[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Update: I have been completely outclassed:

Hat tip: Hot Air. That’s gonna leave a mark.

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Boy, this guy is not even trying to hide his bias.  You see yesterday Martin Bashir decided to chide Sarah Palin for using the U.S. Flag in advertising, even insinuating that this violated the law!

And look it is fair as to point out as Newsbusters did that in fact that if you can burn the flag, Congress really can’t restrict what you do with it, and the Flag Code is purely voluntary anyway.

That’s all well and good, but what is really wrong about this is just how selective this is.  No flags in advertisements?  Well, then you better tell Barack Obama…

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[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Update (III): Emily Miller, a Senior Editor at the Washington Times has been tweeting about her creepy encounter with the congressman. Read the tweets in this order: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Update: Courtesy of the Daily Caller, we get this frankly poor video. I will almost certainly replace it when we have good video.

Update (II): More video…

Update (IV): Even more video:

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I don’t want this to be all Wiener-all-the-time.  But seriously, how do you expect me to resist this?

ABC News’ Devin Dwyer reports:  Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York says he “cannot say with certitude” that the photo of a man in gray boxer briefs that was posted to his Twitter account Friday night is not him.

That is right, the man can’t identify his own junk.  Oy.

And that pretty much means he has taken pictures like this before, right?  And that he owns underwear like that, right?  Because if he didn’t take pics like that and didn’t own underwear like that, he could be certain it wasn’t him, right?

Well, either that or he is trying to set things up in case someone proves it was him…

Oh, and there is no pattern to who he follows on twitter:

During the interview today, Weiner pushed back against suggestions that a handful of young women he followed on Twitter indicated impropriety.

“The people I follow -– it’s fairly random,” he said. “The way I did it recently, I said to people, ‘If you’d like me to follow you, [tweet me] #WeinerYes.’ Sometimes people say, ‘Anthony follow me.'”

Except as the New York Post pointed out (echoing what Gateway Pundit showed more than a day earlier), there is a certain pattern here.

Oh and also the porn star from yesterday spoke to the Daily Caller and her silences speak pretty loudly:

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[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

I wish to God that the title was purely a joke, but yes, that was the defense Stewart offered:

Overall, it was a pretty limp performance, but even going in I wasn’t expecting much.  Unlike a lot of commentators, my attitude was that it would be unfair to expect Stewart to go after the Weiner.  They are old friends going back to college after all.  And I don’t think ideology plays into this at all.  Stewart is not exactly fair, but he is not shameless, either.  He knows—as he well acknowledges—that this is exactly the kind of story his show would have endless fun with.  If Weiner wasn’t his friend, he would be all over it, Democrat or Republican.  As long as he doesn’t extend that protection to a long list of people I am cool with that.

And as for his defense…  I suspect somewhere Weiner is thinking, thanks a lot buddy. With friends like these…

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By the way, I find this detail oddly significant.  Weiner apparently got married almost a year ago and who officiated the wedding?  Um, this guy.

Yes, really.

Now this morning I got off on a rant about how conservatives actually do care about adulterers in higher office and all of that.  And I accept that liberals very often don’t care, believing that your personal life doesn’t affect your ability to govern.  So we can agree to disagree on that.

But how is Clinton’s serial violations of his wedding vows irrelevant in the context of marriage?  Doesn’t it make a mockery of the wedding itself to have a famous serial adulterer standing up there and say:

Anthony Weiner, do you take Huma Abedin to be your wedded wife to live together in marriage? Do you promise to love, comfort, honor and keep her for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, be faithful only to her so long as you both shall live?

(Emphasis added.) Do you want to be at a wedding where you are concerned that the officiant might hit on the bride and can’t be trusted alone with the bridesmaids?  Do you want the officiant to question what the meaning of the word “faithful” is, or if a certain sex act is cheating? Yes, I know he was the President and therefore he should receive a certain amount of respect automatically, but you can find a way to duck out of it without dissing the man.  Like you say, “gee, Mr. Clinton, I am honored by the offer, but this rabbi has been a family friend for years and so it’s kind of a personal thing.”  It is a bizarre act of disrespect for the institution of marriage to have a man with Bill Clinton’s character to officiate over one.

Hat tip: Insty.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by Lee Stranahan]

Somewhere in the #Weinergate story, some people at Mediaite –most notably Tommy Christopher – made a decision that it was their job to actually make up excuses for Rep. Weiner that even Weiner himself wasn’t making. This is not the job of a journalist, really – especially when you take the further step of actually picking on specific individuals. It’s one thing to ask questions and posit theories but Mediaite went way beyond this. The vague suggestions that Mediaite makes turn into full-throated crazy at sites like DailyKos.

And – Mediaite’s excuse factory has made some huge errors. For instance…

If this was in fact a hack, as Weiner claims, then it’s not unreasonable that the alleged hacker would do everything that he or she could do to make the individual look guilty, including retweeting the offending image, and then deleting it. Rep. Weiner is not just a progressive provocateur who has very few fans on the right, but he is also a very public figure with 45,000 Twitter followers. So it is perfectly reasonable to wonder why it would appear that his offending tweet was only retweeted once, by a Twitter user who goes by the handle @patriotusa76:

Sure it’s reasonable – and you’d think with their resources that they would have gotten the answer right.

Weiner’s 45k followers didn’t see the tweet because of the way Twitter works. When you send a ‘mention’ – putting another person @ handle in front, the only people to see that on their timeline are people who follow BOTH parties. It’s explained here.

So rather than 45,000 followers seeing it, it would have been whoever followed BOTH @RepWeiner and Gennette Cordvoa –this number might have been a handful of people. Maybe. Only 100 or so people followed Ms. Cordova.

Now, if people were viewing Rep. Weiner’s page – not the timeline, but his own page – they would have seen it. And that’s exactly how @patriotusa76: saw because he didn’t follow either one.

Mediaite needs to issue a retraction and an apology, ASAP. Why didn’t they check this out before publishing their story? And frankly, they SHOULD do a story on the nature and tone of the criticism over at DailyKos, especially since CNN used DailyKos as an example of counter argument.

Let’s see how objective Mediaite is.

UPDATE: Ezra has more on this here.

– Lee Stranahan

[Guest post by Lee Stranahan]

I’ve written previously about the “Would Your Spouse Buy It Test”?

But Weiner’s latest press conference we’ve moved beyond that to the lower bar of “Would A Reasonable Sane Parent Even Possibly Accept This Excuse And Just Move On” Test.

– Lee Stranahan

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

I know I am being hard on the Johnson (and maybe using one too many d–k jokes), but you can sense desperation in Johnson’s impotence in his latest post on Weinergate.

You see, he figured it all out.  It’s a conspiracy!!!  A conspiracy, I tell you… to destroy Obamacare!

Yes, really:

It’s hard to know where to even begin with that one.  Let’s start by saying that Johnson should have talked to a lawyer before spinning that ridiculous theory, because plainly he hasn’t or the ones he spoke to were partisan hacks.

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