Toby Harnden writes for The Daily Mail, in a just-published report:

Last weekend, Breitbart told friends he was in early talks with CNN about a Crossfire-style show in which he would argue from the Right alongside former US House representative Anthony Weiner taking him on from the Left.

Breitbart was, of course, responsible for breaking open the scandal that took Rep. Weiner down. He appeared at the press conference to hijack it (one Observer reporter noted at the time: "This is like when The Joker takes over Gotham").

A spokeswoman for CNN told Harnden that the network had no comment. So: Not a denial. UPDATE: Dylan Byers at Politico gets the denial from CNN that Harnden couldn't (or didn't):

"It's totallly false," CNN's Edie Emery said. "CNN was not in discussions."

For context, networks have talks all the time about potential projects, and CNN—which hasn't exactly performed well as a network over the last few years compared to its cable news rivals—probably talked about quite a few possibilities, some of them as extreme (and insane) as this.

Then again, they did put a once-scandalized New York governor on their network, and one of his first guests turned out to be Henry Blodget, someone Spitzer had taken down during his time as New York's A.G. Another guest on Spitzer's first show?

Andrew Breitbart, of course.

Also, West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, who—in an incredibly bizarre coincidence—Toby Harnden also spoke to about Breitbart:

Sorkin told me via email: "I e-mailed Andrew last Friday because the episode of The Newsroom I'm currently writing takes place during the week the Anthony Weiner photos were in the news.

"Andrew and I had struck up a friendly e-mail relationship and so I reached out to ask him if he could give me a timeline of the events from his point of view. I got a quick response -'I'm in' - and we were supposed to meet for coffee at the end of the day today [Thursday]."

Sorkin said that the coffee would have been "about Andrew shedding any new light on the Anthony Weiner incident" and "we'll likely see shards of Andrew during his various appearances that week" in news footage from that time.

The entire thing is odd, and—if true—demonstrates at least two of the three entities in question's potential desperation to get back into the spotlight.

Which is to say: Andrew Breitbart's involvement in the potential for this show is undoubtedly the most unsurprising element of it.

CNN: Breitbart-Weiner show 'totally false' [Dylan Byers/Politico]
Andrew Breitbart was 'in talks with CNN' over new show with Anthony Weiner [Daily Mail]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Illustration by Fred Harper.

“You will surely make noise when I take you deep,” texted Representative Anthony Weiner, the great BlackBerry lover, to his virtual inamorata, Lisa Weiss, the famous dissident, aviatrix and Vegas blackjack dealer.

“Yes I will,” she texted back. “I will be sore for days.”

This past year took the world deep, and the world made noise, but unlike Ms. Weiss, it had, in its soreness, no luxury of bed rest. We started with Middle Eastern uprisings and a Japanese nuclear meltdown, either of which might have filled a whole decade in some simpler era but in ours soon became back-page news. And yet, for all its careering, history could seem to stand ominously still. Writing in Vanity Fair at year’s end, Kurt Andersen rightly described the moment as creatively stagnant, perhaps exhausted, a late imperial Gaga-ing of high empire forms.

But as algorithms make consciousness a built environment, perception itself becomes in some way designed, in which sense 2011 wasn’t totally stuck in the past—it offered a new sensation-of-being: Drudge’s report on Trump’s quest for Obama’s birth certificate sends you clicking Facebook pictures of a lost love’s fat children as prelude to a brief viewing of the Muammar el-Qaddafi snuff film, Tim Tebow chatting-up Yahweh on the 50-yard line or, attention span permitting, Fukushima’s “heroes” streaming across your iPhone in frog masks and body suits, their solemn death-trudge naturally interrupted by a billing reminder from Verizon Wireless.

“It’s nice to have moments that are real,” said Ashton Kutcher to the young girl, sharing a little postcoital wisdom.

The real and the unreal, the historic, the mundane—this year they all rushed together, passing through the absurd en route to the grotesque.

Europe’s debt crisis festered until, by November, Poland—Poland—was begging Germany for salvation. The uncertainty frustrated America’s recovery; we saw the true unemployment rate at 17 percent, reports of gun-hoarding and ammunition shortages, and a national debt that in November passed the $15 trillion mark—a number that defies fathoming by minds made for counting mastodon.

