Wow! What a raging jagoff! So I'm sure you recall that the other day, Mark Sanford had the brilliant idea to run a full-page newspaper ad filled with an incredibly lengthy and self-serving series of b.s. explanations for why he trespassed at his ex-wife's home, followed by a whole lot of moaning about negative ads being run by Democrats, and capped off with a comparison of his situation to that of the men who defended the Alamo (who, of course, almost all died). In the middle, though, Sanford made this bizarre offer:
The Democrats' ads will tell you none of this, so if you have further questions, go to www.marksanford.com, call me at the campaign office at 843-764-9188, or even on my cell at 843-367-1010.
"Desperate" and "weird" hardly begin to describe it, but one of the groups whose ads Sanford complained about, the House Majority PAC, decided to take him up on it. In a post-script to a fundraising email, they reprinted Sanford's cell phone number and suggested that their supporters "[g]ive him a call and ask why he spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on luxury travel." A number of them did just that, so guess what Sanford did in response?
He published the phone numbers of the people who called him. These are ordinary citizens—perhaps a little brasher than average—but I'm sure they had no expectation that their numbers would get printed on Mark Sanford's campaign website. I don't want to even link to the document Sanford originally posted, but here's a redacted version, and to be clear, every black box you see obscures a number that Sanford had no problem reproducing in full:
You'll notice that all the numbers are from out-of-state, so I'm guessing Sanford wanted to make some kind of point that no one from South Carolina cared to ring him up—though iPhone users can prune their call logs, so Sanford may have erased any Palmetto State callers. Of course, the more important point is that Mark Sanford is an absolute schmuckface for publicizing the personal information of average Americans who had the temerity to take him up on his offer to talk to him. Sadly, though, that's hardly a surprise. I guess the only real question is, did he ever even answer the phone?
8:09 PM PT: ThinkProgress spoke to three of the people whose privacy Sanford violated by publishing their phone numbers without permission. Needless to say, they aren't happy.