A Better Conspiracy Theory

As I mentioned, early on, 57 percent of French people thought that DSK was a victim of a plot. I did not find that possibility credible. It was a clear case of our elite believing to be untouchable and above laws and rules that are applicable to the rest of us.

As I also added, our Galtian overlords have been given every reason to believe that: IOKIYAR. And DSK would have been OK if he had the right identity.

In the case of Anthony Weiner, the New York Congressman who has just admitted of twittering a photo of his erection to a young woman, there is a better conspiracy theory. Some lonely voices in the Left blogosphere have been trying to highlight the fact that Weiner uncovered recently that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas made $700,000 which remained undisclosed for 13 years with all the conflict of interest implications such a situation entails.



Apparently, Weiner wrote a letter to Thomas asking him to address this issue (and recuse himself from appropriate cases) and began a "Conflicted Thomas" campaign on Twitter, forcing Thomas to agree to a correction of his financial disclosure forms. This campaign earned Weiner a bunch of new followers. It is claimed that some of these new people were working for Andrew Breitbart, the tea party activist, infamous for manufacturing fake scandals against community organizations, journalists and people who are not conservatives. And they were there to catch Weiner doing something controversial. The argument is that, the so called "junk shot" and similar pictures of Weiner's were known for some time but the whole thing was leaked to the media on the same day Thomas corrections were being released.

But notice now what you may not have noticed before. How allegations that Anthony Weiner sexually harassed a young African American woman just appeared out of the blue at the very moment when Weiner’s campaign to discredit Clarence Thomas was peaking. Think some more about what you’ve learned that you may not know, or have forgotten, about the history of the players in this drama and their nexus with the story of the man whose name came to be synonymous with sexual harassment in the American culture 20 years ago. Think about how distracted the media have been from the story of Clarence Thomas, in spite of the efforts of Anthony Weiner to keep a spotlight on Thomas.

Of course, Weiner, who has been insisting on pronouncing his name as "wiener" (even though it means vintner in German and pronounced winer), made things worse by changing his narrative daily for a week and by using countless penis innuendos.

(...)Weiner: "This is part of the problem with the way this has progressed and one of the reasons I was perhaps, you'll forgive me, a little stiff yesterday."

Or,

 "Am I allowed to say I wish?" Weiner joked.

Clinton got the nickname Clenis after the Lewinski scandal and Weiner is now know is Wenis.

The reason I believe that this could be a plot to prevent a discussion of Thomas revelations is that it is a well constructed Breitbart-style mini sex scandal and it is perfectly calibrated to get the media's attention. Breitbart and company probably let Weiner believe that he could get past this and after ten days of contradictory (and stupidly juvenile) denials they told him they had other stuff on him (like shirtless pictures) and he had to confess.

Now this will be debated for weeks -"look, shiny object"- and no one will remember the Thomas conflict of interest story.

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UPDATE: A friend of mine said that I am wrong in absolving Weiner in that incident by connecting it to the Thomas case, as he was clearly guilty of the behavior of which he was accused. Let me clarify that I did not suggest that Weiner was innocent and he did not send those pictures and the whole thing was a plot. He did what he did. Just like Bill Clinton did what he did.

The difference between these types of scandals and thousands of others that are never reported is this: Some right wing think tanks, conservative media organizations and slick operatives cooperate to catch specially designated politicians in the act (who help them by acting stupidly) and turn it into a marketable narrative that the mainstream media find irresistible. Read Greenwald on that.

Compare that with the case of Nevada Senator David Vitter, a Family Values conservative politician who was frequenting prostitutes to satisfy -presumably among other things- his alleged diaper fetish. He also had an aide (with women and gender issues portfolio) who "had allegedly threatened to kill a female friend and held her at knife-point during a 90-minute ordeal." Even though both of these acts constitute a crime and the diaper story is more titillating than a "junk shot," Vitter's story was not aggressively pursued and the Senator was easily reelected.
That is why, even though they are both titillating stories involving politicians, I consider only the first one a likely conspiracy.
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UPDATE 2: This is from today's New York Times

 Three months before Representative Anthony D. Weiner sent a photo from his Twitter account to a 21-year-old Washington State college student named Gennette Cordova, a small group of determined, self-described conservatives were warning young women on Twitter, including Ms. Cordova, to be wary of him.
Calling themselves the #bornfreecrew on Twitter, members of the group closely monitored those whom Mr. Weiner was following, taking it upon themselves to contact young women they believed to be “schoolgirls,” and urging them publicly to stay away from him, according to an analysis of posts on Twitter’s public stream.
By early May, members of the group were also speculating that Mr. Weiner would be caught in a sex scandal. The leader, a man who identified himself on Twitter as Dan Wolfe and used the handle @PatriotUSA76, is the same Twitter user who discovered the photograph that Mr. Weiner took of himself and sent to Ms. Cordova. He shared it with his followers and the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who made it public the next day.
(...)
But even by the standards of modern politics, Dan Wolfe and other members of the #bornfreecrew watched Mr. Weiner’s account with particular ferocity, and a sharp focus on his interactions with women. In several instances the congressman dropped his online contact with women after they were identified by the crew, suggesting that Mr. Weiner might have been aware of its actions.
There were at least two female high school students among the 191 people Mr. Weiner followed. There is no evidence that he engaged in private discussions with them, and he has said that to his knowledge he has not had any online sexual communications with under-age women.
Mr. Wolfe, whose account vanished from Twitter last Friday, has been one of the more mysterious characters in the congressman’s saga, refusing to reveal his real name even to the other members of the #bornfreecrew. He joined Twitter on Jan. 6 and began posting multiple messages criticizing both Mr. Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.