Inside the Right's Rabid Hunt for Anthony Weiner 2.0

MINNEAPOLIS — After accidentally tweeting a photo of his junk the other night, Anthony Weiner scrambled. The Congressman deleted the message so fast that his bulge could not be re-tweeted, nor, apparently, recognized. But it was already too late. Twitter user @PatriotUSA76 — part of the clandestine #BornFreeCrew — had been monitoring Weiner online for months. He used a simple-enough trick to grab the shot ("If you don't refresh your browser you don't lose the Twitter page"), then passed it on to BigGovernment.com founder Andrew Breitbart. What followed was, well, you know.

Less than a month later, the Congressman and the prowling account are gone — its user, supposedly named Dan Wolfe, evaporated into the Internet, or maybe taking up another official to hound. Either way, he's a ghost again; he could be anyone. He could even have been one of the thousand-plus paying attendees here this past weekend — not quite hackers, but not exactly backwoods conservative yokels either. Which are exactly the kind of foot soldiers that small-government activists are looking for these days.

The Republican "leadership" was meeting in New Orleans, and the liberal Netroots Nation conference was confounding the liberal base downtown. Hell, big names from Pawlenty to Bachmann and Cain were stealing the bandwidth from both of those just down the hall. (Click here for the best quotes from the weekend.) But at the RightOnline conference — more popular and powerful than ever in its fourth year under the Americans for Prosperity Foundation — the real story was offstage. And forget the bloggers themselves — ever find yourself disgusted by the screamingly partisan commenters on news stories? RightOnline — and other breeding grounds like it, catalyzed by successes like Weinergate and leaders like Breitbart — are teaching those people how to never let anything evaporate into the Internet again. The Right, just in time for the 2012 election, is turning yokels into citizen journalists, ghosts into watchdogs.

Full report after the jump....

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/anthony-weiner-twitter-hunters-5949890?src=rss

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