Mike Webb, a congressional candidate from Virgina, may be looking at the end of his campaign after he posted a status to his campaign's Facebook page where he was attempting to burn a political rival by comparing him to an experience he had with a shady HR rep.
In the photo, he posted a screenshot of the location where his shady story happened. However, what that screenshot also captured was two browser tabs with videos called "LAYLA RIVERA TIGHT BOOTY" and "IVONE SEXY AMATEUR."
Webb, the congressional candidate from Virginia, inadvertently revealed he was looking at porn while trying to besmirch his opposition. He may not have noticed it, but keen observers on Facebook certainly did, and it wasn't long before the picture went viral.
Regardless of some conception of it being unbecoming for someone seeking a political office to be checking out porn, people looking at porn is quite commonplace. In fact, a study from 2013 showed that at the time, more people looked at porn everyday than used Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Twitter.
With that in mind, the reason this incident caught wind and became blown out of proportion was because of what Webb decided to do next. Instead of deleting the post, he doubled down and posted the same screenshot several hours later, explaining that his porn search was strictly for research.
"Curious by nature, I wanted to test the suggestion that somehow, lurking out in the pornographic world there is some evil operator waiting for the one in a gazillion chance that a candidate for federal office would go to that particular website and thereby be infected with a virus that would cause his or her FEC data file to crash the FECfile application each time that it was loaded on the day of the filing deadline, as well as impact other critical campaign systems," his strange explanation began.
"Well, the Geek Squad techs testified to me, after servicing thousands of computers at the Baileys Crossroads location that they had never seen any computer using their signature virus protection for the time period to acquire over 4800 viruses, 300 of which would require re-installation of the operating system," he continued. "We are currently awaiting their attempt at recovery of files on that machine accidentally deleted when they failed to backup files before re-installation, a scenario about which Matthew Wavro speculated openly to me before we were informed by the Geek Squad that that had indeed occurred...."
What could have been a story about a politician's simple mistake has turned into one about a poorly attempted cover-up. Most people aren't going to care about a politician looking up porn, but they are going to care if you lie about it and think they're dumb enough to believe your excuse.
His post may have been prefaced with the allegation that his political career isn't done, but it certainly will be if his credibility is shot and no one takes him seriously.
