On Thursday, Washington Post writer Dan Zak (@MrDanZak) unloaded on Twitter in general as a blabby mess. Zak was praising a satirical-Nixon account at @dick_nixon operated by a New York playwright, and dropped this bomb:
Most of Twitter, especially around a big event, is nonstop nonsense, the equivalent of a billion babies with a billion rattles. But @dick_nixon has become the only pundit I look to for Campaign 2016 analysis, because he handles it with the seriousness it deserves, which is to say: little.
“A billion babies with a billion rattles?” Is this how The Washington Post wants to engage in social media to build its business, by verbally bombing it? Zak presently has 6,900 babies – er, followers on his Twitter account. Will anyone unfollow?
Zak’s topic sentence:
If Nixon were alive in the social-media era, I thought, this is how he would engage with the world: through a stream of statesman-like megalomania, told-you-so indignation, sly references to old grudges, cutting criticism of current events — and, yes, the occasional late-night drunk tweet slurred with typos.
Zak turns to Keith Olbermann’s favorite old Nixon hand, John Dean, to disabuse him of the notion of a clever Nixon: “He was strikingly inept at quips, not to mention largely humorless, so he probably would have spent several hours, and several pages of his legal pad, coming up with a 140-character comment.”
The Nixon-bashing at the WashPost will never end.