In simpler times you might dose up on Prozac and just ride the shit out, but even that escape was lost. Writing in The New York Review of Books this summer, Harvard Medical School’s Marcia Angell described how the life-tenderizing antidepressants required by more and more Americans to endure their lifestyle paradise—including an estimated 500,000 toddlers on antipsychotics—didn’t beat their placebos once studies were controlled for side-effects. The vast majority of contributors to the DSM, psychiatry’s gospel, were receiving money from pharmaceutical companies, making it at best a brochure, and at worst proof that the age of fraud had compromised even our own self-understanding.

We buried two business legends, Steve Jobs and Jon Corzine. Jobs died gaunt and hollow-eyed, uttering the final words “Oh wow, Oh wow, Oh wow,” suggesting that the magic he brought into this world saw him out of it. Corzine expired somewhat less gracefully: under his leadership MF Global used $700 million in clients’ money to cover its own losses, an act of shameless, vile theft. The former Goldman CEO then went before the once-mighty U.S. Senate, which he’d joined years before as a short-lived retirement gig. “Senator, unfortunately I do not know where the money is,” said the Wall Street lion-turned-hyena, searching for impunity within stupidity.

The God-death extended into celebrity: 2010 offered the prescription-killing of Michael Jackson, tabloid pictures of Gary Coleman’s morbid intubation—the end-stage of a demystification of celebrity that started in the 1990s, and in 2011 seemed to tire even of itself, offering Charlie Sheen as a toothless maniac, and Lindsay Lohan, once compared to Marilyn Monroe, sneaking cigarette breaks from her court-ordered real-death experience changing the blood- and fluid-stained cadaver sheets at the L.A. County morgue.

We made new idols, hastily, brutally: Rebecca Black became a new, demented form of celebrity when, in the space of a few days, her unwitting tribute to the nihilistic-mundane, Friday, registered 60 million hits on YouTube. There was no ideal here, no message, no skill, just the freak-appeal of a meme sputtering out of control along with everything else. Later in the year, Penn State, which has one of America’s most storied college football programs, was revealed as a self-aware child sex ring focusing on the unprivileged and disempowered.

People sought escape in near and distant pasts.

The Tea Party longed for the moral purity of Eisenhower’s America, when gays responsibly took electroshock therapy, the military vaporized Pacific atolls as light recreation, and little black girls showed respect for German shepherds. Pot-bellied in nylon powdered wigs, they blamed Barack Hussein Obama—the obvious product of a Kenyan-Indonesian-Hawaiian-Ivy League conspiracy to do exactly what was never clear—for everyone’s troubles, demanding a return to a “pure” capitalism that had never existed, and which, as the they pushed America toward default, felt increasingly like Hobbes’s state of nature.

Occupy Wall Street evoked 1960s protest culture while failing to learn its lessons—that the police always win because they have the guns, and that the Flower Children became the Manson Family.

A tent city can be made to disappear, but Occupy’s unanswered questions won’t: How is no one in jail for the mortgage catastrophe? How can anyone preach “pure” capitalist gospel after the 2009 bailouts? How does a society that claims exceptionalism tolerate such staggering income inequality, and the awful loss of promise that is its greatest cost?

Filling the silence was a primal howl that had been building in America even during the boom. By 2006 reality shows like Top Chef and Project Runway, which promised to make you a better consumer, shared cultural space with Man vs. Wild, which taught you how to trap and eat lizards in primordial jungles, offering the fantasy of the stronger, more capable and fulfilled person you might become if magically delivered from everything around you that was making you miserable.

This year we went deeper into antisocial dreams. In 2010 The Colony succeeded as apocalyptic reality show simulating viral apocalypse. In its finale, one contestant, an increasingly paranoid carpenter, hid in a patch of tall weeds when simulated government agents offered help, assuming that their incompetence had been translated into the story line. It drew 2.3 million to the Discovery Channel at 10 o’clock on a Tuesday night, only to be outdone this year by The Walking Dead, whose pilot drew 5.7 million to AMC with a vision of apocalypse as pure cliché—the Sheriff, the Rich Elitist, the Crotchety Old Man, the Token Black Guy—all bickering before a legion of hopelessly dehumanized zombies in stunning anticipation of the Republican debates.

