LONDON and JOHANNESBURG – Let’s face it: Ripping politicians is really easy and a hell of a lot of fun.
Whether the misstep is a relatively harmless verbal gaffe, an extramarital affair coming to light, or getting caught on video smoking crack with some not-so-choice constituents, everybody from late night talk show hosts to office workers standing around the water cooler to sarcastic pricks writing for adult industry news sites seems to relish kicking pols when they are down.
Often, the best moments from these sorts of political crises come not from the scandal itself, but the left-footed way the pols handle the public relations challenges that follow. Watergate, for example, might have wound up a relatively minor footnote in the history of the Nixon administration had Nixon and his compatriots not been both determined to sweep everything under the rug and so laughably inept in their attempts.
To be fair, the context of politicians’ misdeeds often hampers the pols’ ability to be honest and forthright in their explanations and rationalizations. Depending on the nature of their position and their constituency, if they want their career to outlast the press conference at which they issue an apology, simply telling the truth might not be the wisest choice.
A pair of international pol-porn scandals getting media attention this week illustrates the importance of geographic context in terms of how politicians manage potentially damaging revelations concerning their viewing habits.
In the UK, Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk [Labor party] popped up on the Scandal Radar when he favorited a tweet linked to a Twitter account described as “an 18+ Erotic account for posting sexy pictures of sexy women.”
While Danczuk’s response starts out sounding like he’s going to pull the Full Weiner Excuse — “This is genuinely true: It’s what you might call a technological accident” — Danczuk thereafter takes his explanation in an unexpected, maybe even refreshing, direction.
“Let’s be truthful about this,” Danczuk said. “If I am being asked have I ever used porn, then the answer is yes. I am a man of the world. I wouldn’t deny that sort of thing. I think we should not be too sanctimonious about this.”
Quite honestly, I knew absolutely nothing about this guy before reading a few articles about his errant social media use, and ordinarily I wouldn’t be inclined to buy the rest of his explanation about how it all happened, the short version of which is “iPhone predictive text fail.” The combination of his candor about watching porn and my own experience with devices utilizing predictive text, however, makes me want to give him the benefit of the doubt.
It’s too soon to tell whether Danczuk has played the politics right in this instance, but I bet he’d have played them differently if he were, say, a Congressperson representing the 6[SUP]th[/SUP] District in Alabama — or the Deputy Speaker of the Limpopo legislature.
The current actual Deputy Speaker of the Limpopo legislature, Lehlogonolo Masoga, is facing some porn-related allegations of his own. Namely, Masoga reportedly ran up a massive bill on his legislature-issued mobile phone, thanks to roaming charges while consuming mobile porn.
While there’s no question about the size of the bill — a little more than $10,000 — to say Masoga has disputed the porn allegation would be an understatement.
“I reject with contempt the malicious, libelous and defamatory allegations leveled against me by some not-so-faceless conspirators to injure my integrity for cheap political motives,” Masoga said, adding the allegations represent a “smear campaign anchored on a cheap, beer-talk conspiracy to rubbish Masoga’s name.”
Masoga also has vowed to combat “political attempts to write my obituary when I am still breathing.”
I have no idea whether Masoga was actually watching porn while racking up his mobile phone tab, but his response is what I’d expect, regardless what the truth might be.
While South Africa is far from zealously anti-porn in terms of its laws and culture on a national basis, Limpopo has the highest poverty level of any South African province, meaning there’s less technological infrastructure and a lower percentage of the population receiving any form of secondary education. Limpopo’s population also is far more “traditional” (for lack of a better word) on average than most of South Africa, with a larger percentage of its populace living in rural establishments, many of which maintain long-standing tribal affiliations.
As such, my offhand guess is Limpopo is not the porn-friendliest area in the country, much the same way the 6[SUP]th[/SUP] District of Alabama is not too porn-friendly. The district’s current representative, Gary Palmer, received a glowing endorsement in 2014 from none other than James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family.
So, even if Masoga thinks porn is the absolute shiznitt, there’s just no way he could take Danczuk’s “Hey, I’m a man of the world, sure I watch porn” approach and expect his career to survive.
By the same token, if Danczuk had followed his “technological accident” explanation by saying “I reject with seething hatred the outrageous lies of the insidious conspirators aligned against me,” any chance of being believed would have fallen to zero. His relatively worldly constituents would rightly say to themselves, “The MP doth protest too much, methinks.”
So, for one day at least, instead of making a series of cheap jokes and bad puns at the expense of these two very different politicians who are confronting porn-scandals in very different contexts, I’m just going to be thankful I’m not standing in their increasingly uncomfortable shoes and wish them the best.
Good luck, gentlemen. My sense is one of you is going to need it a lot more than the other.
