Weiner's tweet-hearts

Wednesday, 1 June 2011



It takes a certain type of woman to set his heart a-Twitter.
Rep. Anthony Weiner follows only a select 198 of his nearly 49,000 Twitter fans -- and a surprising number of them are total babes.
Yesterday, outside his DC office, the model-loving, married congressman testily refused to talk about the pretty women he's following.
He flashed a tight, uncomfortable smile and avoided eye contract as he tried to deflect point-blank questions from reporters about whether or not he had sent a crotch shot of himself in underwear to a 21-year-old co-ed in Seattle.
Was it from you or not," demanded CNN's Capitol Hill producer Ted Barrett. To which the squirming Weiner replied:
"If I were giving a speech to 45,000 people and someone in the back threw a pie or yelled out an insult, I would not spend the next two hours of my speech responding to that pie or that insult.
"I would return to the things that I want to talk about to the audience that I want to talk to. That is what I intend to do this week."
Then in another cringeworthy exchange, the Brooklyn-Queens Democrat unloaded a snarky insult instead of saying why he didn't pass on to Capitol Police his claim that his Twitter account had been hacked -- which would be a federal crime.
"I'm going to have to ask that we follow some rules here. One of them is going to be you ask questions and I'll do the answers. That seem reasonable? . . . You do the questions, I do the answers, and this jackass interrupts me?" a fuming Weiner said of Barrett.
But reporters persisted, asking Weiner if he followed the co-ed on Twitter and whether he had other "young women followers" -- with one barking: "Answer the question!"
Instead, the famously temperamental Weiner looked annoyed, rolled his shoulders and argued -- but never said whether or not he sent the picture.
"This is now Day Three," he intoned. "You have statements that my office has put out. And there are going to be people . . . this is the tactic. The guy in the back of the room who's throwing the pie or yelling out the insult wants that to be the conversation."
He took more tacks than a sailboat as he tried to not explain the Twitter tempest.
"Look, this was a prank that I've now been talking about for a couple of days," he said. "I'm not going to allow it to decide what I talk about for the next week or the next two weeks.
"And so, I'm not going to be giving anything more about that today. I think I've been pretty responsive."
Though visibly angry -- and often combative -- the congressman tried to squeeze in one lame joke, bragging that he "passed [Tea Party favorite Rep.] Michele Bachmann today in the number of Twitter followers. I will give you that fact."

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