We can thank Twitter for mobilizing dissent, humanizing celebrities, and @dril. We can also thank it for its endless flood of clueless dolts, sometimes in high places. The beloved Zen master of basketball Phil Jackson has done irreparable harm to his image via a Twitter persona of clueless incompetence, for example, and Republican also-ran Mike Huckabee has revealed himself to be a strange mixture of a racist, a cornball, and a know-nothing. And while you might say this persona was always right there on the surface for anyone who paid attention to his multiple failed presidential campaigns or his folksy, oafs-only television program, Twitter has really brought out the best in him.
Take, for example, his tweet yesterday in response to Jeff Sessions’ Senate hearing. Sessions notably declined to answer many questions related to the president’s possible obstruction of justice, citing not executive privilege but some befuddling, perhaps-nonexistent tradition of not answering such questions. It was, for a lot of people on the center and the left, pretty infuriating for the attorney general to sit there quivering with fury about the injustice of the entire hearing, then back out of answering its most basic, fundamental questions.
Huckabee’s got a take, though!
As the tweet’s 10,000 responses indicate, the attorney general is not the president’s attorney—that duty falls to the general counsel—and so attorney-client privilege does not apply between the two. Also, “accurately answering questions at a Senate hearing” probably does not make someone a “stooge of Congress,” but this is where Trump loyalists are these days, somehow politicizing the notion of truthfulness. Anyway, onto those 10,000 responses:
Someone doesn’t understand the difference between an Attorney General and a General Counsel. https://t.co/RYvflOi2uh
— Herbal (@HerbCarmen) June 13, 2017
Folks, Oscar-nominee Don Cheadle had to hop into things.
Huckabee’s original tweet was so wrong it inspired a sort of existential confusion:
Huckabee did not get down and start mixing it up in the mentions, nor did he delete the offending tweet. Soon enough, he was back to doing what he does best—tossing off corny zingers.
Huckabee’s personal brand of “your shitty racist online uncle” remains perfectly intact.