During the Super Bowl, when America’s attention was directed at more important things, this emerged from Rep. Raul Labrador’s Twitter account.
It was a response to a pole-dancing themed ad for 2 Broke Girls, a CBS sitcom about (just my guess now) the back problems of busty diner waitresses. And as any casual user of Twitter could guess, it was accidentally added to Labrador’s feed by a Labrador staffer—Phil Hardy, his coalitions director and spokesman—who’d meant to tweet it on his personal account. None of this would have been remembered for more than five minutes if this hadn’t followed.
Labrador made the decision to fire Hardy, said the Idaho Republican’s district director, Jake Ball.
Ball said Labrador fired Hardy late Monday, after news of the embarrassing tweet.
“That’s Raul’s call,” Ball said of the firing. “It was the boss” who told Hardy Monday afternoon.Labrador doesn’t want to talk any more about it, but seriously, why’d he do it? On Tuesday, after the tweet was sent, Labrador was the focus of a remarkably friendly Washington Post profile about his possible immigration deal-making. (Labrador’s Puerto Rican, so he’s always been a citizen, but he used to be an immigration lawyer.) “He’s expressed a willingness to act as an evangelist for reform,” wrote Roz Helderman. “Labrador’s middle-ground approach has earned him significant pushback in his predominately white district.” That’s how he started the week. He ends it as “the guy who fired a staffer over one errant tweet.” Seems like an overreaction.
