WASHINGTON - In the nano-second it takes to send a tweet, Rep. Anthony Weiner's political career has .
From the moment a lewd photograph of bulging briefs was sent to a 21-year-old college student from Weiner's Twitter account last Friday, the married congressman has been on the defensive.
He first tried to laugh it off, then did a blitz of media interviews in which he insisted he didn't send the photo - but couldn't be 100% sure that it wasn't his crotch shot.
In between nonanswers, he oddly tossed out double-entendres and Weiner jokes.
"He's a Shakespearean figure in some ways. All the traits that make him a star - intelligence, wit, humor, his belief he can quip his way out of anything - trip him up," said one former colleague
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Adult film actress Ginger Lee was Twitter follower of politician.Weiner, the once and likely future city mayoral candidate, had been a darling of the liberal left since the national health care debate, when he made a quixotic stand on the House floor for single-payer health care.
That move - independent and smart - was vintage Weiner, friends said, but also under-scored his love of the spotlight.
So his ditching of a planned speech before Wisconsin Democrats Friday - he told organizers he needed to spend time with his family, including his Washington insider wife, Huma Abedin - highlighted how messy the fallout was, pals said.
The online drama began May 27 when the photo appeared in his Twitter stream addressed to journalism student Gennette Cordova of Seattle, making it visible to all of his more than 40,000 Twitter followers.
The photo was a crotch shot of a man in form-fitting underwear that left little to the imagination. It was quickly deleted, and Weiner tweeted that he had been hacked.
"More Weiner Jokes for all my guests," he wrote.
By Sunday, Weiner's spokesman Dave Arnold was resolute: "This is intended to be a distraction and we're not going to let it become one. Anthony's accounts were obviously hacked. He doesn't know the person named by the hacker, and we will be consulting on waht steps to take next."
Cordova, when interviewed last Sunday by the Daily News, said she had never met Weiner and simply followed him on Twitter along with other famous people.
"All of this is so outlandish that I don't know whether to be pissed off or amused, quite frankly," she said.
By Monday, Weinter gate showed no signs of stopping. Weiner and his staff again called it a "distraction" and termed it a "prank" - but stopped short of denying that the congressman was in the photo.
Liberal websites targeted conservative blogger Dan Wolf, who uses the handle "patriotusa76," as the person who spotted the photo among Weiner's tweets and sent it to biggovernment.com, which broke the story.
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