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Witness the Power of a Fully Functional Hashtag
Russia is invading its neighbors, China is expanding its claims over the western Pacific, and Islamic militants are terrorizing Syria, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria and other nations. But fear not, America: President Barack Obama has ordered his forces to deploy high-yield tactical hashtags across social media.
As the administration drastically cuts the U.S. military, the State Department’s Jen Psaki launched a brutal fussilade of tweets at Vladimir Putin, complaining that Moscow wasn’t living up to “the promise of hashtag.” Today, a pouty Michelle Obama is facing down Nigeria’s murderous Boko Haram with a hashtagged photo uploaded to Instagram.
Let’s all pray North Korea doesn’t march south or Chuck Hagel will have to curate an anti-Juche Pinterest board.
Published in General
I haven’t even read your words yet, that photoshopped image is priceless nothing you say can improve upon it.
[Expletive]…
I guess this is what an ironic foreign policy looks like. I don’t even know what to say… do they really think Putin gets a report of what Twitter is saying about him? If he did, do they really think he would care? This is insane!
Same Here.
This administration mistakes twitter for real life just as they mistake intentions for diplomacy.
Chuck Hagel will have to wait until our most powerful diplomat, John Kerry, crushes the Norks with #OnTheWrongSideOfHistory.
Jon, I think all this begs the question of just who is conducting the White House’s polling and focus-testing.
(Presumably such operations *report* to Valerie Jarrett, but I’m asking here who the ground operatives are.)
*Someone* is telling Jarrett that all this crap is polling/testing well with the base.
Diplomacy (to say nothing of military considerations) is completely beside the point here — surely the emphasis (in the White House’s collective/hive mind) is on how this can play towards the 2014 mid-terms.
Given how “disappointed” certain segments of the base have been with Obama, what with the Snowden revelations (which, in the eyes of these base segments, make the POTUS’s drone-strikes program appear all the more Bush-like), these latest hashtag shenanigans might actually make electoral sense.
In other words, idealistic fecklessness, served up via hashtag solidarity campaigns, might be precisely what the POTUS’s ground operatives are finding soothes the anguished, delicate-flower souls who have been agitating for a November ballot-boycott.
So I’d be curious to know who those operatives are, and see whether they get follow-on gigs after November.
There are dozens of Federal agencies with thousands of six-figure gigs for The Enlightened. No worries, Federal Progs will be livin’ in tall cotton for decades to come.
At least Monty Python’s “Secret Deadliest Joke Weapon” actually killed people.
The #bringbackourgirls or whatever is just sad pandering to single female slactivists.
Its not like they care about nigeria, the violence, the people, the girls, or heaven forbid the other half of the human species. No some girls they never met, in a place they don’t fundamentally care about, got kidnapped, and now they can go on the internet and rend their garments like a pharisee. In a week or 2 they will have some other issue to wear sack cloth over in the kind of moral preening that is a positional good.
Before we marvel at how weak and useless this administration is, let’s remember one thing: this clown beat us, twice.
Reminds me of the line from the movie The Sting. As the bad guy (Robert Shaw) walks past Redford and Newman, Redford snarls, “He’s not as tough as he thinks he is.” Newman answers: “Neither are we.”
#10 KC
As a friend of mine expressed it about the 2008 election, the Dems could have run a ficus as their nominee and McCain still would have lost — in other words, there was a base level of anti-Bush repudiation that would have propelled just about any Dem to the Oval Office.
But 2012 — that I fully grant.
Future generations will remember…
The perfect response:
Aaaaarrrrrrgggghhh! I can’t get the image to load!
Aaaaarrrrggghhh again! It replaced the headline image! Sorry!
Fixed. Edit your comment and reload the image. There’s a bug in the system.
Jon,
Little did I know that the power of the President of the United States in his full role as Executive of the US Government & Commander in Chief of the US Military is simply not where it’s at! If you really want to get things done in this world what I need is a twitter account.
Too bad my darn fingers are a little too big for my smart phone’s keyboard or I could have slowed the oceans and healed the earth by 5pm today.
Regards,
Jim
Shouldn’t it be …# beats man made disaster creators? or # beats work place violence?
Woah, just hold on a minute there. We all remember how KONY 2012 changed the world, I am sure we can expect equivalent results here.
With apologies to EJ and Jon for daring to appear on the same page.
#meaningless empty gestures
#we’re not really going to do anything
#we’re officially out of ideas
#we’re cowards
And for all the celebrities saying “bring back our girls” this one’s for you:
http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/05/08/operation-pouty-face/
Starting as far back as Woodstock and the Concert for Bangladesh, 1971, feeling good about making a difference is more important than actually making a difference. A few moments in history that # was absent for; Ghandi’s march to the sea, defeating the axis, Martin Luther King Greensboro sit in and I’m sure a few more that a pouty face and hashtag wouldn’t have made a difference in.
It appears the world knows what we are capable of as a country but not this president, first lady or the rest of the administration… cowards to actually take a stand that might actually mean something. I’m sure they will just stick to being offended, call everyone in sight a racist and continue a virtual commitment to principles.
Jon, continue to mock, its a target rich environment.
Kozak brings up another marvelous modern word changing precursor to the hashtag, the ubiquitous bumper sticker, probably the most unctuous and useless form of expression for ‘values’ without real change. Wouldn’t the word actually be a better place without the worst bumper sticker ever created- ‘Coexist’?
Well put. A hugely troubling thing about Obama’s foreign policy (and much of his domestic) is that it’s designed only to make him look good to his supporters, real-world consequences be damned. He only wants to look like he cares.
What barbarism! Even Truman only used the the atomic bomb on the Japanese, he didn’t resort to hashtags! #hashtagwarcrimes
Ah the hash tag, it’s like ‘digital waterboarding’, barbarous!