Warming Up the Butthurt

People who watch network television were able to see The Tonight Show last night. Current host Jimmy Fallon joked with Donald Trump and messed up his hair.

The rest of us saw snippets on the InterWebz, where we were treated to a huge Twitter storm of outrage at Fallon. Jimmy was damned for daring to treat this terrible person, this —racist, fascist, nazi, white supreemist, irredentist, orange-faced antedeluvianist—thing as though it were just another celebrity-pol to be kidded around with…the way Jack Paar knocked back with Dick Nixon in 1960.

Some of the tweets were too funny to be ill-tempered. Real Grade A comedy stuff turned up, imagining Hitler or Stalin on the couch, welcomed by Jimmy Fallon with routine, generic joviality. (“You killed 30 million people? That’s crazy! Josef Stalin, everybody!”) And some of the anti-Trump tweets were so over-the-top they should be jokes…

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Presumably some were voicing serious, if hysterical, concern. And this concerns us much indeed. Because how will they handle their butthurt when Trump gets elected in November?

Whining on Twitter won’t do it. That would merely trivialize their agony. Perhaps they could go full Buddhist-monk, with gasoline and a Zippo in the middle of a street? That might work.

Here and there we stumbled across striving SJW journo-wannabes, or elderly journo-never-weres, manically shouting out to all parties that this was a disgrace, that you are disgraceful, that I’m gonna block you as soon as I finish my flame-war.

Such was the case with Michelangelo Signorile, a name you probably do not know, but who had 15 minutes of fame back in 1990 when he “outed” the freshly dead Malcolm Forbes. Needless to say, he did not base this scurrility on diaries, memoirs, or interviews with Mr Forbes. Signorile had…other…sources.

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This sensationalism gave Signorile’s shoestring magazine a shot in the arm for a few months. Soon enough, though, Outweek succeeded in “outing” everybody and discovering that nobody really cared. Whereupon the rag folded. In the next quarter-century, Signorile was unable to move from this into serious journalism, although he still rumor-mongers on satellite radio and Twitter.

Signorile had no conceivable business with Fallon controversy except to denounce people with green-frog avis and “Deplorable” in their names. His technique was to bait to adversaries, then call them anti-gay when they talked back.

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Author: Moderator has moderated nycforum.org since 2016.

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  • James OMeara Link

    I honestly thought he was dead. Signorelle, I mean. Can dead people have Twitter accounts? When I saw his name I had to up my blood pressure meds. Oy, doctor, the pressure!

  • Jane Weir Link

    Signorile was only thirtyish when he did the Malcolm Forbes takedown, so he’s got some innings left. Could have been a Perez Hilton, but never a Roger Kimball.