Odd this day
After the tale of a Florida legend yesterday, it’s time for the story of a legend who took on a man from Florida and won — because it was ten years ago today that ‘feckhead’ tricked a fellow Twitter user into RTing a picture of serial killers Fred and Rose West.
I’m not going to go into too much detail about the man who was pranked in this manner, because we all hear far too much from him anyway, and it would be preferable if the intervening years had seen him face some consequences for being such an extreme example of stupidity combined with amorality, but they haven’t.
On that subject, it may be interesting to note that Christopher Hitchens once said of George W Bush:
He’s a man who is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is a man who is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.
…and it is a measure of what happened to the Republicans between 2008 and 2016 that the next President their party had made his egregious predecessor look like an East Coast liberal and towering intellectual.
But I digress. Back to the heady, carefree days of 2014, when the man who actually, in real life, became the 45th President of the United States of America, responded exactly as one would expect: petulantly, and with empty threats.
Obviously, no such legal action came even close to becoming reality, and Philip Bradbury, the man behind the ‘feckhead’ account, did not have to appear in court on a charge of enjoying a joke, a succulent, childish joke.
His Twitter account still exists, remarkably, but is now silent. One day soon — please, please — may the deep, sweet peace of nothingness be all we hear from the person who retweeted him.
