A Missouri State Rep Just Tweeted a Giant Penis

Whoops. On Monday morning, Missouri Republican State Rep. Mark Parkinson tweeted a photo of a gigantic penis with the words "ALWAYS that problem in the morning..." floating overhead. Then Parkinson awkwardly deleted it and blamed hackers for the picture, although we find that a little dubious. (See Exhibit A: Weiner, Anthony.) The photo was sent from Parkinson's Twitter account, which is otherwise littered with automatic tweets from his FitBit showing how many steps he walked on any given day. No other suspicious tweets showed up on the account before or since, at least from what's visible there now. One thing we know for sure: Parkinson is walking the doctor-recommended 10,000 steps per day. Sometimes more!

A local journalist grabbed a shot of the clearly fake (though still NSFW) picture of a man with a cartoonishly large erection. Parkinson quickly moved to delete the photo and explain the mortifying tweet's existence by denying he tweeted it. Like any good Republican, Parkinson even managed to dabble in raging at the media that covered the tweet.

We can think of a few reasons why Parkinson may have tweeted the offending photo, which we show below for some context. First, there's always the possibility, however unlikely, that he's telling the truth. Next: Someone with direct access to Parkinson's computer might've tweeted it out. He lives with his wife and three pets: A Brazilian mastiff named Duchess and two Chihuahuas named Penny and Fergie, according to his web page. It should be noted that those are dogs of absurdly different sizes. We can also conclude they likely did not send the tweet.

Finally, Wiener-stye, Parkinson may have intended to send the Tweet as a direct message, or accidentally selected it from his phone while trying to upload a different photo. Both of those present the possibility that Parkinson saw the photo of a man with a gigantic erection and thought it was hilarious enough to be worth sharing with someone else.

Here's Parkinson's defense:

To be clear, Weiner's scandal was a lot worse: While Parkinson, or Parkinson's account, Tweeted out an inappropriate and somewhat crass pic, at least for a lawmaker, Weiner was actively sexting young women. But their responses to the scandal are eerily similar.

"My system was hacked, pictures can be manipulated, dropped in and inserted," Weiner said when the Tweet first appeared on his account, according to Politico. That's a little like when you claim to never have received an email from someone you regularly correspond with because it "must have gone to spam." It's just a weird excuse that doesn't make sense. Sure, it's sort of plausible, but unlikely.

We all know what hackers' messages typically look like. Either they're sent with a clear purpose, like the Syrian Electronic Army's hacks of 2013, or they're intended to get a person to click a link and download a virus, which is what happened to your friend's account that she hasn't used in years. They don't really look like penises, usually.