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Congressional Staffer's Crude Twitter Fail Costs Him His Job

This article is more than 10 years old.

A congressional staffer was fired earlier this week after he mistakenly tweeted a crude message from the account of his boss, Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador, in response to a tawdry Super Bowl commercial.

The staffer, spokesman Phil Hardy, deleted the tweet 14 seconds after it was posted, but the Sunlight Foundation’s Politwoops, a site that keeps public record of politicians’ deleted tweets, kept Hardy’s Twitter fail alive for the world to see. The embarrassing moment was apparently enough for Labrador to show Hardy the door, and another reason why politicians probably shouldn’t trust others to tweet for them.

The commercial, a spot for CBS’s “Two Broke Girls,” featured two actresses from the sitcom dancing seductively around a pole, something Hardy seems to have enjoyed.

Amazingly, an account apparently belonging to Hardy tweeted a message similar to the deleted one which remains today. “Me likey Broke Girls,” it says, “But have never seen their show!”

Rep. Labrador made the decision to fire Hardy himself, a staffer told the Idaho statesman, but declined to provide much more detail.

So be careful on Twitter, folks. It's real and mistakes there can have serious consequences.

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