Politician Accidentally Posts Screen Shots of Porn Searches, Follows Up With Hilariously Bad Explanation

Mike Webb, candidate for U.S. Congress in Virginia’s 8th district, made the kind of error normal people have nightmares about—he posted a screenshot to his Facebook page that included his porn searches. As Gawker reported, Webb posted an image detailing a long, vaguely paranoid story about how he had been called by a staffing agency for a job interview, but when he arrived at the office, a secretary said his contact was no longer employed at the firm.

But that’s not the good part. The good part was the screenshot:

Zoom in, and here’s what you see on those search tabs:

That’s right: “IVONE SEXY AMATEUR” and “LAYLA RIVERA TIGHT BOOTY.”

Webb left the image up for more than six hours, and in that time Gawker had time to confirm that yes, these searches lead directly to porno videos. In keeping with his weird, elusive prose style, Webb than posted what seemed like a response, of sorts, but which was bizarre and circuitous and basically nonsensical-and which now seems to have been taken down. Here’s a sample:

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. 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. 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….

But, now let me tell you the results of my empirical inquiry that introduced me to Layla and Ivone. Around Powerball lottery time, January 9, 2016, I calculated the odds that my friend Rev. Howard John Wesley and I working independently arrived at the same prayer plan, and I was able to determine that there was about a one in a billion chance that that could have occurred in the way that it did. (https://www.facebook.com/search/top/…). Well, as much as folks like Duffy Taylor want to hope that the Devil is waiting for Christian candidates on a particular pornographic website to infect his or her FEC data file is even more improbable than my Paul and Silas story, and I know that Duffy Taylor is not a man of faith belief; so, I don’t know how he empirically arrives at his conclusion. I couldn’t see the probability or possibility without a RAND computer.

But, that is the news that will never be printed, but no matter. We found a few more “silent majority” worms today, but we also picked up a few more of the faithful. So, not a bad day, at all.

Uh…what?

Later, he emailed Gawker a statement that tried to spin the event into something positive, but ended up even more confusing:

One commenter about a half hour ago told me that I needed to hire a new social media director, and others earlier were concluding that the candidate declared DOA in his press debut before Christmas in the local press—six months before a Republican challenger ever gets picked up—today is toast for sure. But, when I read that post about the social media director, we were up 42 likes on Facebook, and I don’t know how many on Twitter. Just now, I looked at Facebook, again, and we are up 75, far outpacing my rival who defeated me with establishment support in the nomination convention.

From a faith based perspective and as a preacher’s kid, I probably would not be comfortable with “adult” topics, but politically, within certain parameters, as a conservative with many libertarian ideas, it can and should be discussed. In this campaign and in the exploratory phases we touched on dating sites and the song” that entraps many in Nigerian scams and we have on many occasions discussed the taboo topic of forcible sexual abuse that in 2014 in Virginia found young white girls below the ages of 17 exponentially more likely the victims than any other than victims of this crime, and, in our own Falls Church, we have some brave parents continue to break the silence with their “We Support the Girls” campaign. So, from that perspective, I do not really see a problem with the viewing of some tabs on a screenshot, even if it does show the scrutiny to which some candidates for office are subjected. In December one viewer blew up images from my social media page to suggest that I was engaging in subliminal messaging.

Now, apparently Mike Webb had no real shot at winning the election anyway, so this wasn’t some kind of fatal blow to his campaign. Still, it’s pretty high on the humiliation meter, even by political standards, and Webb should probably think about curtailing the long diatribes that just make him look more guilty. Although this was plenty entertaining for the rest of us, including the occasionally brilliant commenters on his Facebook page—one of whom noted that while his chances at a landslide victory are over, he could have a “hand-slide” victory all by himself.