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It's been a while since I wrote about Weinergate, mostly because I found the whole thing just so painfully silly.

To recap the basics for those just tuning in: Anthony Weiner, Congressman from New York, sent pictures of his penis (technical term: pricktures) through Algore'z Internetz. He usually sent these pricktures to sycophantic young progressive women in college, who somehow managed to avoid learning that real men in real life are perfectly willing to show them the real thing, free of charge, in person.

Weiner's flashing habit was exposed by his political opposition. An anonymous Twitter account known as "Dan Wolfe" retweeted the picture to members of the media. Before you knew it, the story was on Andrew Brietbart's websites and then the whole world was looking at the Weiner.

And John Stewart seemed a bit envious as he discussed his friend's abs on The Daily Show.

After a very lame and embarrassing attempt to blame it all on "hackerz," Weiner resigned at a press conference full of fireworks. Nobody really believed the "hackerz" storyline, except the extremely gullible like Joan Walsh, and those cursed with severe autism. Everyone else on the liberal-progressive side of the world with half a brain figured Weiner was a serial prickture pervert, but played along with the "hackerz" story because they loved them some Weiner in Congress, fighting the good fight for collectivism.

Hell, even Bill O'Reilly didn't really buy the whole "he wuz hacked" storyline, and he views the Internetz as some kind of passing fad, like the Charleston, only with more alluring swimwear.

I had a brief Zelig moment in the story when I interviewed the anonymous person known as "Dan Wolfe" via Yahoo Instant Messenger. It was a painfully long chat session that was the equivalent of mental saltpeter.

Since then all manner of writers, journalists, and anonymous creeps online have tossed theory after theory on how the whole thing went down. Was "Dan Wolfe" a political operative? Was "Dan Wolfe" Andrew Brietbart? Was "Dan Wolfe" an Ancient Alien?

It would all be so hilariously funny if it weren't for a couple of new developments in the story - namely, the "swatting" of Mike Stack.

Mike Stack was one of Dan Wolfe's online twitter "friends." Over the months that Wolfe was on Twitter actively, he gathered up people like Mike to help him take down the Weiner. Wolfe watched Anthony Weiner like a hawk and when Weiner gave him - ahem - the sword, Wolfe used Twitter friends like Mike to help plunge it in deep.

Unfortunately, Mike Stack didn't hide his identity as well as "Dan Wolfe," and so online venues like The Smoking Gun threw his address and arrest records out there for the world to see, partly in an effort, at the time, to bolster Weiner's attempt to say that he was "hacked." Mike had a checkered past as a moderator for an online porn forum, so he was easy fodder in this regards.

I've always wondered, what do you do as a moderator on a porn forum? Ban people for posting pictures of puppy dogs and flowers instead of naked women?

Anyway.

After Weiner retired flaccidly from the field, someone out there decided to "swat" Mike Stack. What is that, you ask? Well, imagine you're sitting at home, autistically fiddling around on your computer trying to solve the mysteries of Easter Island through clues left by Ancient Aliens on Wikipedia, when all of a sudden fifty cop cars drive up on your lawn, and before you know it, you're being arrested for murdering your wife. Even though you're not married.

Here's the 911 call:

So now the game is afoot. Mike is trying to figure out who did the swatting and set up a website called The Crying Wolfe in an effort to track it all down.

And all manner of arm-chair sleuths on both the collectivist and the individualist sides of planet Earth are desperately trying to figure it out. The cast of characters in this mystery is a bit overwhelming. The entire conservative and communist-Kos blogosphere is a suspect. Hackers, Anonymous, journalists, twitter accounts - they all swirl left and right like crazy.

For instance, on the collectivist-communist side of the aisle, there is one anonymous account named "OccupyRebellion" who claimed some of my time last night with his-her-its laser-like imitation of Hercule Poirot. It all started when I tweeted, "I still can't believe they won't let the weiner go. Pun intended."

Unless you're really into the whole mystery, the following exchange will mean nothing to you. Feel free to glaze over it.

There are so many amusing things within this bit of solipsism, but they're kind of inside jokes, and you kinda had to be there to get them.

Somehow, this anonymous creep has traced it all to the blogger Ace of Spades HQ, and has managed to discover that Ace is actually female. I mention this bit of amazing detective work by Occupy Rebellion to demonstrate that he-she-it is an absolute moron. Let's take a look at the non-gendered creature's blog, Brietbart Unmasked...

Why is tracking down Ace important to the Weiner story? Because somehow Ace is a suspect in "swatting" Mike?

OccupyRebellion, you are a stupid f'ing moron. I've met Ace several times at CPAC. There are pictures of Ace accepting a blogging award at CPAC all over Algore'z Internetz. You might have seen them if you weren't so busy coming up with a hair-brained theory that there's some kind of conspiracy to hide Ace's being a woman. A super-sleuth you are not. Unless Ace is some kind of transgendered mutant, Ace is a guy. With a LOT of hair. Michelle Kerr most likely registered the domain name for Ace because Ace is not a technical person, you jackass.

When I voiced these notions to OccupyRebellion, the response was:

Yes, dim-bulb, because your efforts in that regard are so ridiculously amateur that there's no reason to get into your crazy-weeds on the rest.

Now look, I don't have the answers to the burning two questions of Weinergate, namely, the identity of "Dan Wolfe" and the identity of Mike Stack's swatter. But I do have some hunches, and I'm going to give you some hints to my line of thinking.

First, I think this circle-jerk effort to hang the identity of "Dan Wolfe" on everyone from the Brietbart crew to Patterico to Stranahan to Ace etc. is just plain silly, because none of that makes any sense from a real-world perspective, unless you live in crazy town. Those guys were drawn into the story for the sake of blog hits and ratings. Suspecting them of being Dan Wolfe is just as silly as blaming Joan Walsh for Mike Stack's swatting simply because she's a progressive loon, and was made to look like an ass by the whole Weinergate story.

