If you’ve had better things to do over the last week or two than follow what reporters are doing on Twitter, congratulate yourself for minimizing your exposure to the shitstorm we’re going to discuss today.
David Weigel is a reporter for the Washington Post. I’m not really familiar with Dave’s work, but I do know in the last couple of weeks he retweeted a bad joke.
The joke, in case you were wondering, was something told by a YouTuber named Cam Harless, who apparently twitted “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.”
Now it’s not my kind of joke. But your humble humorist realizes comedy is subjective and what one person finds hilarious might not tickle another’s fancy.
Someone who really didn’t like Weigel’s retweet of a joke was his former colleague Felicia Sonmez, a political reporter for the Post. Sonmez posted a screen grab of the twit to her followers with the caption “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!”
That wasn’t enough for Sonmez, who confronted Weigel in a company Slack channel over the RT, asking him, “I’m sorry, what is this?” Sonmez also asked in the Slack channel if the retweet “sent a confusing message about what the Post’s values are.”
If you’ve read SJ long enough, you know what happened to Dave Weigel. He was suspended for a month without pay over retweeting a joke.
As for Ms. Sonmez, she continued her Twitter rampage attacking her bosses of rampant sexism, racism, whateverthefuckism, you name it. Meanwhile her bosses were publishing company wide memos about being respectful and not harassing other employees.
Sonmez, not satisfied with the pound of flesh she’d taken, continued her rampage until June 9, 2022, when the Post terminated her employment for generally being a stick in the mud and acting like a whiny bitch.
Now before I continue on this path, I want to make something very clear. I love and respect women. I’m married to a wonderful woman and I’m trying damned hard to raise a loving, empathetic daughter who gives the best hugs around.
But if you’re going to make a big stink and get someone suspended from their job without pay over a fucking retweet of a poor joke, I’m going to take notice and act accordingly.
The following highly problematic statements are therefore made in solidarity with David Weigel, he of the WaPo Excommunicado. CUE THE SMARTASS TIMER!
*I guess we can update the joke now to “bipolar, bi-sexual, and bye-Felicia.”
*Leave it to a woman to go out of her way to prove the saying “Life imitates art.”
*I’m not saying correlation equals causation, but we gave women the right to vote and then a couple of wars happened.
*Marrying a woman is like being in a hurricane. It starts out with a lot of sucking and blowing then eventually you lose half your shit.
*Women are to blame for the rise of Reality TV because it allows them to be judgmental from their couches with a glass of wine in hand and suffer zero consequences for it.
*You know a woman’s about to say something smart when she begins a sentence with “A man told me…”
*A man driving a car hits a woman. The man is clearly at fault in this scenario. Why was he driving a car through the kitchen?
*Life is like a penis: women make it hard for no reason.
*Everyone says the world would be better off if it was run by women. Sure, maybe there wouldn’t be violence and territorial conquests fueled by male testosterone. But instead, we’d have a bunch of jealous countries that aren’t talking to each other.
*When a man opens the car door for his wife, you can be sure of one thing, either the car is new or the wife is.
*How many men does it take to open a beer? None. It should be opened by the time she brings it.
*We can update another meme: “Asteroid Tweets About Striking Earth: Women Most Offended.”
In the words of Arthur Hoggett in the movie “Babe:” “That’ll do, pig.”
I think it will. Nicely.
Happy Friday everyone! Hope you had a great week, and remember: no matter how bad things got, at least you weren’t fired or suspended from your job over a retweet of a joke!
And hopefully I’m allowed back next week after this little tirade. In my defense I did tell my mean-ass editor what I planned to do this week; I didn’t tell him how low I was going to stoop in the process.
If I’m not canceled we’ll see you next week, everyone!
Careful, my friend…
“No man is complete until he’s married. Then, he’s finished.”
“The three rings of marriage: engagement ring, wedding ring, and suffering.”
Like the Theo Von says, “They’re just jokes, people. They can’t all be good.”
As another comedian said, “Take my wife…please.”
Told my wife I wanted to be cremated. She has me set for next Tues.
All that gertruding won’t save you now.
Can we still say Gertruding?
Well I don’t know about you, but I can say anything I want because I don’t give a flip what anyone thinks about it. I refuse to be defeated by a bunch of scolds looking for reasons to be offended.
Read an article yesterday about how kids in their 20s on down and some up into the early 30s are starting to turn against feminism because the new batch has changed it from being about gaining equality and have turned it into a weapon to destroy people, mostly males, for any or no reason and with no recourse once you are targeted.
Your jokes were much funnier than Weigel’s.
Weigel’s good at what he does. It’s too much horse-race oriented coverage for me, but he’s quite good at it. He’s superlative when it comes to progressive (in the non-political sense) rock.