There were biological rites. Bin Laden’s assassination was pure death ritual, Delta Force-like spider monkeys on a primal raid. The web demanded pictures of a corpse, and when none were released people simply Photoshopped their own, mutilating an eye here, bruising flesh there, mouse clicks crushing human skull. They went viral—not exactly real or unreal, more the feeling of the one thing rubbing against the other.

The Royal Wedding was a fantasy-fertility spectacle in which Kate Middleton, the gifted AIDS researcher, finally succeeded in her long struggle to escape the upper middle class. Twenty-four million people watched, ratings so good that Kim Kardashian pretended her own marriage six months later. She drew 4.4 million viewers, made $17 million, then filed for separation, at which point a minor miracle occurred: after a decade of abuses and betrayals by elites, there was still, somehow, enough American capacity for belief that people claimed outrage at Ms. Kardashian’s disregard for the sanctity of marriage. But she was soon forgiven. And why not? With Kim’s Fairytale Wedding: A Kardashian Event, she’d let people abandon themselves for a two-part, four-hour E! stupor, and that was worth something, because in 2011, mainly, there was no escaping the present: there was way too much of it coming way too fast, conning, pleading, plotting, perverting even alpha into omega.

Wild monkeys will soon be joining the ranks of Fukushima’s heroes. The monkeys will be unleashed to test radiation in the site’s forbidden areas. One assumes they’ll be strapped with Chinese-made HD cameras, in the spirit of the day. The footage will be shaky, but that will let us know it’s real. We’ll watch as they go yapping, loping, hooting, meeting modern horror with primal awe. And maybe a few will pause in their heroism to find each other in the isotopic wreck, to mount and caress and conceive in naked assertion of life over death—

They’re up to the 92nd floor of One World Trade Center, which will replace the twin towers, whose destruction a decade ago began this whole regrettable era. They added 40 new stories this year, almost one a week. What everyone knows but won’t say is that we loved the old buildings only in the negative, as shafts of light on summer nights. They were violent in their homogeneity, in their Bauhaus rejection of history, “a pair of fangs” at the end of Manhattan, as Norman Mailer put it when arguing against them ever being built, rightly predicting that if they did go up, they’d be working for the devil.

But the new structure keeps surprising with its beauty. You’ll be downtown at night and you’ll look south and see its light-dotted form, fragile but determined—like a flower coming up through the snow.

editorial@observer.com

Weiner.

And how’s this for irony: at midnight on June 21, the dawn of the first official day of summer—which ushered in what promises to be a three-month free-for-all during which New Yorkers of all shapes and sizes show as much skin as possible without getting arrested—also marked the end of Anthony Weiner’s time in office. The congressman resigned last Thursday in front of a crowd who voiced concern for his welfare. (“Will you maintain your hard-on?” one intrepid reporter cried. Tsk, tsk, Mr. Keller—we expected more from you.)

Iran’s recently appointed deputy foreign minister, Mohammad Sharif Malekzadeh, also resigned this week, albeit under far less salacious circumstances, and, presumably, to fewer questions about his erectile function, after Iranian intelligence officials and members of Parliament accused the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ally of trying to weaken the role of the country’s clergy. Meanwhile, from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Archbishop Timothy Dolan prayed “that marriage stays between a man and a woman in the state of New York.” After increasingly cagey statements coming out of Albany from Andrew Cuomo and Sheldon Silver, we’ve resigned ourselves to the fact that there will be no vote on same-sex marriage before this issue goes to print (see Azi Paybarah's feature The Honeymoaners for details on the hold-up), but based on our cover story on Power Gays we know at least 50 New Yorkers who would love to silence the clergy (and, for that matter, the Republicans) in this particular case.

