Chris Busby, editor of The Bollard and a blogger for the Bangor Daily News, wrote a piece for the BDN based on Crash Barry’s report about inappropriate, racist and offensive tweets sent by the son of Angus King. See the tweets in Barry’s report here. (WARNING: They are explicit and highly offensive.) But Busby wrote that he and the BDN “have come to a different conclusion than I have regarding whether it is appropriate to bring this issue to light.” This is an excerpt from Busby’s report in The Bollard, titled “Nasty, brutish and short: the tweets of Angus King’s son.”
By Chris Busby
The man who promises to bring Maine values to the United States Senate has clearly failed to do so in his own home.
In a report we posted this week, columnist and investigative reporter Crash Barry examines the troubling Twitter postings (or tweets) of Angus King’s youngest son, twenty-something Ben Herman. The tweets reveal that Herman’s privileged upbringing as the scion of one of Maine’s most prominent families has not made him a young man of character, class or compassion.
Much to the contrary, the posts show Herman to be a lazy, boozy, foul-mouthed lout who delights in spreading racist stereotypes, views women as little more than sexual orifices, and finds the misfortunes of others (the handicapped, the elderly) alternately irritating and amusing.
From Crash Barry’s report, titled “What a twitt-witt!”:
You’d think that since the Angus King Senate campaign is heavily invested in social media – with 38,747 “likes” on Facebook and 1,675 followers on Twitter – they would have asked the candidate’s college-age son, Ben Herman, to stop making racist, homophobic, ageist and inane Tweets. Or at least get him to change his privacy settings so the whole world wouldn’t have access to his views on politics, history, old people and vaginas.
The lack of discretion seems especially odd since King’s spokesperson, Crystal Canney, routinely asks all interns and volunteers for their Twitter handles and frequently inquires about Facebook postings. And it wasn’t like I went searching for Herman’s Twitter feed. I accidentally discovered it while looking at his mom’s Twitter account. Even though Mary Herman “follows” her son’s Internet shenanigans, it’s highly unlikely she actually reads his musings.
Ben Herman’s Twitter account (twitter.com/bherm18) was removed minutes after word of his posts went public. The King campaign, according to one of the candidate’s closest pals, has a friend at Twitter headquarters. That’s why the Angus King parody account disappeared so quickly. At least we have Ben Herman’s tweets for posterity.
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Sounds like a progressive in the mold of the Kennedy’s. Now he must have learned this type of behavior from someone, nice upbringing
Tell me who you go with and I’ll tell you what you are. If you attend a Marxist University like UNE you are more RED than read on TWITTER.