Twittered Out: Washington Does Not Like Snarky

By John Grant

To: Jofi Joseph, Washington DC

Dear Mr Joseph:

I read of your firing as a national security adviser in the White House thanks to your “snarky” tweeting about various White House officials above you in the pecking order.

I understand you are contrite and a bit embarrassed and told that your tweeting escapade as @NatSecWonk started as innocent fun and turned into something else. Even the New York Times reporters who told your story on their front page today seemed hard pressed not to treat comically. The headline was: “Rising Career in Washington Twitters Out.” Twittering out is hardly a dignified downfall. In the annals of schadenfreude over the downfall of promising national office holders via the internet, at least you did not tweet anyone images of your penis.

From here on out I’m going to treat your situation seriously, since I feel your predicament is instructive. I know you and your wife certainly see it as serious, since she remains on the Washington national-security-state power merry-go-round.

On the Rachel Maddow Show Wednesday night, yours was not the only Twitter-based story. Maddow gave much more time to, and was quite laudatory about, a tweeter named Tom Matzzie, a man who once worked for MoveOn.org.

Mattzie made blow-by-blow tweets from a Washington to New York Acela train of a loud, off-the-record cell phone interview being given in the seat directly behind him. The interviewee, Michael Hayden, as you must know, was the NSA director under President Clinton and CIA director under Presidents Bush and Obama; he now works for the Chertoff Group, which according to its website, “provides business and government leaders with the same kind of high-level, strategic thinking and diligent execution that have kept the American homeland and its people safe since 9/11.”

When Hayden was informed via his cell phone that an ordinary schmuck had just done a surveillance job on him from the seat ahead, the master spy introduced himself and graciously posed with Matzzie for a photograph. As any good spy knows, it’s important to always remain cool and make the best of things when caught with your pants down...

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new uncompromising four-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to:www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2019