In other frustrating—if less potentially life-changing—delays, we’ve resigned ourselves to another week of Derek Jeter-less Yankee games, which also means another week of waiting for the sanguine shortstop to make contact with his 3,000th ball in major league play (we can’t claim to know what he does in his personal life). Newt Gingrich’s finance team has resigned, forcing the struggling G.O.P. candidate to attend only the events he can drive to from his Georgia and D.C.-area homes. And, across the country, deep in the recesses of his Holmby Hills compound, eternal playboy Hugh Hefner has resigned himself once again to living the life of your average octogenarian billionaire bachelor after his 25-year-old fiancée Crystal Harris called off their engagement just days before their planned June 18 nuptials, ending their very public May-December (really, more like February-December) romance. Ms. Harris did visit her jilted lover on Father’s Day, however, lending an unexpectedly Freudian air to the day’s festivities.

But not everyone’s resigning. Or resigned. Take Keith Olbermann, for instance, whose Countdown sputtered to life once again on Current TV Monday night. The proudly pompous pundit spoke with documentarian Michael Moore about President Obama’s Libya problem (try as he might, the president has not yet convinced Congress to resign its War Powers Resolution) and then crowned a new Worst Person in the World—none other than the “educated” young woman-turned-viral-YouTube-video-star who verbally assaulted a Metro-North train conductor last week.

Perhaps a more fitting contender for Mr. Olbermann’s dubious prize would be Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Osama bin Laden deputy who has reportedly ascended to al Qaeda’s top spot. Al-Zawahiri, a former member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, is said to “lack bin Laden’s charisma.” So we have that to look forward to.

Uncle Mike, it’s gonna be a twister.

Nice penmanship.

It appears as if Anthony Weiner is going to make it through the prime-Friday-afternoon-bad-news-delivery period without the much awaited resignation announcement.

But that doesn’t mean he isn’t reaching out.

CNN gets their hands on this apology note from Weiner to his neighbors, offering his mea culpa for the press hordes who remain camped outside his apartment.

The note reads:

To our neighbors:

Please forgive the inconvenience of all the press outside.

I am sorry for all I have done that has now impacted you.

Hopefully it will soon pass.

–Anthony

Easy to imagine that Weiner’s fellow residents of his pre-war co-op wish that the sale had gone through before all this tumult came about.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (via Getty Images)

Rupert Murdoch's New York Post has made hay of the Anthony Weiner story--today's coverline, "Pop Goes the Weasel," deals (albeit tastelessly) with the just-announced pregnancy of Mr. Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin--and his London-based Times is chasing the story as well, with a smaller-than-might-be-expected touch of British restraint. Today brings the luridly-portmanteau'd "Wife of 'sexting' congressman is pregnant" news story, as well as a style article on waxing entitled "Weiner's pecs don't lie." Yesterday brought a piece for the "families" section on "Sexting, lies and political scandal"--the story has metastasized across the Times's broad sheets. (Caveat: all of these stories lie behind the Times paywall, though surely they are all worth the price in pounds sterling!)

Strangely, the only news item arriving under a search for "Weiner" on the website of Mr. Murdoch's raunchier downmarket U.K. tabloid, the Sun, is a piece from 2007 entitled "Hot dog! We have a weiner." Right punnery, wrong topic--it's about a viral video containing frankfurters. (By comparison, the U.K. tabloid Daily Mail, not owned by Mr. Murdoch, has a heart-rending narrative starring heroic Huma, who "bravely appears alongside Hillary as Democrats demand shamed husband quits.") Perhaps it's the whiff of politics that's keeping the Sun from joining its corporate cousins in the U.K. and U.S. in freaking out over the Weiner story. After all, they print more shocking stuff on Page Three each day.

City Councilman Eric Ulrich. (photo credit: william alatriste / new york city council)

Anthony Weiner’s Republican opponents would seem to have one obvious advantage should they choose to challenge the embattled congressman in 2012: their to-date failure to distribute compromising photos of themselves (or parts of themselves) over the Internet.

“Let me think,” joked Bob Turner, the 70-year-old businessman who ran against Mr. Weiner last year, when asked about any lewd photos he might possess or have sent to people who were, say, definitively not his wife. “I’m pretty sure I don’t.”

“No, of course not,” said 26-year-old Eric Ulrich, a city councilman from Queens and another rumored challenger, when asked if he had engaged in any inappropriate online banter.

