Florida State Senator Caught Looking at … Porn?

TALLAHASSEE, Fla.—By now, Florida Sen. Mike Bennett (R-Bradenton) is probably the most famous political porn watcher since the SEC 30 (or was it 32?), even if it wasn’t really porn that he called up on his computer during a floor session last week.

The story has obviously gone viral, because Lord knows it has newsworthy written all over it, especially when lesser stories—like a massive oil slick headed for the state—are taking up the airwaves. It just proves that the media is even-handed in these matters—even a one-second mistake is going to be taken as seriously as an environmental disaster. Now that’s fair and balanced.

For his part, the senator says he wasn’t surfing porn, and we would agree. A photo of four topless women is not porn. But that’s not what Bennett meant. The image, he said, was contained in an email from a friend that he happened to open during boring speeches.

"I was just sitting there, bored as they were debating the abortion bill," Bennett said. And who wouldn’t be bored stiff by such a mundane topic as abortion? Like there’s anything left to debate about that silly subject!

Not content to take Bennett at his word, however, the Sunshine State News—whose cameras were there to catch the offending images—is not about to let Florida voters down by not getting to the bottom of what actually occurred on that day, in that august hall.

“We offered Bennett an opportunity to prove his statements to Sunshine State News by showing the executive editor and videographer the email record with a government-related subject line, but after talking to the Senate's top lawyer, he declined to let us see those records,” wrote reporter Lane Wright.

Wright then made the connection that everyone already had made in their own minds.

“This revealing video comes just weeks after an investigation found a number of federal Securities and Exchange Commission employees had been spending several hours visiting pornographic websites on government-issued computers when they should have been working,” he wrote.

The conspiracy deepens.