Jack Burkman causing problems for Jack Burkman, again

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Vancouver City Councilor Jack Burkman has been taking a beating on social media, thanks to the other Jack Burkman, the one MSNBC host Keith Olberman named the worst person in the world in 2010.

That Jack Burkman, a conservative lobbyist, announced this week he was working on legislation to ban gay athletes from the NFL. Burkman has acknowledged it was a PR stunt, writes Josh Voorhees of Slate.

“A conservative lobbyist of debatable repute grabbed a few D.C.-centric headlines on Monday when he announced that he was preparing legislation that would ban gay athletes from joining the National Football League. The Hill was the first to give Jack Burkman the attention he was looking for, but his homophobic PR stunt also gained varying degrees of traction in the national media and among local outlets (the latter of which were largely less skeptical of Burkman’s motives),” Voorhees wrote. 

So Vancouver’s Jack Burkman has been left to explain on Twitter that he’s not Jack Burkman, homophobic lobbyist. Here’s a screenshot of his Twitter feed this morning:

“It’s really heating up today,” Burkman wrote in an email this morning. “I’m spending a significant amount of my time knocking down obscene Facebook posts and tweets along with answering email. It’s hard to stop things like this from spreading in this fast paced social media world. No phone calls or letters yet, but I expect them to start based on what happened in 2010.”

The other Jack Burkman’s Twitter handle is @Jack_Burkman, and he only has 61 followers, compared to the real Jack Burkman, who has 342 followers. Guess that’s why he needed to do a PR stunt?

Update: Burkman changed his Facebook profile pic this afternoon

Wednesday update: Burkman posted this status update on his Facebook page: “OMG, CNN just called me. Yup, they were looking for my evil twin. It just keeps getting better and better.”