Tag Archives: over reaction

The low(brow) road

Posted by thebastard on

I’m not at all surprised that dirty tricks would be used in the upcoming U.S. senate race. What shocks me is how banal these efforts have been. Earlier today, the Globe’s political blog posted an item about the Massachusetts Democratic Party calling on Scott Brown to fire members of his staff who have been responsible for various online shenanigans directed against potential Democratic contenders to his seat.

Fake Twitter accounts are really not much newer than Twitter, itself, and the tactic has become little more than a way for anonymous staffers to showcase their lack of talent as joke writers, such as in this gem from @CrazyKhazei, the account intended to humiliate Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alan Khazei.

 

“Silly gays with their videos about ‘life getting better’ and ‘encouraging confused teens not to kill themselves.’” – Scott Brown Campaign.

 

Earlier this summer, one of Brown’s staffers, Eric Fehrnstrom began tweeting as @CrazyKhazei, which really did nothing more than reveal Fehrnstrom to be a snotty homophobe with hackneyed barbs that actually make David Bernstein seem funny and original.

I assume that in college, Fehrnstrom was the douche bag that took time out of his busy date-rape schedule to cajole his fellow frat brothers into begrudgingly going out with him at night to set homeless people on fire. Hey it’s all in good fun if no one of importance gets hurt, right?

"After this, let's go impregnate my girlfriend then dump her!"

Fehrnstrom was found out when he accidently tweeted from his @EricFehrn account something that was intended for @CrazyKhazei.

Ultimately, Fehrnstrom would admit his actions to the Boston Globe, writing “Sometimes we take our politics too seriously and this was my way of lightening things up. As they say in politics, if you can’t stand the tweet, get out of the kitchen.”

Brown responded to the news with a half-hearted plea to stop such shenanigans from taking place in his office again. That same day, www.QueenElizabethWarren.com was registered by Robert Willington, an advisor to Brown’s campaign. News that he was responsible for the domain registration broke yesterday on http://www.bluemassgroup.com.

Really, all this proves is that Scott Brown and his staff are a bunch of assholes, but then we already knew that. What little interaction I’ve had with Brown and his media relations staff has left me wondering about the journalistic ethics of hoping I’m in the right place at the right time to get a photo of any of them getting hit by a truck. Preferably one registered in Wrentham.

It’s not like there isn’t enough material to levy personal attacks on Scott Brown, such as when he practically pimped out his two daughters, or the fact that he was a one-time nude model.

 

I tried to register http://www.SexyBrownAction.com, but found that it was already claimed.

 

Call me crazy, but I think fake Twitter accounts and fake websites are a far cry from previous political shenanigans, such as the George W. Bush campaign spreading the rumor in South Carolina that John McCain has a black baby, or that Barack Obama is a closet Jihadist from Kenya who hates capitalist America.

Scott Brown avoids contact with the general public when he can help it, votes consistently enough with the GOP to hate poor people and just for the sake of Libel, is probably a racist. The fact that he hires assholes to work his campaign is not exactly news.

If you’re going to take a page out of the Yes Men’s playbook, for fuck sake, try to actually be funny.

The shakes

Posted by thebastard on

It’s happened. The big one finally came and it was 1755 all over again. The city’s been devastated. Huge chunks of land all over Boston, including the entirety of Back Bay was liquefied and now sits at the bottom of the harbor.

Buildings have collapsed, imploded and exploded – though none of the ones that would make anyone happy, and city government is in disarray.

That’s certainly the impressive I got from my twitter feed yesterday.

Just think about the damage that could have been done had the college kids all returned to the city.

At about 2 p.m. yesterday afternoon, a 5.6 magnitude earthquake hit the Virginia. Closer to the epicenter, the magnitude of the quake, while nothing like its West Coast counterparts, was great enough to crack the Washington Monument.

In Boston, there was a slight vibration felt for a few moments – one that I didn’t even notice until it was pointed out to me.

In total, the amount of damage done to the entire Eastern Seaboard is estimated at around $100 million. Boston’s contribution to that accumulated in dropped ice coffees on formerly stain-free carpets.

Almost immediately Twitter lit up with rumors about evacuated, crumbling and leaning buildings.

Reports began surfacing that the building at 111 Devonshire in downtown Boston was now leaning up against its neighbor as a result of the earthquake.

The majority of leaning that takes place in Boston is the result of alcohol.

This lasted until Fire Department Officials pushed through the crowd of amateur photographers –  capturing documentation of their own idiocy – and determined that the building always looked that way. Good job, Boston.

Meanwhile, there were reported evacuations all over the city, including a courthouse in South Boston and the UMass Dorchester campus.

The last time there was an actually destructive earthquake in the hub was as recently as 1755 – so long ago that one of the few easily accessible documentations of the event is a weekly newsletter and a woodcut that looks like unfinished work from a high school art class.

Hell, the Molasses Flood of 1919 happened much more recently and probably still has a greater statistical chance of coming to Boston than an earthquake than does any damage.

At the time, they blamed witches and Quakers for the disaster.