*deep sigh* All right, let’s talk about the pictures.

POLITICO gleefully dropped these photos on Friday, intending to mock and demean Congressman Madison Cawthorn.

New this afternoon for @POLITICO. https://t.co/Qp6V26wNI6

— Michael Kruse (@michaelkruse) April 22, 2022

After all, Madison Cawthorn is a REPUBLICAN and therefore should be shamed, SHAMED, for these photos! POLITICO opens their article with these paragraphs.

Photographs obtained by POLITICO appear to show Madison Cawthorn, the embattled Republican congressman from North Carolina who recently accused his GOP colleagues of inviting him to orgies, wearing lingerie in what appears to be a party setting.”

Cawthorn, 26, was raised in a conservative Baptist community in Henderson County, North Carolina, and has staked his political persona on arch-traditional Christian principles and the insistence of the importance of a kind of hypermasculinity. His comments about “the sexual perversion” in Washington made on a podcast, which he later admitted were exaggerated, drew the public disapproval and disavowal of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy as well as other Republican leaders including those in his North Carolina congressional caucus.”

The revelation of the two photos is the latest in a series of unflattering headlines for the freshman member of Congress in the run-up to the primary in his first re-election bid. The primary in North Carolina is May 17. Cawthorn has seven Republican opponents who see him as vulnerable.”

Hmmm. Not exactly hiding the ball here, are you, POLITICO? They admit later in the article that they were given the photos “by a person formerly close to Cawthorn and his campaign.” Hmmm again. Political hit job much?

Madison Cawthorn, for his part, responded to the photos in a tweet.
https://twitter.com/CawthornforNC/status/1517616971315126272
The link he provides in the tweet is to a review of from Cruise Critic of “Royal Carribean’s Quest Game Show” which is billed as an “adults-only scavenger hunt.” After the Cruise Critic recounts the experience (fully explaining why this is an “adults-only” game), this caveat is added:

If you’re not easily offended and love to cut loose on a cruise, this is a must. You don’t even have to participate to enjoy it; you can sit back and watch everyone else run around and still share in the laughter. Keep an open mind and go with the flow. If you take yourself too seriously, you won’t have fun at the Quest game on Royal Caribbean.”

So, Cawthorn – who is currently the youngest Representative in the House of Representatives at age 26 – has silly photos of himself at an adult scavenger hunt on a cruise ship from sometime after 2014 (Cawthorn is in his wheelchair in the photos, and the accident in which he was injured took place in 2014). This is when every single Gen Xer is counting their blessings that none of the stupid things they did in their early 20’s are on digital photos or videos, and took place before the rise of social media. As far as it goes, unless POLITICO has more than these pictures and squeals of “OOOOOHHHH HE’S WEARING LINGERIE,” then this “story” is pretty much dead in the water. But that wasn’t the point. POLITICO wanted to embarrass Cawthorn, and put some dents in his “young conservative Christian” image before the primary.

To which I say… POLITICO clearly hasn’t been paying attention to Madison Cawthorn, because it’s clear he’s capable of embarrassing himself without any help.

Yes, Cawthorn talked to Leader McCarthy and ending up putting massive qualifiers on his claims, or just letting them drop altogether. Again, he’s 26 and young and dumb. He came into office in 2020 and made headlines when he got to speak at the RNC Convention. And yet, his young and dumb gets a full color picture spread in POLITICO, where the Democrats’ young and dumb, the previous youngest member of the House, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, gets glowing coverage for putting “Tax The Rich” across her butt.

Two things can be true at once. You can think Madison Cawthorn is a very green, immature, and unseasoned young man who needs to weigh what he says before it comes out of his mouth on a podcast where he’s trying to sound cool. AND you can think that POLITICO is trying to stir up the primary against Cawthorn by releasing these photos with the most disingenuous framing possible.

And a third thing – and one that a lot of twenty-somethings need to hear. Madison Cawthorn, get better friends and vet your campaign circle more thoroughly. Whoever decided to hand over these photos to POLITICO is neither friend nor ally, and needs to be shunned out of your life.

Featured image: Thomas Hawk/Flickr.com, cropped, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)