Lying To Make Friends

I genuinely enjoy me some Twitter, but I can not think of anything more boring and useless than following a politician 140 characters at a time. I figure if a politician does something interesting, I’ll hear about it elsewhere. And I don’t need to get indoctrinated with some political message written in all lowercase and full of typos.

So count me surprised that something marginally interesting actually came of a political tweet, courtesy of Newt Gingrich’s May 27th “Latina woman racist should … withdraw” comment. It even inspired John Dickerson to write a defense of Republican tweeting in Salon yesterday.

I decided to check out Gingrich’s Twitter feed to see what I’ve been missing all these months by limiting my following to friends, cats, taco trucks, and funny people. But just as I expected, B-O-R-I-N-G. “I’m promoting my book, which is probably boring” “I’m going on Hannity to discuss something boring like taxes,” “I’m predictably and redundantly disagreeing with Obama,” blah, blah, blah.

That one set of tweets where Gingrich a) says Sotomayor is racist and b) equates her brand of racism with “old racism” (by which I think he means the sort of racism that has allowed the Supreme Court to be almost completely dominated by white men) is basically the only thing of interest there.

Except, perhaps, this:

“Auschwitz is a horrifying experience which reminded me of thee vil of kim jong I’ll and dangers of al qaeda hamas and hezbollah”

That tweet came right after the Sotomayor comments and was apparently related to Gingrich’s visit to Auschwitz. (Although it was initially unclear whether Gingrich sent his “racist” tweets from Auschwitz, he later clarified: “Tweeted on way warsaw.”)

Basically, unless you’re looking for boredom mixed with infrequent moments of offensiveness and frequent moments of Twittery confusion (what is a thee vil?), I’d stick to following Sockington.

-AS