This is an update to the previous post. Parts of it may not make sense unless you've read what came before. In short and in sum: I've been attacked by a creature named George Gooding, the new darling of the "get Weiner" brigade.
I've uncovered something very unnerving about this fellow. The truth emerged only after a sleepless night of sparring with Geroge in the comments. (You can read the play-by-play if you scroll down to the post below) We had hours of techno-battle, and then...samsara.
We'll get to that great revelation soon. First, let's get up to speed on the tech argument. (If this section confuses you, read the previous post first. Or just skim and get the gist.)
Turns out George didn't know -- and neither did I -- that Weiner really did use a PC-based app called TweetDeck on May 27. His record indicates that he never used it before that date. Weird.
Is that fact germane? No. George's whole argument hinges on the presupposition that Weiner used TweetDeck or some similar app during his entire Twittering career, and thus never established a Yfrog account -- which would mean that he never had a "secret" Yfrog address appended to his images.
Well, that presupposition is wrong. Weiner had sent images via his Blackberry on previous occasions. He had to have established a Yfrog account at some point, because you can't use Tweetdeck on a Blackberry. (George deceptively refused to tell people about that.) There is at least one tweet marked "from Yfrog."
As far as Milowent could determine (he is examining the available record), Weiner never did the Tweetdeck thing before the 27th. Again: Weird. But that fact hardly impacts what I said about the Yfrog exploit.
I opened a Twitter account as "Chalice153" and used Tweetdeck to send a picture to Dowson. (It's so cute to watch your fictional creations talk to each other!) Even though Chalice never opened a Yfrog page, an account was created for her. Could someone have used the exploit to send a pic to that account? Gooding says no. I think the answer is yes. We can't test the proposition now that Yfrog has changed its policies.
Isn't that conveeeeeenient?
When Weiner got started on Twitter, the only app for the Blackberry that sent pics is something called Twitterberry -- ye gods, what a puerile name! And that app appends the words "from Twitterberry" to the messages. We can't see those words anywhere in Weiner's twitterings.
Nope. George's theory is a no-go.
Weiner had a Yfrog account. And he never said otherwise on the Rachel Maddow show, despite George's lying claims to the contrary. Weiner actually claimed that he was kind of fuzzy about what Yfrog actually did -- as are a lot of other non-techie Twitter users, no doubt. (I give the full quote in the previous post. George has an aversion to accurate quotation.)
Let this sink in. George falsely claimed that Weiner had said something to Maddow which he did not actually say. And then George maintained this false claim even after I typed up the direct quote.
That is very strange behavior, to say the least. But it gets stranger.
Read the comments and you'll see: Turns out George made a slip up which revealed that he never even saw the Maddow interview in question! Thus, he never heard the words that he twisted and transformed into the heart of his argument.
That's the moment when I started to wonder: Who IS this guy?
So I had a better look at his site. Check it out. Notice something strange?
George is a ghost.
Well, at least his site is ghostly.
My now-notorious post called that site into existence. His "blog" contains not a single post predating it.
He gives no background. No history. No indication of being any sort of real human being. His site is a bare-bones affair.
Yet all of a sudden, he is in communication with all the superstars of the right (even though he claims to be non-partisan.) They are all twittering away with him. Look at his (brief) record.
Last night, I was inundated with a zillion taunting messages from righties. It was obviously a coordinated effort. (Many regular Cannonfire readers witnessed similar coordination when the Obots went on the rampage back in 2008. We know what this sort of thing feels like. Axelrod is an amateur compared to his right-wing counterparts.) The taunters all screeched about how the famous, fabulous George Gooding had kicked my ass.
Uh huh. Right. Question: How did zillions of righties even hear about a blog that is so new that Google still doesn't even list it? How did these people learn about that blog on its FIRST NIGHT OF EXISTENCE?
Now, when I say that George is a ghost, I refer to his current spectral existence as a blogger. His site has no existence preceding the Weiner affair.
In a previous life, however, George did have a presence in Norway. Here, Mr. NonPartisan denounces "Bush hate." (Most of the rest is in Norwegian.) His Norwegian site is here. Running the page through Google translate reveals that Mr. Nonpartisan is pretty damned partisan.
Let's dig further. Turns out George used to write under another name -- one that I had encountered before, although I could recall it only vaguely. Forgive the hazy memory, George, but 2006 was five years ago and I don't travel in rightist circles. (And I don't usually read Think Progress.)
Back in 2006, George wrote for the National Review and other ever-so-non-partisan venues. At the time, he used the mysterious byline Seixon.
Seixon focused on Plame-gate, always siding with rightists while pretending to be centrist. He was involved with a weird contretemps I did not follow involving Jason Leopold, Larisa Alexandrovna and Larry Johnson. Seixon/Gooding seems to think that Larisa was involved with a huge conspiracy, and that claim is ridiculous. (I have no stake in defending that woman, but she sure as hell ain't what Gooding imagines her to be.)
Basically, Gooding's National Review piece argued that "Plame-gate" was a con-job, a huge conspiracy against the Bush administration, concocted by a "tight knit group of intelligence professionals."
Around the same time, Gooding argued that Iraq really did have WMDs. Also see here. What does he offer? Lots of complex, highly abstruse argumentation. Lots of bullshit. All delivered to you in a flat, made-by-committee prose style free of authorial voice, sort of like Gerry Posner's.
Despite his continual defense of the W administration, "Seixon" claims to be a Democrat -- no, I'm not kidding. Obviously, that is a pose. He is a Republican operative who gets dragged out every so often.
The timing tells you all you need to know. My post had rattled some cages, so Georgie-poo established his blog. His first order of business was to spew some technoblather to try to undermine a point that a whole buncha of computer savvy people (even the guys on Little Green Footballs) had verified. And all of a sudden, literally overnight, everyone who is anyone on the right knows about this guy's out-of-nowhere insta-blog.
Do such things "just happen"? Come to your own conclusions.
The Republican point man leading the attack on Plame and Wilson created an entire damn website just to slam me. Wow!
Is George right about the Weiner controversy (and about yours truly)? Well, ask yourself: Do you think that Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson are evil conspirators against the saintly W? Do you think that Bush was right about Saddam's WMDs?
If you think that way, get a shrink.
Gooding pretends to be a computer expert, but most of what he has said is dazzling, meaningless blather. Yeah, it's true: I dislike the very idea of Twitter and refuse to use it. But many seasoned Twitterers and computer experts have verified the existence of the Yfrog exploit which this blog publicized. I ran my first post on this topic past a very computer-savvy friend, just to make sure there weren't any major mistakes. The security hole was real -- as Yfrog itself now admits.
The folks at Yfrog have quietly shut down the ability to post from random email accounts. They claim that there have been no security compromises, and they obviously don't want anyone thinking that the changes have any link to Wiener. But the timing tells the real story. If my post was wrong, why did they do such a thing now?
As for George: His is a familiar type. When the Wiener controversy is done, Gooding's new insta-site will go away. He'll ruminate in Oslo for awhile until a new task arises -- and then he'll start a new new site. We've seen this sort of thing before.
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