This US Senator has never sent an email. So why is he on a subcommittee focused on tech?

Sen. Lindsey Graham has never sent an email. He's also a member of the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. Let that sink in for a moment.

Business Insider attempts to rationalize Graham's lack of email experience by noting that he's a 59-year-old man who has "probably had plenty of help in the communications department" during his twelve years as a U.S. Senator.

That's bullshit. All my grandparents are older than that, and they've all sent emails. Most of them are on Facebook! Yet none of them are expected to help Congress navigate the changing technological landscape (or, really, to do much of anything).

A better explanation for Graham lacking even the most rudimentary experience with technology might be that our government is built on incongruity. Just consider a few basic facts about this Congress and the people it "represents":

• The majority of Americans believe that climate change is happening. (As if that's something that needs to be "believed," but that's a semantic argument for another time.) Yet the head of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee is a climate change denier who thinks a snowball disproves global warming.
• Congress is overwhelmingly white, although this latest Congress is the most diverse ever, with Pew reporting that non-whites represent 17 percent of its members. Yet that pales to non-whites' 38 percent slice of the population -- and by 2020, more than half of people under 18-years-old will be non-white.
• Congress is also overwhelmingly occupied by men, who represent 80 percent of the group. Yet women represented 50 percent of the population in 2014, according to the Census Bureau.

That means many people who don't use the Internet would if they had the chance. I suspect that Graham can afford an Internet connection in Washington, DC. I'm also pretty sure he's smart enough to do so -- or at least I hope that he is, anyway.

"I don't email. No, you can have every email I've ever sent," Graham said in a segment on Meet the Press. "I've never sent one. I don't know what that makes me."

It makes you a luddite, sir, and an anachronism.

[photo credit: public domain]