Maybe there’s something about this Friday the 13th business after all. I’m saying that because here it is, Friday the 13th, and for some reason, the President of the United States has been struck by a truly remarkable misfortune. That’s because today, President Barack Hussein Obama II decided it would be a really good idea to employ that well-known tool of Internet geniuses everywhere – by which I mean Twitter, of course – to send out a presidential tweet featuring a picture of him holding a sign with the caption “#GETCOVERED” and a hand-lettered slogan in his handwriting which said “Nobody should go broke just because they get sick.”
For the record, I don’t do Twitter. But Gretchen, my private secretary does, and in less than an hour after the White House posted that tweet, she started receiving re-tweets. Perhaps somebody in the Executive Office of the President should have briefed our Commander in Chief about re-tweets, because apparently, he has no clue what they are. So unless you’ve been living under a rock, as the saying goes, by the time you read this, you no doubt have seen several examples of what can be accomplished by replacing the text our dear leader wrote on that sign with other messages.
Therefore, without further ado, I will now share with the vast and erudite readership of Tom Collins’ World Wide Web Log the re-tweets of our President’s tweet which Gretchen has shared with me. First of all there’s hers, where she replaced the President’s message with the following text:
That’s right, the president of the United States was stupid enough to tweet this picture.
Leave it to Gretchen – she’s a plain-spoken Amish farm girl from Pennsylvania who gets right to the point. Regular readers of this Web log will naturally recall my dear brother-in-law, Henry Palikowski, who, at the moment resides in West Virginia with the wife of his own dear brother, Arthur, a lovely lady named Shannon. As regular readers are well aware, the two of them ran off to join a right-wing survivalist group, leaving my dear sister Rose and Arthur to care for their two huge broods of Catholic children in a very, very cozy, and fortunately, rather large suburban home in Fairfax, Virginia, where Arthur and Shannon and their kids moved in after losing their own home in the Subprime Mortgage Meltdown and subsequent Great Recession of 2007, 2008 or 2009, depending on who you ask. Well, Hank and Shannon may be awaiting the End Times in a bunker dug into the Appalachian mountains and stocked with three dozen assault rifles and fifty thousand rounds of ammo, but that doesn’t mean they can’t re-tweet like a couple of Bay Area hipsters, no sir. Here’s what Arthur’s re-tweeted version of the sign Obama is holding said:
Who cares what the birthers think, now that I’ve put Fuddy in the drink?
Shannon, for her part, re-tweeted:
PolitiFact was wrong, Obamacare is only the SECOND biggest LIE of the YEAR.
Pretty much what I’d expect from those two. Hank’s eldest son, Hank Jr., on the other hand, is an art student at Brown, so leave it to him to come up with this zinger for the President’s Twitter sign:
Marcel Duchamp, email home – I am a Ready Made.
And so I would concur. Obviously, my dear nephew will go far in the art world. And as a Ready Made, I suppose it’s time to find a place of honor for President Obama in the Hirshhorn Museum, I guess, or perhaps the East Wing of the National Gallery. Today’s accomplishments have placed our beloved president firmly in both the Surrealist and the Dada schools, something I am pretty sure no other Nobel laureate has ever achieved. Meanwhile, my brother Rob Roy, his wife Katje and their son Jason, who live in Falls Church, Virginia, and work in the Washington, DC technology industry, contributed these clever bons mots for President Obama’s little sign:
Rob Roy – Error 404 – Healthcare.gov Not Found
Katje – Sorry, I don’t know IT from ET, I’m a ******* H*****d lawyer.
Jason – I’ve never met an H1B visa I didn’t like.
Now, like me, Rose and Arthur don’t tweet. Our reasons differ, however. My reason is that I consider tweeting to be undignified, frivolous, and dangerously conducive to a severely shortened attention span. Their reason is that they don’t understand it and have no idea how it works. But their children, on the other hand, sent Aunt Gretchen, as they call her, plenty of re-tweets, and here they are (with their names withheld because they are minors, of course):
I have never heard of Photoshop. Why am I President?
My kids are spoiled brats who go to Sidwell Friends.
All out of ideas – any suggestions?
I AM NOT A FOOL.
My government housing is better than yours.
Available for paid appearances starting 1/21/2017 – graduations, weddings, bar mitzvahs, etc.
My presidential library will need remedial reading.
Who dat who say “who dat?” when I say “who dat?”
I lost eleven teeth playing basketball but got elected President anyway.
My Momma was so liberal, she felt guilty about the Crusades.
Vote for me once, shame on me; vote for me twice…
Will pander to special interests for power, fame, a mansion, gourmet food, international travel and a luxury retirement.
Whoever thought of this will never work in Washington again. Oh, wait a minute, that’s me!
Step one: Extract head from butt. Step two?
Windshields cleaned 50 cents.
Big furniture bargains – left at the next light!
Writ of Non Compos Mentis in re Obama et al. vs. the United States
Ouch. Those kids are tougher than the two of their parents who know how to tweet. Proof, as they say, that the truth comes from the mouths of babes. But what I don’t get is that Barack Obama was born in 1961, which, admittedly, was a while before me, but GZPZ, isn’t that still young enough to realize the risks inherent in tweeting a picture of yourself holding up a sign? I’m sorry, Mr. President, but there’s just no other way to put it – ROFLMAO!