And Justice For All — Except Republicans

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Daily Caller

Texas Rep. Joe Barton is having a nightmarish Thanksgiving.

Late Tuesday, nude photos were circulated of the Texas Republican, prompting a wave of gleeful mockery on social media.

Barton, a divorcee, had sent the compromising photos to a woman he had a consensual relationship with. It appears she leaked them after they had a bad break-up.

In a court of law, this would likely constitute as revenge porn — a crime in most states — which explains why Barton would have threatened to report the woman to police.

 

But The Washington Post framed that threat as some sinister show of power in its report on the matter Wednesday night and treated the jilted lover as some heroic whistleblower of Barton’s “secret sex life.”

That “secret sex life” was that Barton, a single man at the time, was flirty with other women.

Truly one of the great criminal conspiracies of our time.

However, the Post’s article makes it seem like this is the real wrongdoing here instead of the revenge porn, which the paper fleetingly describes before getting to the reporters’ main purpose of shaming Barton.

According to the Post, Barton’s leaker — who is granted anonymity by the sympathetic reporters in spite of her possible crime — didn’t have any intention to use the embarrassing photos against the congressman.

Instead, she explained her motive this way. “It’s not normal for a member of Congress who runs on a GOP platform of family values and conservatism to be scouring the Internet looking for a new sexual liaison.”

WaPo made sure to give credence to this incredulous claim by detailing Barton’s voting record and political positions in the piece.

It would be easy to come away from the article thinking the woman did a noble service but did not commit a real crime. As the Post points out, “so-called ‘revenge porn'” isn’t a federal crime, and the woman said she had no intention of retaliating.

She just didn’t like how he two-timed her, and she wanted to point out the hypocrisy of his politics

It’s not likely this argument will help her in court, but it certainly helped her out in the court of liberal Twitter. The Washington Post reversed its long-standing concern with revenge porn to dismiss the issue as only something Texans care about.

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Some forms of revenge are more equal than others.