Then again, there's no proof that Joan Walsh is actually a woman. Hmmmm.

Anyway, "Dan Wolfe" spent a lot of time online watching Anthony Weiner's Twitter account like a hawk. From the first tweet to the last, it was Weiner Weiner Weiner. Who has time for that? A blogger with a day job like Patterico? Please.

A jilted lover? Maybe. Possible. I've run across some freaky Fatal-Attraction types on teh Internetz. But they acted a bit differently than "Dan Wolfe." Mostly, they were more hysterical.

A conservative offended by Anthony Weiner's politics? Maybe. Maybe. But I know a lot of conservative activists on Twitter, and "Dan Wolfe" was way too professional for that. He hid is IP well, hid his identity with maddening efficiency. Usually a Twitter activist makes friends and personal details slip out. "Wolfe" never made those amateur mistakes.

The most realistic supposition, to my mind, is that "Dan Wolfe" was a social-media opposition research team for a political campaign.

If you've ever worked on a political campaign - and I've worked on lots and lots of them - then you know that opposition research is a time-honored tradition. There are people who specialize in such work, which has been made much easier by teh Internetz. Sometimes the work involves not just Googling your opposition, or checking out their FEC records, it involves checking out what they do on Twitter and Facebook, if your opposition happens to use social media.

And Weiner loved him some social media. Where else could he send out some proud pricktures? Where else could he find young sycophantic progressive women who haven't yet learned that if they have a hankering to peek at a penis, there are plenty available for viewing in real life?

Anyway, if I were inclined to be a super-sleuth on the identity of "Dan Wolfe" and wildly tossing out nets of suspicion, I would be looking to political campaigns or the freelancers who work for political campaigns as opposition researchers. Probably based in New York. Someone who had something to gain if Weiner's political career suddenly went limp.

Which reduces Patterico and the whole Brietbart crew to nothing more than earned media, roped into the Weiner story in the same way that a political campaign would rope in bloggers and journalists to get a story out, and sometimes manipulated to keep the story going (example: threats from "Alicia Pain," my interview with "Dan Wolfe," etc.) Sure, Andrew Brietbart jumped in and showboated the thing (that was his stock in trade), but he didn't find the picture. He didn't start the story.

"Dan Wolfe" did, by cyber-stalking the crap out of Weiner.

Anyway, I could go on for a thousand more words on connecting dots (Reid, Betty and Veronica, Tommy Christopher, etc.) and talking about how all the jigsaw puzzle pieces fit this scenario, but meh, that's pretty boring stuff. I also have my own ideas about who the opp-research team was, and yes, I do have some clues that no one else seems to have on the matter. Unfortunately, none of it is definitive, only circumstantial. Mentioning those clues here is pretty pointless, because if I'm wrong, I'd be an ass for casting aspersions. Suffice to say, I don't think any of the arm-chair Clouseaus in this little tempest in a tea pot are looking in the right direction at all.

Bottom line: my hunch is that "Dan Wolfe" was an opp-research effort, and the swatting of Mike Stack was performed by that opposition in a fit of frustration. It was an effort to try and figure out the identity of the opp-research team by stirring some shit.

If you've read this far, you've noticed that I said I had some clues no one else seems to have, or are talking about. Well, I'm going to give all you arm-chair Clouseaus a little something for your efforts in reading so far. Mind you, I'm not giving you any of my "clues" here, I'm simply giving you a direction.

Release the hounds.

:)

Update 1: Certain paranoids are wondering what my motivation is in putting up this post. It is simply this. If it is indeed the case that "Dan Wolfe" was an opp-research social-media team run by political pros, they should never be allowed to work in politics again. Granted, they got rid of Weiner, and yeah, that was cool. But to do it, they recruited a bunch of decent civilians on Twitter and left them to fend for themselves when the likes of the creepy KosKids started doxing them - and I refer not just to Mike Stack. A lot of decent people were terrorized. Single mothers. Retirees.

I'm sorry, but when you spark up the lightning, you take the strike. You don't slink off into the shadows.

And oh yeah - I didn't like being a pawn in that operation, if that's what it was.

Update 2:

This is a great movie.

Update 3: Heh. How tall was King Kong?

Update 4: There's one thing I want to walk back on. I may have been a bit Church-Lady in Update 1 when I said "they should never be allowed to work in politics again." This DW stuff happened, in Internet terms, a long time ago. Political teams using social media are, in a sense, pioneering uncharted waters; I can imagine how a team originally designed to do opp-research and a bit of social-media promotion of the Weiner's failings found themselves sucked, inexorably, step-by-step, into keeping a fake Twitter account like DW running to the point that it's giving interviews to people like me and VerumSerum. It's understandable and might even be forgiveable, if the whole thing were revealed and steps were taken to put a halt to the wild gibbering morons on the collectivist "team."

Heck, it might even be the sort of thing that one could spin into being a "feather" in someone's cap. In today's politics, being able to run that kind of thing - with all the crazy twists and turns that the opposition threw at the "team" - might even be considered a resume enhancer.

As long as the team steps up a bit and does the right thing before someone, somewhere, drops the dime on the opp.

Extra thought: Or before some innocent person gets killed in a "swat" operation by one of the gibbering morons.

Update 5: Kreepy Kos Kid "OccupyRebellion" ranted at me on Twitter. I blocked the autistic commie moron.

Update 6: I am willing to share any information I may have, including correspondence, with any reputable sane journalist or news agency -- and have been. But I'm sorry, not with you, Roy.

contact ladd @ filmladd dot com