Before a photo of his crotch rocketed around the country and was splattered across various tabloid covers, Mr. Weiner was expected to be a leading mayoral candidate in 2013, and his re-election to Congress was widely considered a given.

Now, facing an ethics investigation of his lewd messages to as many as six young women and a wall of public silence from his congressional colleagues, Mr. Weiner must first survive 2012.

“Look, my constituents have to make the determination,” Mr. Weiner said on Monday. “If they believe that this is something that means that they don’t want to vote for me, I’m going to work very hard to win back their trust and to try to persuade them that this is a personal failing of mine; that I’ve worked very hard for my constituents for a very long time, very long hours; and that nothing about this should reflect in any way on my official duties or on my oath of office.”

Last November, Mr. Turner captured more than 40 percent of the vote in the Queens and Brooklyn district, a relatively high number for an unknown challenger trying to unseat an established incumbent. And pundits suggest Mr. Weiner could face an even tougher challenge from someone who’s won and run before—like, say, Mr. Ulrich.

“He’s won in a big chunk of the district,” said Jerry Skurnik, a political consultant known for his number-crunching. According to Mr. Skurnik, 50,000 of the 56,000 voters in Mr. Ulrich’s City Council district also reside in Mr. Weiner’s congressional district, and, among the rumored challengers, Mr. Skurnik called Mr. Ulrich the “strongest.”

On Monday, just before Mr. Weiner’s tearful, 27-minute long press conference in midtown, Mr. Ulrich stepped outside of his Ozone Park office to discuss the possibility.

“I don’t want to talk political stuff in my office,” said Mr. Ulrich. “We don’t need any conflict of interest rulings against me.”
Mr. Ulrich said he had been fielding questions “from both sides of the aisle” about the possibility of challenging for the seat, which would pit Mr. Weiner against something like a right-leaning version of his former self.

The similarities between the two are so striking as to be comical.

In 1992, at the tender age of 27, Mr. Weiner won a six-way Democratic primary and four-way general election to become the youngest person ever to serve on New York’s City Council.

In 2009, the ambitious Mr. Ulrich won a five-way special election to become the new youngest councilman, at age 24.

Both enjoy a spirited debate.The ability to strike at the moral nerve center of a debate had been a hallmark of Mr. Weiner, who became a YouTube sensation when he dressed down fellow New York congressman Peter King on the floor of the House and parlayed his sharp tongue into minor celebrity status on cable news shows.

Prior to attending seminary, Mr. Ulrich said he trained as a member of his school’s debate team—a fact even his aides were not aware of. Neither were his opponents, who, during the 2009 special election, found themselves eviscerated by the neophyte, to the delight of a crowded room of voters.

“Eric, you are a Republican party official,” one of his opponents, Mike Riccato, said, while reading off of a small notepad.

“But what experience do you have to lead this community in these fiscally challenging times?”

“It’s manna from heaven. Thank you, Mike,” Mr. Ulrich replied, buttoning his coat. “My experience has been in civics, in communities, has been with people, my whole life.”

With the microphone in his right hand, he continued.

“I wasn’t always a politician,” he said, enthusiastically waving his left hand. “And by the way, being a politician is not a bad thing. I was studying for the priesthood at one time. So I’ll have you know! My dear friend! That there is a lot more to being a city councilman than being a businessman.”

He spoke above the crowd, which was already applauding.

“Politics is not a business,” said Mr. Ulrich. Pointing to the crowd. “These are not your employees!”

Mr. Ulrich went on, leaving his opponents stunned, and the audience electrified.

(About the priesthood: Mr. Ulrich studied for the seminary, but ultimately decided not to continue, and, after winning his Council seat, he got married.)

Both men enjoy the lure of social media, occasionally to their peril.

Mr. Weiner’s transgressions are, by now, well-documented; yesterday he admitted that he “panicked” when he mistakenly posted a private photo of his underpants to his Twitter feed, and deleted all his photos, before lying to cover it up in a series of interviews over several days.

Mr. Ulrich deleted one of his own posts last week, when he said he was responding to a barrage of vulgar messages from bike zealots.

After a woman was hit by a van in his district, a young female constituent tweeted that Mr. Ulrich should support bike lanes to help “calm” traffic.

