I had not followed the notorious case of the notorious @comfortablysmug who apparently tweeted all sorts of false Sandy information until I saw a large chunk of Memeorandum devoted to the subject.The villain was outed by a writer at Buzzfeed, Jack Stuef, The Man Behind @ComfortablySmug, Hurricane Sandy’s Worst Twitter Villain:
During the storm last night, user @comfortablysmug was the source of a load of frightening but false information about conditions in New York City that spread wildly on Twitter and onto news broadcasts before Con Ed, the MTA, and Wall Street sources had to take time out of the crisis situation to refute them.
What leads a person to do such a thing, which his critics have likened to shouting “fire” in a crowded movie theater? It’s unclear. But perhaps it has something to do with the nature of anonymity. If there are no consequences for posting false “BREAKING” news, there’s an incentive to do it to accumulate a large audience.What @comfortablysmug didn’t count on, apparently, was losing that anonymity. Based on photos he censored and posted to the account but I found unedited elsewhere, @comfortablysmug is Shashank Tripathi, a hedge fund analyst and the campaign manager of Christopher R. Wight, this year’s Republican candidate for the U.S. House from New York’s 12th Congressional District.
Busted! Tripathi has resigned from the campaign and apologized.
But wait, where had I heard the name Jack Stuef before? Oh yes, back into the archives from April 2011, Wonkette Goes After Trig Palin Again, Again:
On July 28, 2009, I posted about the obsession at Wonkette, a widely read liberal website, with attacking Trig Palin, Wonkette Goes After Trig Palin Again. The author of the Wonkette article which was the focus of the 2009 post was Ken Layne, the co-owner of Wonkette after Gawker Media let Wonkette loose.Now Wonkette is at it again, in an even more crude manner, this time authored by 2010 Georgetown grad Jack Stuef, Greatest Living American: A Children’s Treasury of Trig Crap On His Birthday. [note, original post pulled, available here]Replete with PhotoShops of Trig next to a pulsating pole dancer (image right), and links to videos in which various Democrats mock Trig in profanity-laced tirades, Stuef has a good laugh with text such as this:
Today is the day we come together to celebrate the snowbilly grifter’s magical journey from Texas to Alaska to deliver to the America the great gentleman scholar Trig Palin. Is Palin his true mother? Or was Bristol? (And why is it that nobody questions who the father is? Because, either way, Todd definitely did it.) It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we are privileged to live in a time when we can witness the greatest prop in world political history…What’s he dreaming about? Nothing. He’s retarded.
Stueff was forced to resign by the firestorm resulting from his post, but I saw a bright future for him, Infamous Wonkette Writer Resigns:
My prediction: Stuef has a solid career ahead of him in the entertainment industry. In about a year Stuef will become a writer for Saturday Night Live, just in time to write skits mocking the Republican nominee for President.
Pretty close prediction. Saturday Night Live/Buzzfeed.
Only in America on the internet.
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