Trying to put last weekend’s ambiguous online miniscandal behind him, Rep. Anthony Weiner told reporters outside his office Tuesday that he’s “not going to talk about this anymore.” 
 
 But Weiner, a veteran and champion of New York City’s media scrum, may be the single worst-placed congressman to hunker down and wait for a flap to fade. 
 
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 The Queens congressman is a combative MSNBC star with a corresponding conservative target on his back. He is also viewed as the front-runner in what is already shaping up as an intensely competitive Democratic primary for the 2013 election to replace Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He’s a media favorite, a source par excellence and a magnet for cable news cameras — on full display in two interviews broadcast by CNN on Tuesday. 
 
 “It ain’t done. We don’t know what the facts are,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran New York Democratic consultant. “There are too many reporters asking too many questions to avoid any of this.” 
 
 After a long weekend’s fuss over a photograph of a man’s crotch, sent over his Twitter account, Weiner appears to have decided not to pursue an investigation that would conclusively settle how the image made its way online. He also refused repeatedly to answer direct questions about whether he’d taken or sent the photograph. 
 
 On Wednesday, Weiner said he “can’t say with certitude” that the photo sent using his Twitter account isn’t of him. “I didn’t send that picture out,” Weiner said in a Wednesday afternoon interview with NBC News. 
 
 Technical data could settle the question of whether he sent it. The photograph was uploaded to the site yfrog.com, which is integrated with Twitter, and either Twitter, yfrog, or both almost definitely have logs indicating the unique digital address of the computer or device that sent the image. (Twitter declined to comment on a specific customer; Imageshack, which owns yfrog, didn’t respond to a request for comment.) But Weiner told reporters, in a pair of impromptu and increasingly testy interviews outside his office on Capitol Hill, that he didn’t think asking the companies for that information or turning to law enforcement would end the story. 
 
 “I’m not convinced that there’s any value of anymore of me talking about it,” he said. 
 
 Weiner’s flat refusal to engage may or may not serve him well in Washington’s totally partisan environment, in which Democrats will defend him, and Republicans attack him, as usual. Back in New York, meanwhile, allies of his rivals - former comptroller William Thompson, Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Democrats all - are licking their chops. 
 
 “This is New York - he’s in deep doo-doo when it comes to future aspirations,” said a pleased adviser to one of his rivals. “You’ve got every enemy of his, and interested political reporters, all digging, because there’s something too weird about this.” 
 
 Stuart Applebaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and a Weiner ally, said Weiner was right to play the matter as a “distraction” and to suggest that he was targeted for the sort of outspoken, combative liberalism that is a selling point in New York. ||||| weinergate Anthony Weiner Is Not Doing Himself Any Favors 
 
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 We won't pretend to know the truth behind Weinergate  whether Weiner was the victim of a hacker or prankster or conservative conspiracy, or whether he was personally responsible for sending a college girl a photo of a man's bulge over Twitter. But what's clear is that Weiner is only inviting more suspicion on himself by the way he's handling the attention. During an encounter with reporters earlier today, Weiner refused to answer any questions about the incident, including whether that was his own package in the photo, why he contacted a lawyer instead of law enforcement, and why he was following the college student on Twitter in the first place. Instead, he pointed reporters to his previous statements (which don't actually address those questions) and expressed his desire to move on to more important business. 
 
 If Weiner is truly innocent of Internet hanky-panky, such questions would indeed be irritating and tiresome. And on conservative blogs like the Daily Caller, where the angle of Weiner's penis at rest is being closely scrutinized, the treatment of the controversy is becoming absurd, and frankly, gross. But dodging easily answerable questions is definitely not the way to make it all go away. For example, something like, "No, that was not my penis. I know this because I didn't take a photo of my penis," would have been a perfectly fine response. The mainstream press, at least, would be satisfied. 
 
 Evading questions, however, is a strategy most often utilized by people with something to hide, and will only further pique the media's interest. Weiner either has something to hide, or he has no idea how the media operates.
– Dan Amira at New York's Daily Intel blog doesn't pretend to know whether Anthony Weiner is innocent or guilty in the Twitter photo flap. "But what's clear is that Weiner is only inviting more suspicion on himself by the way he's handling the attention," writes Amira. His combative go-rounds with reporters yesterday, in which he refused to answer the most basic questions about the controversy, did not help his case. "For example, something like, 'No, that was not my penis. I know this because I didn't take a photo of my penis,' would have been a perfectly fine response," writes Amira. That kind of response may not satisfy his gleeful right-wing enemies, but the mainstream press at least likely would go away. "Weiner either has something to hide, or he has no idea how the media operates." Click for more, including video of Weiner getting testy with reporters. Or click here to read the take of Ben Smith at Politico, who notes that because Weiner is a feisty cable star seen as a frontrunner in the 2013 Democratic primary for New York City mayor, he "may be the single worst-placed congressman to hunker down and wait for a flap to fade."