Mr. Ulrich said he was offended the advocates would use this tragic accident to advance their agenda, and he told them as much, using the hashtag “#getalife.” When The Observer and another outlet picked up the story, Mr. Ulrich released a statement, backing up his position.

“First of all, I can say with certitude that my Twitter account, to my knowledge, has not been hacked,” Mr. Ulrich said, tauntingly echoing the awkward phrasing in Mr. Weiner’s initial nondenial.

“With that said,” Mr. Ulrich’s statement continued, “I cannot believe that anyone would use a tragic incident like the one that occurred on Friday to advance their own agenda. To suggest that a bike lane would have prevented this from happening is simply absurd.”

Both Mr. Weiner and Mr. Ulrich plan to keep using social media. In Mr. Weiner’s case, admittedly, “not in the same way.”

As for Mr. Ulrich, it’s a work in progress.

“If the voters of the Ninth District want to make sure the seat is held by a politician who sends inappropriate tweets to young, female constituents, Eric Ulrich is worth a look,” said Aaron Pasternak, a transit advocate and bike lane booster.

Mr. Ulrich said he had heard about polling already being conducted in the district, and that he had heard his name was among those being mentioned. (A spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee said the organization was not polling in the district. Mr. Turner said he was also considering whether to run against Mr. Weiner.)
For now, the councilman said he was focused on fighting the ongoing budget battle in the City Council.

“I rebuffed a lot of the talk because I don’t want to put a target on my back,” he told The Observer on Monday.

A call to his cell phone Tuesday morning went straight to voice mail. Minutes later, he sent a text message.

“If the seat opens up, I might consider running,” he wrote. “Right now, the people need someone who can restore their trust and faith in government.”

apaybarah@observer.com

He has no choice. He should resign, now.

Until a few weeks ago, Mr. Weiner had a reputation as something of a policy nerd, the sort of politician who spends his spare time reading G.A.O. reports or the findings of subcommittee investigations. In fact, as we now know, when the congressman wasn’t giving self-righteous speeches on the House floor, he was chatting up women on Twitter and Facebook and circulating lewd pictures of himself.

When he was caught, he lied. Repeatedly. He tried to play the role of victim, insisting that some hacker was to blame. We now know why he couldn’t get his stories straight: he was making them up as he went along.

His credibility is shot. His reputation is in tatters. He is a national joke. His constituents deserve better. For their sake, he needs to walk away and never come back.

During his tearful and far-too-belated confessional, Mr. Weiner said he would not resign because he had not violated his oath of office, which requires him to uphold the United States Constitution. That is pure sophistry, and he is smart enough to know it. His shirtless colleague from upstate New York, Christopher Lee, broke no laws when he tried to hook up with women via Craigslist—the congressman, like Mr. Weiner, is married. When the scandal broke, Mr. Lee quit within hours, despite having been true to the letter of the nation’s founding document.

Mr. Weiner knows that voters, in their innocence, expect more from their elected officials than mere adherence to the letter of the law. They demand a certain amount of decorum and a degree of civic and moral leadership. In other words, they don’t expect their elected officials to carry on like Charlie Sheen or Lindsay Lohan.

Of course, these expectations are regularly proved to be unrealistic. Weinergate broke even as former senator John Edwards was indicted on corruption charges stemming from an extramarital affair conducted while his wife was dying and while he was running for president—there is chutzpah, and then there is John Edwards. And Mr. Edwards is only the latest prominent male politician to wind up on the wrong side of the law because of his libido.

Bill Clinton once argued that even a president is entitled to a private life. Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and many other presidents surely would have agreed. But as long as political figures portray themselves as exemplars of family life, as long as they use their spouses and children as campaign props, as long as they insist that they stand for values and not just opinions, they are obliged to conduct their private lives accordingly. When they don’t, they forfeit their right to a private life.

Mr. Weiner may not have broken any laws. But he did break his trust with the people of Brooklyn. He is not worthy of their support. He must resign.

