(thanks to mi compadre Harold Cook
)
Dishonor waits on perfidy. A man should blush to think a falsehood; it is the crime of cowards.
- Samuel Johnson
Once upon a time not so very long ago (five years, if memory serves), people didn’t worry about limiting their online thoughts to 140 characters or less. No one had heard of Twitter, and for all we knew, Biz Stone was a struggling barista with a dream at a Starbucks in San Jose.
Today, Twitter is the online forum of choice for millions worldwide, everyone from politicians to celebrities to felons to athletes. This is widely considered to be a good thing, another example of how much smaller our world is than when I was a kid and my grandmother had a hand-crack telephone on a party line. Of course, with any technology or communications medium there’s the potential for those so inclined to misuse it for their own nefarious ends.
Most Twitter users assume that when a tweet is re-tweeted that it’s passed along either completely intact or, if it’s edited to keep it under 140 characters, the meaning is unchanged. It turns out that some folks are more than willing to alter retweets significantly, alterting their meaning, or make them up altogether. This is where Dan McDonald comes into this story.
Who is Dan McDonald, you might reasonably ask? There’s no reason you should have heard of him; he’s a deservedly anonymous Republican activist in central Texas. McDonald claims to be the Secretary of both the Travis County and Hays County Republican Parties. Maybe he just has way too much time on his hands, but he’s taken it as his personal mission to mess with Texas State Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin) on Twitter.
(Full disclosure: I’ve met Watson. In addition to being a helluva nice guy, he’s also an extremely talented and competent politician, as well as an extremely competent lawyer.)
Messing with people on Twitter is neither new nor original. People do it all the time. I used to do it to the late Andrew Breitbart, who hated me for it (he hated a lot of people; I was hardly unique in that). Mama would have been so proud….
What McDonald has done that’s particularly reprehensible is to alter Watson’s tweets to substantially change the meaning. When that hasn’t been satisfying enough, McDonald simply retweeted things that Watson never tweeted in the first place. Hey, if you can’t defeat your adversary with the sheer force of your superior logic and intellect, why not just make stuff up? Especially if it twists the words of your adversary and makes it seem as if they said something they never in fact did?
It’s one thing to engage in parody, to have a bit of fun at the expense of an adversary. It’s quite another to make things up out of whole cloth and attribute them to said adversary. That’s not just dishonest, that’s immoral. That’s Dan McDonald, for whom any tactic, no matter how dishonest, is acceptable if it portrays Kirk Watson in a negative light. It’s just what you do when all you care about is winning and you slither through life completely devoid of anything resembling integrity. It’s what you do when you’re Dan McDonald, a coward who couldn’t hold Watson’s jock.
