Anthony Weiner 'Can't Say With Certitude' If a Picture of His Dick Started Weinergate

With evasive answers and all-around awkwardness, Anthony Weiner is making sure #Weinergate doesn't go away any time soon, as we guessed it might yesterday before a head-smackingly bad press conference made the guy look guilty as hell. This afternoon, Weiner told Luke Russert of NBC News that he "didn't send that picture out," but when pushed to clarify -- "That's not a picture of you?" Russert followed up -- made things way worse. "You know, I can't say with certitude," Weiner said. That means it's his penis, doesn't it?

"My system was hacked, pictures can be manipulated, dropped in and inserted," Weiner said. "One reason I asked a firm to look at what the heck happened here...is to see maybe something was manipulated, maybe something was dropped in."

This, of course, makes no technical sense; plus, a human knows what their own body looks like and tends to remember pictures they've taken of it, especially if they're lewd in nature and were sitting saved on a BlackBerry.

"We don't know for sure what happened here," he added. (That's for sure.) Then he stammered some more: "I think it's fair and reasonable to ask some of the questions. It was a prank, still, I think it's fair to ask the question. I think we have to be careful not to take this out of context. This is not a national security matter. This is not an instance -- we're not making a federal case out of this, and I don't think anyone else should."

Gasoline, meet fire.

[jcoscarelli@villagevoice.com / @joecoscarelli]