Sometimes I wonder why I’m still on Twitter. Actually, I know why: to promote First Draft. We get most of our social media referrals from that hell site. What can ya do?
What bothers me most about Twitter is that it’s a bubbling cauldron of stupid much of the time. The stupid usually smacks me in the face when I open the app. Most of the stupid comes from political Twitter, which is obsessed with the leftover fight between Hillary and Bernie and, above all else, Donald Trump.
Every news story is seen through a Trumpist prism. No wonder that narcissistic shitbag loves the Tweeter Tube so much. It’s all Donald, all the time.
The latest irksome obsession is Trump’s relationship with former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe who was murdered yesterday. People have mistaken Abe’s ability to flatter and cajole Trump for friendship. That’s inspired the Impeached Insult Comedian to play the role of mourner-in-chief. Abe’s assassination is NOT about former President* Pennwyise even if he thinks he’s the corpse at every funeral.
The Abe assassination is extra disturbing because gun crimes in Japan are rare: only 10 gun related murders last year. It’s the first political murder there since the 1930’s. It’s about Japan, not America or Donald Trump. To make it so is to play into his tiny orange hands.
And now for a brief musical interlude:
As to denial, that brings me to Willard Mittbot Romney’s recent piece in the Atlantic: America Is In Denial.
Romney makes some valid points. The country *is* in denial but he’s in denial about the identity of the main culprit: the Republican party. His party.
The GOP is the party of sedition and stupidity as they pretend that the BIG LIE is not only true but plausible. Willard concedes that but resorts to both-siderism. Only one party wants to save democracy and it’s not the party that nominated the Mittbot in 2012.
In the same publication, my countryman Tom Nichols poses this question: Are the last rational Republicans in denial? He concludes that they are. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Mitt Romney thinks their party can return to right-wing normality. Nichols is dubious as am I. Us Greek Americans need to stick together.
Nichols opens his piece with a story from the waning days of the Soviet Union:
In 1991, the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was briefly deposed in a coup by hard-line members of the Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev, upon his return to Moscow, tried to differentiate between the plotters and the Party itself. One of his closest advisers, Aleksandr Yakovlev, told him that this effort was pointless, akin to “serving tea to a corpse.”
The Yakovlev theorem strikes me as a fitting epitaph for the GOP.
The last word goes to The Police:
Twitter drives me crazy. I use it to help promote my blog too, but get relatively little traffic from it, as 99.99% of my followers (including you) ignore all my tweets.
Not original, but Tom Nichols should know since he helped create the modern GOP