Washington Post reporter Annie Linskey got herself into some hot water this weekend with one of those jokes that went over like a pregnant pole vaulter. For those that don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, she essentially poked fun at Joe Biden’s trip through the cemetery to visit the graves of his family. Instead, she claimed he was visiting his domestic agenda.

According to Linskey, she did not know he was actually visiting his son’s grave. In the process, she learned two key things as it pertains to social media. First, once you hit send on a tweet it’s going to be out there. Sure, you can go back and delete the tweet, but someone has made a copy and will produce it on the ready.

Secondly, the urge to be first is strong, but an enterprising journalist has to remember it is more important to be right. Being first with a joke is even more pathetic. Exactly how many points does that get you? If she had taken the extra few minutes to figure out why he was there this could have been avoided. If she had taken the extra few minutes to realize she is a Washington Post reporter and not a comic at the local improv this could have been avoided.

As you might suspect, the outrage machine started up in full force. If Twitter is good for anything it is good for a nice ratio. The ratio is where numerous commenters and strangers get to pile on after an ill-advised tweet. So, hundreds of people commented with some saying they were canceling their subscription to the Washington Post. As of now she is still employed with the Post, but it doesn’t take a huge effort to see that changing before this story cycle ends.

As for Biden, he hardly reacted at all. If we can count on Biden for anything it is that he will always maintain his dignity. He will occasionally fumble through words or offer the occasional gaffe as any president would. Some of that is the stuttering. Some of that is a lifetime of not necessarily being a great orator. Heck, maybe some of it is age. What we do know is that he won’t do or say anything excessively mean. The last guy would have jumped at that opportunity.

We should keep that as our guide on what to do about Linskey. While it can seem fun to put someone through the ringer for a horrible mistake, we do have to remember she is human. We have to remember we all make mistakes. We have to remember that she has likely done 100 good things for every one bad thing she has done. While we can say that none of us has ever done THAT, we all can say we have done something awful that would have been ridiculed in public if any of us had a higher social media profile.

So, here’s hoping that Linskey learns something valuable from this experience and that she has the opportunity to demonstrate to us that she is a better person for it. Destroying a reporter for a bad joke doesn’t seem appropriate. At least it doesn’t seem any more appropriate than the bad joke she attempted to take back.

Trump, even as late as this weekend, repeated the lie on his blog that the election was stolen from him by non-existent voter fraud.  He bragged that 80% of Republicans believed that lie as he desperately tries to keep his iron grip on the party that he wants destroyed.  Trump is nothing, if not obsesively vindictive.  What’s telling, though, have been his actions.  How do we know?  Trump tried to wreck as much of the US government as he could on the way out the door.  I don’t think he would have done that had he truly believed he won.

On November 9th, John McEtee, aide to Trump, told Douglas Macgregor, new acting defense secretary Chris Miller’s senior advisor, that Trump wanted full military withdrawal, by Inauguration Day,  from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, all of Africa, and…wait for it…Germany.  Recall that Miller had just taken on the defense job after Trump fired Mark Esper by tweet just a few days earlier.  This, as you would imagine, was an impossible task, and worse, it was from out in left field.  A written order followed two days later that commanded the Pentagon to withdraw troops  from Somalia by December 15th, and Afghanistan bay January 15th.  It was personally signed by Trump in his idiotic scribble.  The order sent shockwaves through the Pentagon as leaders realized that this was an “off the books” operation with none of the usual planning, table top simulations, or alternatives.  This was just Trump being Trump, and luckily the Pentagon held the line, slow walking the order to run out the clock.

At the same time, Trump tried to wreck the CIA and dig dirt on his enemies by installing loyalists at the top of the agency trying to get the director, Gina Haspel, to resign.  Mercifully, that effort also failed as Pence and WH counsel Pat Cipollone came to Haspel’s defense.  Switching tactics, Trump then installed a Nunes staffer and Trump loyalist, Michael Ellis, to the general counsel position at the NSA, a position difficult to terminate by the new administration.  In an appropriate end to his short career, Ellis resigned in April after he had been sidelined by an IG investigation into his role in the handling of classified information and placed on indefinite leave.

