OK, I admit it: when I heard this morning that Rep. Weiner had supposedly sent a coed a picture of his (encased) genitalia via Twitter, I assumed that somebody was just having his or her little joke by hacking into the man’s account and indicating that Weiner is, as I put it, one of the bigger d*cks in Congress.  But that was before Ace of Spades demolished this argument utterly (H/T: Neil Stevens) (remember, folks [and bad Moe!]: identity theft is a crime), so now I am taking this seriously as a possible scandal, and I found something interesting going on.  Somebody’s scrubbing the recipient’s Internet presence, even as we speak.

The coed’s name (one Gennette Cordova) was (obviously) easily accessible, thanks to the wonders of screenshots (such as the ones done by Doug Ross, via The Other McCain), so it was a fairly trivial exercise to do a search for her name, prior to May 2011.  Turns out she’s a writer for her local college: examples here and here and here.  Except that Cordova’s name is no longer on those articles: compare this to this, and this to this… and compare this to this, which has an extra layer of scrubbing going on.  That last one is most interesting, because it’s the one that Lee Stranahan over at Patterico noted was an article apparently written by Cordova that talked about how sites like Twitter and Facebook would allow people opportunities to meet their ‘celebrities.’

Whether or not those sites also allowed one specific person an opportunity to meet one particular, specifically-directed set of celebrity genitals at one remove is still up in the air: but I am very much wondering why it was suddenly necessary to remove Ms. Cordova’s name from all of her article bylines.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

By the way: Weiner has apparently not actually done anything about his account being hacked, past making jokes about somebody committing identity-theft on a sitting Congressman’s online presence.  Odd, huh?