21st century.
I posted a balanced pro/con comment about Twitter, which I think is an interesting test medium for what’s best and worst about the way we use language and the way it uses us. I would add that I am not carried along by the “hire a pro to do your Tweeting for you” notion. It takes care of the “Whoops -- did I just say or show something outrageous?” problem, but at the same time it devalues the medium. Why should I care what Senator X just Tweeted if the senator didn’t do it him or herself? If spontaneity and authenticity are the values for a particular medium, hiring somebody else to be spontaneous and authentic for you vitiates the gesture. To be fair, I feel that way about speechwriters, too: if a leader can’t figure out how to say something in a sensible, dignified manner, perhaps he or she shouldn’t be leading in the first place. It’s a mark of competence, and I expect politicians to be capable orators, not fools who couldn’t utter a decent sentence to save their lives. It means something to me that Mr. Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address himself, even if he used his bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon as a sounding board. What would you think if you found out that Lincoln got his address gussied up by some professional whom he had told to “Write me something about wars and freedom and renewal of democracy and all that stuff, and make it sound pretty. I’m paying good money for this!” ?
ReplyDeleteOkay, now that that naughty man Anthony Weiner has 'fessed up to his multifarious electronic misdeeds as of June 6th, 2011: Jon Stewart, have you anything to say in your defense, what with your "No Waaaaaaay That's Him" downsizing recollection on The Daily Show? Have you at long last no mnemonic decency, sir? (LOL)
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though, I suppose the issue will fade away. It seems to me to fall under the heading of bad personal conduct, not illegality. AW is a good rep for New York, in spite of this foolish behavior and the ridiculous equivocation of the last week or so. What usually protects Dems in such cases, I think, is the simple fact that they didn't win on a sanctimonious "I am ever so much holier than thou, so let me tell you how to live your life" pledge the way some of the fallen GOP members seem to have done. At least one can't add an obscene level of hypocrisy to the list of offenses. Sex is an irrational force that embarrasses the hell out of many people at one time or another. Life goes on....
Remember Whitewater and don't count on it dying out. It can easily metasticise and spread to investigations of more body parts, more relationships and a re-emergence of Kenn Starr.
ReplyDeleteAfter all he may have used a coputer or an account paid for my those vestal virgins, the American Taxpayer!
They very, very badly need to find a counterpoise for all the Republican sex scandals and I think we can count on them to inflate this faster than anything has inflated since the Big Bang.
Dino, I did indeed find your comments on Twitter to be balanced. I thought that I made it perfectly clear that I was addressing those who announced that Twitter was a waste of time which suggests that those of us who engage in its use are merely wasting our time. Now why on earth would you think that your balanced perspective was the object of my chastisement?
ReplyDelete