A bizarre controversy is erupting in Pennsylvania politics, with the state’s Attorney General at the center, drowning in a pool of terrible memes. In a series of dumps over the past year, the state’s Attorney General, Kathleen Kane, has been releasing email after email sent and received by Pennsylvania state employees and officials. The main themes of the emails are: racism, homophobia, sexism, bigotry, misogyny, pornography and, of course, memes…. The content of the emails, of which some 10,000 have been released so far, is nothing short of jaw-dropping, according to The Washington Post: A small sampling: A photo of a pantsless woman on her knees performing oral sex on a man is captioned “Making your boss happy is your only job.” A picture of a white man fending off two African American men while carrying a bucket of fried chicken reads “BRAVERY At Its Finest.” The sender of the email that shows a group of men engaged in sex included this message to friends, “How friggin gay are you?”
A very wise friend once told me that you should never forward or send anything via email or social media that you wouldn’t want your mother to see. This is particularly true in a professional context, where you’d think mature adults would recognize the boundary between the realm of the appropriate and humorous and that of the inappropriate and offensive. Then again, we’re talking about politicians here, a milieu in which maturity, good judgment, and/or professionalism are optional under the best of circumstances.
This scandal, which is as entertaining as it is distressing, is also rather complicated. Ms. Kane is facing a criminal indictment for felony perjury, and she’s facing intense pressure to resign from a number of directions. Worse, her email dumps have not been without collateral damage: “several disturbing emails, including one that made light of domestic violence, were sent and received by her twin sister, state prosecutor Ellen Granahan Goffer.” That’s got to be awkward, eh?
Ms. Kane is proclaiming her innocence and insists that she’s the real victim, the target of an “old boys’ network” determined to destroy her. It appears there’s much more to this controversy, which would seem to lead a reasonable observer to wonder who, if anyone, is actually tending to the business of the people of Pennsylvania. What some wags are calling “Porngate” seems to be sucking all the air out of the room, leaving much of Pennsylvania’s state government heavily invested in damage control and career preservation.
So what’s the moral of this story? Well, to start, how ‘bout y’all stop forwarding memes? Seeing as how there seems to be a pronounced lack of professionalism and maturity in place, wouldn’t it make sense to limit email and social media to the business you’re are being paid by the people of Pennsylvania to attend do? Perhaps if y’all spent less time on da Interwebz and more on taking care of the people you represent…ah, but that would require a degree of maturity and professionalism that would be difficult to sustain, eh?
