Our wonderful Lt. Governor, Andre Bauer, has been in the news quite a bit lately. This has mostly been due to his reckless driving skills and the fact that he seems to be ticket-proof, even when driving at high speeds through residential areas. Bauer is rumored to have a ferocious temper, and even had one arresting officer draw his weapon on him because he felt threatened at one traffic stop. Such a model citizen to be in the #2 spot in our state government.
In addition to the traffic controversy, there was a front page article in the Greenville Cage Liner about Bauer’s MySpace page. According to the article, the page contains links to questionable material…
The page includes a list of more than 160 friends and photos, some of them young women in bikinis, and a link to a racy MySpace group called "Matt’s Mom is HOTT," where users talk about parties, concerts and sexual scenarios.
A quick check of the site does show that such links exists, as the image below illustrates. This is a screen capture from Bauer’s page
The article seems to key into the fears that have been generated by other recent stories about MySpace. However, there are two things going on here. First, most of these are unmoderated comments left on Bauer’s page, and are the equivalent of spam. Secondly, he has some young, immature supporters who apparently don’t separate their political and personal lives. They may have linked to his site as "friends" and may truly be supporters, but their own sites contain their spring break pictures at the beach, etc., which are not appropriate as links to a professional page.
As much as I despise Andre Bauer, this is hardly the travesty that the article paints. To accuse Bauer of linking to porn just because OTHERS have posted links to his site would be the same as accusing him of using penis enlargement drugs because he gets spam e-mail for those products. This is more an indictment of his staff’s inability to moderate this particular mode of communication.
I think that the creep needs to be nailed to the wall, but he needs to be nailed with something that matters. The media just shows its ignorance of social web networking when it posts an article such as this.