Big Deal of the Day: “Weinergate” [UPDATED]

Big Deal of the Day: Long story short, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) allegedly tweeted a photo of his underwear-covered junk to a female follower.

The photo (sNSFW) — which was posted to the Congressman’s yfrog account on Friday night — was summarily deleted (along with all other photos) by Weiner himself. He then promptly tweeted that his Facebook had been hacked. However, the “incriminating” tweet was retweeted several times before Weiner managed to get to it, and an alleged screencap of his yfrog page was posted on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government.

Rep. Weiner, meanwhile, took the incident in stride, tweeting a Sherlock Holmes-themed joke at his own expense. He later told Politico’s Jonathan Allen and Ben Smith that he thought it was “obvious” that he had been hacked. “The weiner gags never get old, I guess,” he is quoted as saying. Weiner’s spokesman Dave Arnold told the New York Post that both the congressman’s Facebook page and Twitter account had been hacked.

Big Government remains adament that something isn’t adding up in Weiner’s claim that he was hacked; Daily Kos says this is nothing but a “sex smear,” and a commenter used Error Level Analysis (sNSFW) to prove the yfrog screencap was faked.

Meanwhile, the follower at the center of “Weinergate” — a Bellingham, WA-based journalism student — has since deleted both her Twitter and Facebook accounts (some say her online presence is being scrubbed). Bloggers on the right have gone so far as to claim that the 21-year-old is Weiner’s lover, putting up as evidence a tweet from Weiner referencing “Seattle time” and a tweet from @GennetteNicole calling him her “boyfriend.”

Among the questions being asked on the right is why Rep. Weiner never mentioned alerting the authorities to the hack. A better question might be, if this was indeed a nefarious hack aimed at destroying the Democrat, why use a photo of someone so handsomely endowed?

[politico / nyp / biggovernment / dailykos / @repweiner / villagevoice.]

UPDATE: Meet @patriotusa76: A Weiner-obsessed Reagan Republican who was supposedly the only person quick enough to retweet the Congressman’s wiener.