Sadly, No!

Inspired by D. Aristophanes’s last post.

So it turns out we had some readers who thought it was uncool to criticize Tila Tequila for tweeting her grief at the loss of her partner. Anyway, it got me thinking what other famous people might have tweeted in similar circumstances, if Twitter, like the poor, had always been with us.

First up, a slain civil rights hero:

Next, the Passion of the Tweet:

Finally, the obligatory Godwinning of the entire discussion:

Too soon? In the Twitter Era it is probably already too late.

Oh Christ.

One of Sully’s e-mailers chimes in with the following:

Again, think about it. If you wanted to blow up a plane, would you attempt it from your seat, where somebody could quite possibly stop you? No, you would go to the washroom where you could set off the bomb without disruption.

Please don’t give these ass hammers any further ideas. I have to fly out tomorrow for work and I don’t want to have a TSA agent inspect my crotch before taking a wee-wee on the plane.

Incidentally, the insane measures that some terrorororists are willing to go through really make you have to wonder why Ole Perfesser Reynolds gets so aroused at the idea of having thought-controlled nanobots traveling through the air we breathe. That seems to present much more of a security challenge for governments than some sad dude failing to blow up his crotch.

Richard Cohen writes today:

Last month, no American soldiers were killed in Iraq. Last month, the unemployment rate dipped a bit, the stock market ended the year up, the financial system did not crater, Detroit’s Big Three began to get a pulse — and yet a consensus started to form that Barack Obama, who is either responsible for or merely presided over all this good stuff, is a failure.

On the one hand, I see where Cohen is coming from. The fact that Obama is not George W. Bush is indeed a welcome relief for me.

But on the other hand, as I’ll note in a forthcoming op-ed written for the Commonweal Institute, George W. Bush was really a Haley’s Comet type of shitty president, the sort that can only come around once every 80 years lest the country completely sink into oblivion. (Previous Haley’s presidents are James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover. As bad as Nixon was ethically, he didn’t leave his successor with a depression or a civil war — or, in Bush’s case, the worst recession since the 1930s and TWO unfinished wars.)

I think Bush has diminished our expectations of the presidency far too much. The president of the United States isn’t supposed to bog the country down in an endless series of foreign conflicts. He isn’t supposed to allow the economy to completely collapse. That Bush managed to accomplish both of these things during his glorious eight-year run is a testament of the man’s unmatched ability to suck at everything.

So yes, I think that while we can thank Allah that Bush is no longer president, we should hold Obama to some higher standards, particularly on his handling of Wall Street. Because otherwise, there won’t be “great” presidents anymore. There will simply be presidents who manage to not get us all killed.

MTV reports that ‘socialite’ Casey Johnson, 30, is dead ‘of natural causes.’ Not something I’d normally write about, except that via MTV we learn that Johnson’s partner, the reality TV person Tila Tequila, ‘broke the news of Johnson’s death on her Twitter account on Monday evening.’

‘Everyone please pray 4 my Wifey Casey Johnson. She has passed away. Thank u for all ur love and support but I will be offline to be w family,’ she wrote, but returned to Twitter for a few more updates. ‘This is a very heartbreaking time for me. I just want some privacy as I deal with the loss of my Fiance Casey Johnson. [My] heart is shredded.’

Early Tuesday morning, a distraught Tequila tweeted, ‘I can’t stop these haunting visions of her and I … we made such a lovely couple, only beginning to spend the rest of our lives together.’

Is it just me, or does anybody else find such a public declaration of private grief seriously off-putting? Part of it’s just cross-generational — I sometimes have to remind myself that Gen Y et. al. use technology and the public forum of social media in ways that aren’t necessarily bad but just different from the way I would and do. I fucking hate Twitter, fr’example … just can’t stand its truncated format, which seems to me to be essentially a celebration of the spectacularly unexamined life and a giant ‘eff you’ to the studied craft of writing.

