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Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Garbage on Twitter -- So What Else Is New

There were two tweets I saw today that shocked me.  It's hard to shock me on Twitter; there's so much nonsense advanced and hatred spewed on an ordinary day.  Still, I get shocked when there is total idiocy put forth by  people with a great many followers who surely should know better.

The first tweet came from the senior senator from my state, Richard Blumenthal.  Blumenthal is a Democrat and, unlike our other senator Chris Murphy, Blumenthal is reasonably intelligent.  Nevertheless, this morning, he tweeted this:

"Only someone with secrets would want a secret and private line w/ Putin.  Kushner owes America an immediate explanation."

Think about that.  The mainstream media story is that President Trump and the Russians were setting up a back channel communication  method.  Okay, that's nothing unusual.  Blumenthal says, however, that only someone with secrets would want to do that.  Just imagine that!  The President of the United States has secrets!  Oh, the horror!  Seriously, of course the president has secrets.  We have an entire system called classified documents meant to maintain those secrets.  Indeed, the problem in recent months has been that those secrets have been leaked to the media.  Conversations with the leaders of Australia, Mexico, Germany, Israel, and other countries have been replayed in the press.  Those are secret conversations meant to be kept confidential.  The truth is that Blumenthal is actually making the case for why a back channel was needed.  The president has secrets, our government has secrets, and the secrets are supposed to stay secret.

The second tweet came from Chuck Woolery, a game show host with about 250,000 followers.  Here's what this guy had to say:

FDR's first vice was a communist.  He even ran for President on the Communist ticket.  Inconvenient maybe, but a fact.  Check your history.

This tweet was so bizarre and so wrong that I checked to make sure that it was not coming from a parody account.  (It wasn't).  The first vice president under FDR was John Nance Garner, a conservative Democrat from Texas.  He held the position from 1933 to 1941.  He was not a Communist and never ran for president on any ticket.  This was so off base, that Woolery could have just tweeted that he is a moron and accomplished as much.

So many people spend so much time on twitter.  I wonder how many of them understand just how much nonsense is spewed there.

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