Time to Log Off is a weekly series documenting the many ways our political figures show their whole asses online.
On Thursday morning, St. Patrick’s Day, I read a tweet that was the mental equivalent of gnawing on tinfoil with a mouth full of fillings. Would you like to see it? Have you made peace with your loved ones and whichever — if any — higher power you believe in?
Okay. Here it is:
If you’re anything like me, it’s entirely possible that your brain, like mine, just flamed out the moment you finished reading that sentence. I’m serious. There was a good four or five minutes after I read this tweet where all I could hear was radio static, and I’m pretty sure I could taste copper on the tip of my tongue. Would she do an Irish accent?? Would she wear enormous sunglasses? What in the earthly fuck is happening here? Sometimes, when questioning an infinite abyss of horrors the human mind opts simply to retreat inward as a final act of desperate self-preservation.
If only my brain had stayed immobilized for longer, so I could have saved myself from experiencing how astronomically bad things got. At no point between reading Jake Sherman’s report and watching the following could I have ever, ever conceived that it would look like ... this:
If you need a minute to rinse your eyes, ears, and brain with bleach, please feel free to do so now.
Let’s ignore the fact that the poem itself has LiveJournal-esque angsty lines like “the psycho in this human family,” as well as the fact that Pelosi, addressing the crowd of lawmakers, clergy, and other notables at Thursday’s Speaker’s Lunch, has about as much innate feel for poetry as I do for deep space telemetry. Let’s instead focus on the fact that Bono — yes, Uno, Dos, Tres, Catorce Bono — was like “hey Nance, are you thinking of me? I’m thinking of you, too. Anyway, here’s a friggin’ limerick.”
The whole thing is so bad, and weird, and uncomfortable to watch that you almost forget how bizarre and inappropriate Bono’s preemptive hagiography of Volodymyr Zelensky (who is very notably Jewish) as a Catholic saint really is. That Pelosi then segues effortlessly into welcoming the cast of Riverdance is just the sour cherry on the top of this particularly stupid sundae.
Who is this for? Why does this exist? Does God stay in heaven because he lives in fear of his own creation? These are just a few of the questions this whole experience has forced me to ask myself. Until I get some satisfactory answers, I think it’s probably best if Nancy, Bono, and I all spend some time logged off for a bit.