At any rate, MTV helpfully reports at the end of the story that ‘Johnson’s last tweet was posted early on the morning of December 29’.

Well, Thers has forced me to violate the treaty provisions forbidding the proliferation of ukuleles of mass destruction. So drag me to The Hague. I spit on your treaties.

And I retaliate for Thers’s Ayn Rand interview accompanied by a spacey Quaalude-drenched New Age soundtrack with . . . Teh Gay Patriot and his newest video. Now I become death, destroyer of worlds.

(If anyone ever offers a webcam that requires a breathalyser test before it can be used, Bruce should snap it up tout de suite.)

Ann Althouse has requested ‘an Althouse-focused equivalent of Analyze Glenn Reynolds’ Body Language.’ We live to serve, thus a rather provocative photo of Prof. Althouse with analysis of her posture below (we encourage commenters to add their own interpretations as well):

Photo credit: Ann Althouse

A casual observer of the above photo will immediately note the way that Althouse’s naked body contrasts with the snow drift immediately behind her to effect a heightened, if somewhat disarming kind of visual tension, such that we are forcibly confronted with the raw animal power of non-partisan sexuality emerging like a bolt of pure energy from the wasteland of wintry desolation.

But the photo’s composition is not our main concern — rather, as the title of this post suggests, it is Althouse’s body language. Here, her puckish facial expression suggests a secret kept close but available for the right (implicitly non-monetary) price, while the professor’s taut, coiled physicality is that of a stalking lioness or perhaps of a person pretending to do Daniel-san’s crane kick from ‘The Karate Kid’ to add a little humor to yet another roadside sobriety test in the greater Madison area.

Now look at her left hand. Unremarkable, you say? Look at it again. Now do you see it? Hard to believe that on first glance you missed such an obvious and practiced gesture, isn’t it? Prediction (longshot): This will have lasting implications for our understanding of Plessy v. Ferguson.

There is of course much more to glean from this singularly evocative photograph. But we will now stand aside and let readers have their say.

Courtesy of DougJ at Balloon Juice, we learn of important new research into Glenn Reynolds’ body language as displayed in publicly available photos on the Internet. Analyze Glenn Reynolds’ Body Language presents us with the below photo of a curiously diagonal Ol’ Perfesser, which it describes as ‘A damning visual metaphor for wingnut welfare.’

Point well taken, but we couldn’t help but notice something else about this picture of Reynolds, whom you will note is rarely photographed from the waist down — apparently there is a good reason for this, as our blow-up of the relevant section of the image shows:

Commenters at Analyze Glenn Reynolds’ Body Language wonder why he’s leaning to the right in this photo … the obvious explanation being a subtle expression of Reynolds’ political sympathies. But we think this new revelation that Glenn Reynolds has a permanently erect, massive, cockeyed schlong rooted in the inner portion of his upper left thigh offers a simpler explanation — that in order to perform the simple act of pissing straight, the Ol’ Perfesser must tilt his body at a generous angle to compensate for the skewed outgrowth of his monstrous mutant genitalia.

And we ask — is this really the sort of person America wants educating her next generation of lawyers and judges?

ABOVE: M. Edward Whelan III. (If you think this Photoshop of Whelan
is an exaggeration, click here.)

Shorter M. Edward Whelan III, J.D., Esq., America’s Shittiest Website™
Staging a Show Trial on Same-Sex Marriage

• The trial in the court challenge to Proposition 8 in California shouldn’t be televised because televising federal trials is illegal* and because the arguments in support of proposition 8 are so stupid it will make all of us who oppose gay marriage look like the anti-evolution crowd in the Scopes trial.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Shorter Chuck Kraphammer, Fred Hiatt’s Island for Misfit Boys
A terrorist war Obama has denied

• The way to defeat Al Qaeda is for Obama to click his heels three times and then say “The War on Terror” over and over again. That will scare the underpants off everyone in Al Qaeda, force them to throw down their PETN and cause them to flee back to the villages and luxury condos from whence they came.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™