So, Monday was fun. Not only did we learn that embattled amateur underwear model and unwavering mayoral aspirant Anthony Weiner really did tweet that infamous crotch shot to Gennette Cordova, in addition to numerous other indiscretions conducted over social media (we couldn't resist imagining how a certain member of--well, Mr. Weiner’s person--may have felt about the whole affair), but we also learned that Andrew Breitbart has no qualms about creating new photo ops for himself.

In a bizarre turn, the conservative blogger stepped out of the press gallery and up to the podium, where he proceeded to speak for 13 minutes, announcing at the outset, “I’m here for some vindication.” (While he was undoubtedly referring to the yfrog-friendly Mr. Weiner’s public denials of crotch shot distribution, we can¹t help but wonder if the man who once self-identified as “Matt Drudge’s bitch” was also eager to atone for other things--like calling Michelle Obama fat.) Mr. Breitbart went on to announce that he possessed an “X-rated” image of Mr. Weiner, presumably not for personal use.

But despite Mr. Breitbart’s best efforts, Ms. Weiner’s most helpful (if belated) counsel may have come from the actress Reese Witherspoon, who, while accepting a “Generations Award” at the MTV Movie Awards on Sunday night, told the audience--which included recent smartphone self-portraitist Blake Lively--that, when she came up in show business, “if you took naked pictures of yourself ... you hide your face, people! Hide your face!”

Escaping pictorial evidence of his crimes‹but not the wrath of his victims‹this week was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who entered a not guilty plea at his arraignment Monday morning after weeks of hiding his face in $14 million Tribeca townhouse. As the former I.M.F. chief entered the courthouse, a row of chambermaids chanted, “Shame on you!” After the hearing, D.S.K. was placed under house arrest (which, if we've learned anything from Martha Stewart and Gossip Girl, means lots of scone-baking and ambivalent Gilt Groupe shopping).

Another photo finish--albeit somewhat less risqué--may be the 2012 presidential race, according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll numbers, released Tuesday. If Mitt Romney is the G.O.P. nominee, the poll indicates that he will defeat President Obama by a 3% margin, while if Romney and his Aquafresh campaign logo fail to woo the Republican base, the incumbent has an edge over possible opponents Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, and Jon Huntsman. (And former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who announced his candidacy Monday despite being voted out of office by his constituents in 2006, entered the race too late to be considered, but we're betting his odds of winning the nomination are about as good as those that the unsavory definition of “santorum” coined by his detractors will fall from the top spot on Google.)

And how ‘bout those Yankees? New York's dominant baseball franchise began a series with the Boston Red Sox Tuesday night, the outcome of which will determine who's number one in the A.L. East. We haven't been this excited since--well, since every other year this happens.

At least there are a few goings-on to distract us from sext scandals, sports and premature political projections. It’s Internet Week, for starters--like Secretary’s Day, but for your Tumblr!--a city-wide event that’s attracted such illustrious keynote speakers as Chuck Schumer and Nicholas Kristof (no word on whether notorious web maven and future former Times editor Bill Keller was offered a spot). In celebration--or by coincidence--The Observer relaunched its website early this morning, just as the copy of the paper you’re holding was dropped onto your doorstep with a few modifications of its own. We’re sleeker! We’re wordier! We’re ever so slightly more fanciful!

But we’re not trying to steal anybody’s spotlight. And we’re not looking for vindication. We’re just not afraid to show our (ever so slightly improved) face.

Illo: Zina Saunders

If you really want to hear about it, the first things you’ll probably want to know are whether gray is my favorite color, whether I’m more comfortable in briefs or boxers, and if I was the one who tweeted that crude portrait from coast to coast. Well, no, I prefer maroon, in loose-fitting boxers, and of course not. I don’t have a Twitter account, and I’m not on Facebook. I have no interest in being posted, tweeted or “liked.” (Have I even been “liked”?) My friends at the gym are all jealous. A lot of them yearn for this kind of exposure. But just because I’m attached to a public figure doesn’t mean I want to be out there like the guy on the cover of Sticky Fingers. Like my favorite authors, I hate having my picture taken.

A yfrog comes across the sky, and I’ve been screaming ever since. I haven’t been in this much pain since the day of our bris. You try to live your life with a certain dignity. You spend a lot of your days holding it all in, sacrificing your own comfort out of a sense of duty on the campaign trail or in some committee hearing. In private, when the lights are out, you try to stand tall when called to serve.

