Leave Twitter to the Dogs

Twitter once offered a correction to the mainstream media’s control over the narrative. Now Twitter is the narrative.

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“What is the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?” the president of the United States asked 10 years ago at the White House Correspondents Dinner. “A pit bull is  delicious.”

Of course, as E.B. White cautioned, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.” But that’s all right because I bring up this decade-old riff to explain the joke that is Twitter. 

The “hockey moms” reference was a shot at Sarah Palin, who had famously joked that the difference between pit bulls and hockey moms was “lipstick.” But Palin wasn’t the actual butt of Barack Obama’s joke, he was. Two weeks earlier, Daily Caller blogger Jim Treacher posted an article noting that Obama admitted in his memoir Dreams of My Father that he had eaten dog when he was visiting family in Indonesia.  

Treacher’s point was to push back on the combined obsession of the Beltway media and the Obama campaign with an old story about how Mitt Romney—Obama’s 2012 opponent—used to go on driving family vacations with his dog in a kennel on the roof. New York Times columnist Gail Collins alone mentioned the incident at least 70 times.  

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    I think I’ll stay on Twitter, partly just to follow Jonah and the rest of the TD crowd.

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  2. Kurt Von Fuchs

    I question your statistics a bit. According to the Economist, Der Spiegel the daily Mail 80% of Twitter users live outside of the United States and most of those folks are not liberals at least not in the American sense

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  3. Jack Webster

    Ya know it's almost as if we keep turning to technology to escape the bounds of our humanity and yet we keep finding that we're human.

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  4. CatoTheElder

    But here's the thing:

    Twitter needn't be the narrative for long. If enough responsible, reasonable people abandon Twitter and refuse to engage in its silliness, stupidity, and worse, Twitter will come to be seen as what it really is: the online equivalent of puerile scribbling on bathroom walls.

    Dog videos and the like can be shared on FB, Instagram, YouTube, and other venues. I'd like to have seen Jonah dump Twitter and announce the advent of a Zoe/Pippa YouTube channel. Heck, I might even subscribe to that. But I'm not going back into the hellhole that is Twitter just to see a dog's butt wiggle.

    Stick a silver stake through whatever passes as the heart of Twitter and move on. Let Elon Musk feast on the rotting corpse he's purchased. And let's have civilized behavior held up and rewarded.

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  5. Ned Calderone

    Dog Twitter is truly the platform's only redeeming quality. There simply is no way to have a meaningful conversation about anything. Toxicity permeates all topics, be they politics, culture, or sports.

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  6. Donald H Waters

    With apologies to W. Shakespeare
    Tweet, and tweet, and tweet,
    Twitter in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our tweets have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief tweet!
    Twitter's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
    And then is heard no more. It is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.

    Tis all I have to say about that with which I will have no truck.

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  7. Donald H Waters

    With apologies to W. Shakespeare

    Tweet, and tweet, and tweet,
    Twitter in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our tweets have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief tweet!
    Twitter's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
    That struts and frets its hour upon the stage,
    And then is heard no more. It is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.

    Tis all I have to say about that with which I have no truck.

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  8. Donald H Waters

    With apologies to Shakespeare

    "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
    Twitter in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief tweet!
    Twitter's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
    That struts and frets its hour upon the stage,
    And then is heard no more. It is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing."

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  9. Avatar photo
    Brett Myers

    Amen...

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  10. Avatar photo
    Rotated Avatar Pic

    I learned a long German word that might describe these “Twitter journalists” that Jonah talks about here: Vierwaldstätterseedampfschiffrundfahrtskapitän. Translated it’s the Captain of a Boat in a lake that only goes around in a circle.

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