The Village Voice's roundup of right-wing Weinergate conspiracy theories kinda shows the eww-grossness of the right's obsession with this story.
A word of warning before you click: The language is R-rated (complete with gross headline) and some of the photos are racy. But even if you don’t click, before you get too comfortable, it’s worth noting that, according to The Daily, TweetCongress’ records have Anthony Weiner’s uh … weiner … coming from TweetDeck, not yFrog. Which may blow a hole in an important theory about how his account was hacked. The Village Voice has an article on that, too. Actual evidence or gross right-wing bloggers? Pick your poison.
(via shortformblog)
Thank God!
According to Summers, we’re entering the Golden Age of the Sex Scandal. His evidence:
The evidence in the new generation of sex scandals has been compiled by the protagonists themselves, in the form of text messages, voice mails, IMs, e-mails, and cell-phone pictures that one party, usually the less powerful one, has squirreled away. Digital communications are tough to avoid or erase, and they’re easy to archive as text, audio, or video. Text messages in particular are “the new lipstick on the collar,” says The New York Times, in a piece describing how SMS evidence has driven the Tiger Woods case and everyday divorces alike.Now, when a former mayor gets into trouble for a relationship with a campaign aide, we get to hear the actual voice mails he left the woman. When a congressman crosses the line with his young pages, we get the actual transcripts [PDF] of their instant-message conversations. When a married governor decides that an Argentine woman is his soulmate and pretends to be on the Appalachian Trail while he visits her, we get their actual heartfelt e-mails. I don’t know about you, but as a scholar of the tawdry, I find the prospect of working with primary documents exhilarating.