I can’t believe we missed Israel Day because of all this!

I’d just as soon we did resign. I hate D.C. You sweat too much. You forge marriages of convenience. You rally around the consensus, one consensus or another. Call it the consensus of the heather-gray cotton boxer-brief—the bipartisan compromise of the undergarment world. Nobody’s honest here. In fact, the day-to-day fakery is so rampant that otherwise upstanding individuals retreat to the Internet to say disgusting things to strangers half a continent away, dream up ill-fated mayoral campaigns and take pictures of parts of themselves that never agreed to be photographed in the first place.

I’ll be happy when we’re back in Queens. I’ll be happy when my privacy’s restored in the private sector. Maybe then we can focus on what really matters in life: dignity, by which I mean having a social life healthy and genuine enough that those close to you are not tempted to resort to transcontinental electronic communication for gratification; seclusion, by which I mean nobody cares about you or what color your underwear is; and comfort, by which I mean constant proximity to a clean lavatory and some maroon silk boxer shorts.

editorial@observer.com

Was he or wasn't he? The evidence:

1) How the photo was tweeted.

Rep. Weiner updates Twitter from a number of sources, including Twitter.com, the Twitter for Blackberry app and Tweetdeck, which all use the photo uploading service yfrog.com. The crotch photo was uploaded to Rep. Weiner's yfrog account, the contents of which he's now erased.

We don't have enough evidence to say what service--Twitter.com, Twitter for Blackberry or Tweetdeck, was used to send the tweet in question, but the fact that it was uploaded to yfrog is consistent with those apps as well as the representative's past photo-appended tweets.

However, Yfrog "authenticates" with Twitter, so it doesn't require a separate login. If a hacker had access to Rep Weiner's Twitter account, he or she would be able to upload to yfrog automatically.

2) The photo "file."

The alleged raw photo now circulating the internet is stamped as being taken with a Blackberry. A hacker would likely use a computer when breaking into an account, but could have taken the photo beforehand in order to lend veracity to the story.

3) The back-and-forth on Twitter.

Some have suggested that the fact that the tweet was only noticed by one of Rep. Weiner's followers is suspicious and suggests it was never tweeted, and that screen captures of the tweet were doctored. But Twitter only shows you conversations between users you're following, so only users following both parties would have seen the tweet.

One user, @patriotusa76, a Weiner-troll, had tweeted with the recipient before in the course of chastising the representative for following a lot of attractive girls on Twitter. The fact that they had a previous interaction suggests he might have been one of the few people following both parties--who else would be following a random girl in Seattle?--to whom Twitter would show the tweet. He also clearly keeps a close eye on the representative's account, having tweeted at it 287 times. He retweeted the crotch at 11:34 p.m.

4) Rep. Weiner's preceding and succeeding tweets.

The reference to Seattle in a previous tweet, as noticed by Mediaite, suggests a passive shout-out to the girl Rep. Weiner supposedly crotch-tweeted at.

The reference to having his Facebook hacked--which there is no evidence of now--is just confusing. But if Rep. Weiner used the same password for Twitter and Facebook, a hacker might have gained access to both at the same time.

5) It's easy to accidentally publish a private message on Twitter.

Users can add "d" and the username of the recipient in front of the message in order to send it to only that person. It's also very easy to forget to add the "d"--this happens pretty often on Twitter and is referred to as a "DM (direct message) fail."

6) It's also easy to break into a Twitter account--if the user has a simple password.

Back in 2009, a hacker gained access to several accounts, including Barack Obama's, after running a program that tested every word in the dictionary until it found a Twitter support employee who had used the word "happiness" as her password.

7) Conclusion.

The hacker explanation requires many more assumptions--that someone out to get Rep. Weiner either was savvy enough to run a program that could guess his password or hired someone to do this; that the hacker was thoughtful enough to circulate a photo that had been taken with a Blackberry; that Rep. Weiner was able to regain access to his account before the hacker could change his password; and so on.--than the failed-private message explanation. Add Rep. Weiner's dodginess with the press, and the case of the crotch controversy seems easy to dismiss as an instance of user error.