THE WASHINGTON silly season started early this year, with the so-called Weinergate scandal continuing into a fifth day on Thursday, when it took on political proportions.
Last weekend, someone transmitted a photograph of the lower section of a man’s body, wearing a tight pair of underpants with a bulge, to a college student via the Twitter account of Anthony Weiner, the Democratic congressional representative for Brooklyn and Queens.
Mr Weiner’s handling of the scandal has been a public relations disaster. On Tuesday, he argued with a CNN correspondent and her producer outside his office in Congress’s Rayburn building, at one point calling the producer a “jackass”. By Wednesday, the congressman changed tactics, apologising for having been “a little stiff yesterday”. He did television interviews with MSNBC, CBS, ABC, Fox and CNN. His attempts to inject humour into the controversy fell flat. “When your name is Weiner, you get a lot of people who are doing mischievous things, making jokes about your name,” he told Fox News.
Mr Weiner said someone hacked into his Twitter account, and that the photo sent to Gennette Cordova (21), a journalism student at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham Washington, was a “prank”.
Ms Cordova is one of Mr Weiner’s 54,000 Twitter followers. She told journalists she has never met the congressman, who is considered a pioneer in the use of social media. Twitter’s Washington representative warned politicians and government officials to be more diligent in protecting their accounts and passwords.
Weinergate has this week ranked with Sarah Palin’s bus tour at the top of the media agenda, overshadowing discussions between President Barack Obama and Republicans about raising the ceiling on the budget deficit.
Journalists began staking out Mr Weiner’s office before 7 am on Wednesday; by noon there were more than 30 encamped in the hallway.
Most puzzling to the media was Mr Weiner’s claim that he “could not say with certitude” whether the bulging parts in the photograph were his. “You would know if this was your underpants,” CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer said incredulously. Republicans tried to turn the scandal to their own advantage yesterday when the House majority leader Eric Cantor called on Mr Weiner to “come clean” and explain how the lewd photograph found its way to his Twitter feed.
“There’s a lot of explaining going on without a lot of clarity,” Mr Cantor said on Fox News. “The American people are right in saying that they don’t have tolerance for this repeated kind of activity going on surrounding their elected leaders.”
Mr Cantor said he felt “really saddened” for Mr Weiner’s wife , a senior aide to Hillary Clinton.
