Thursday Afternoon: I see a story about the stray shots at the Capitol Building. Realizing that anyone who thinks they can seriously harm congress by doing a drive-by on one of the most heavily guarded buildings on the face of the Earth is not exactly a criminal mastermind, I (correctly) assess that no congressmen/women were even remotely in danger.
So I go on Twitter and say “The Bad News: Shooting at U.S. Capitol…The Worse News: No Tea Party members were hit.”
Pretty obvious I’m making the kind of joke that’s made on social media roughly 4,000 times a minute, and usually involving Obama “going back to Kenya in a Somali pirate boat” or something.
Luckily for me, Faux News Correspondent Brit Hume (or whatever 20 year old internet actually writes his Twitter feed) must have thought it was more serious than that, because he re-tweeted it. We can safely assume that because Hume is slightly to the right of Ted Nugent, that he didn’t re-tweet this because he can appreciate a good turn of phrase. Without directly saying so, he wanted to showcase my tweet as an example of “liberal hatred” that all conservatives should get immediately riled up about.
Luckily for me, they followed suit. I had a few hundred tweets telling me to go fuck myself or what a horrible human being I am/if people know what a horrible human being I am or that I’m a douche/an asshole/a monster/a sick puppy, pretty much everything but a horse thief. Then I had even more people retweet the tweets I was mentioned in. [The equivalent of someone saying “I hate your guts!” and having 100 people echo that sentiment.]
As far as traffic for the site, it drove it to an enormous amount of new visitors (about ten of which actually took the time to tell me to go fuck myself on here, it’s so nice when people say hello), one of the top ten highest days the site has ever had. And I didn’t have to do a minute of advertising on my own.
It turns out the Faux News outrage machine is actually quite a boon for smaller-fish liberals. All it really takes is one tweet of “outrage” that’s desperately trying to deflect attention away from the GOP’s failures to whip the conservative knee-jerk crowd into their daily dose of outrage. I’m willing to bet that if I got a hold of those ISP addresses, more than a few of those comments would probably be coming from the same server or GOP lobbying firm where small time interns get paid to spam social media with lopsided comments.
You see, what I actually wrote was immediately shortened and paraphrased into “This guy wants Tea Party members killed!!!” and I guess in their minds a pretty obvious joke becomes a deadly serious call to arms. [Let’s not pretend that half of U.S. ultra-conservatives aren’t indulging in secret fantasies where there’s an armed revolution and they actually get to take up arms to “defend” the country.] It was a straw-reach for something, anything to make liberals look as foolish or bitter as conservatives, and deflect attention away from people who are actually causing this shutdown. I have to say that I’m happy to have filled that void for Hume.
So happy that I wrote him “Hume, thanks for the controversy the other day. If I send you some more stuff will you retweet it?…” “If you need a straw-man liberal to demonize and deflect attention away from GOP failures, I’m your Huckleberry.” Then I thanked my conservative haters for their fake outrage, and just imagined how vitriolic the reaction would have been if ANY member of congress was in ACTUAL danger for a SECOND.
The one person to get hurt in the shooting? The shooter. No congress people were even seriously spooked by it, and the woman apparently was going after Obama because she believed he was spying on her. That’s right, the woman was actually shooting stray shots at the U.S. Capitol Building so that she could hit the President. I’m not so sure a dangerous mind with a poor grasp of exactly who goes in what building is really the scariest threat to Tea Party members. I would argue that they have imposed more self-destructive damage on their brand than that.
Ahh too funny. Those tea party freaks sure do have tons of crazy fans.