Last week I entered the fray within the Rep. Weiner saga.
You see, I had strong suspicions about these two supposedly underage girls he was having twitter communications with.
I wrote a diary with what I believed to be their real identities. As it turns out, neither set of identities were real. The girls were invented by Breitbart and co.
At Mediaite.com a guy named "tommy christopher" wrote an article about how Markos refused to redact the identities of these girls, and it didn't take long for others to start parroting the meme that Markos was endangering the welfare of a couple of minors.
I wrote a call-out diary accusing Messrs. Christopher and Breitbart of lying about the ages of the girls. Little did I know they were lying about the existence of the girls completely. The DailyKos community persuaded me to do a little journalism, you know, calling sources and stuff. So I did.
I spoke to Tommy Christopher.
I spoke to Tommy Christopher, and he assured me these girls were real, and really 16 years old. He claimed he spoke to the "parents." And he also claimed to have seen lots of evidence that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the girls were minors.
I was a bit reluctant to redact my diary, but in the interest of erring on the side of caution, I pulled it, and replaced it with a Postscript.
But something didn't sit right with me. From the Postscript diary...
And today I spoke with Tommy Christopher and believed the things he told me. There are liars involved here, liars of unimaginable audacity, and yet there I am taking the word of a stranger who assures me what he's saying is true. Someone who is putting his own reputation on the line to defend a man who publishes known lies. So I'm left with the bitter realization that I've waded into waters too deep for me. We would all like to think that someone who might otherwise be lying would break down and tell us the real truth. But the fact is, when someone's in for a penny, they're in for a pound. The same paradox that applies to asking my Veronica if she's the notorious twitter user also applies to believing the word of Tommy Christopher. Sigh. I feel like I'm the one who's being played now.
My instincts were right. Destroying lives is not a game to these people, they play for keeps. You can not believe them when they swear they are telling you the truth.
Fri Jun 17, 2011 at 9:17 PM PT: I ought to just say, in a CYA kind of way, that there's no indication that Mr. Christopher knew he was lying to me. Perhaps he was the victim of the same ruse...