It’s now just coming out that Trump’s DOJ tried to get the courts to unmask a Twitter user who had gotten under Devin Nunes skin with a parody account @NunesAlt.  Barr’s attorneys sought a grand jury subpoena of Twitter to reveal the user’s actual name, and Twitter had fought the subpoena until the demand was dropped after Biden took office.

These are just a few examples of the lengths to which Trump went in the waning days of his infestation to wreck as much of the government that he could, install loyalists as his spies, and punish his supporters’ enemies.  Luckily the actual public servants in these agencies kept their oaths to the Constitution, and repelled Trump’s attacks.  Next time (if there is a next time) we might not be so lucky.

Breaking – Twitter has just announced that it has banned Trump permanently due to his continued abuse of their terms of service.  Their statement: “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter’s official “Safety” account tweeted.  That’s only about 5 years late.

In yet another step toward Trumpist fascism, Trump has announced he’s signing an executive order to curb Twitter’s (and other social media platforms) ability to moderate content posted there.  Trump has regularly violated community standards on Twitter, spouting lies, conspiracy theories, personal attacks, and even accusations of murder.  Twitter, and Facebook for that matter, regularly police their platforms for fake news, bots, trolls, and threats.  Frankly, the job they do is inconsistent and generally piss-poor, allowing shocking content to stay posted.   The cancer within social media is the persistent presence of bots and troll which sow discontent, conflict, and dis-information to billions of users.

Up until this weekend, Twitter has allowed Trump to run rampant with no moderation, spreading bile sometimes hundreds of times a day.  The tipping point was his posting of lies and conspiracy theories this weekend about voting by mail.  Trump knows that the more people who vote, the less his chance of being reelected.  Let’s be clear about his intent.  He’s not concerned about non-existent voter fraud. He’s concerned about Americans voting. Period.  If there were free and fair elections with easy access to a ballot Trump will get walloped by double digits.  He and this toads know that, so he’s waging an all out war against voting by mail, even illegally threatening states by withholding appropriated funds from them (just like he did when he has attempting to extort Ukraine to get at Joe Biden).

My belief is this executive order will be just more Trump double speak to rile up his base and give him and Press Room Barbie more bile they can spread on national television and Twitter.  Trump is an ignorant, boorish, self-centered blowhard and everyone knows it, including actual lawyers.  Those lawyers know that the President of the United States attempting to stifle private parties that displease him is the textbook example of government violation of free speech rights.

Let’s review.  The First Amendment says,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The highlight is mine.  The First Amendment is designed to prevent the Congress from passing laws that abridge freedom of expression,  but case law over the centuries has established a general foundation that prevents the government from controlling what individuals can say or do.  Twitter and other social media platforms are private and establish terms of service and community standards of conduct.  Trump isn’t forced to use Twitter, he CHOSE it rather than what previous presidents have done by communicating to the People through press briefings and official statements.  He has cynically used Twitter specifically to spout bullshit that the press would (and does) immediately call him on.  He hates that, continuously trying to circumvent any fact checking by spewing his bile directly through the platform.

If Twitter is guilty of anything, it’s allowing this to go on far too long.  Any other individual spreading the kinds of personal attacks, libel, and outright falsehoods would have been banned long ago.  If Twitter would just cut him off, he would be forced to go back to conventional means of communication.  They opened this can of worms to drive more traffic to the platform and have looked the other way for years, so this crisis is as much their fault as Trump’s.

Trump’s executive order won’t really change anything except intimidate Twitter from any further attempts at moderation of his stream of daily manure that he spews.  I predict that, like his other jaw dropping conduct, will work and Twitter will back down, even though they should ban him today.

Breaking:  The Second US Court of Appeals in NY has just ruled that it’s unconstitutional for Trump to block his critics on Twitter calling it a violation of users’ First Amendment rights.  This is the second ruling in favor of seven plaintiffs who have sued Trump for blocking them simply because they disagreed with him.  Trump’s lawyers had argued that his account was a private one, but the court brushed that aside pointing to the obvious daily evidence that he uses Twitter as an official communication platform for the WH.

Score one for the good guys.

OK, kids, here’s something you can actively do to help get our country back – silence Trump’s continuous stream of bile and hate on social media.  The Women’s March has started a campaign to get 200,000 signatures on a petition that they can present to Twitter during their annual meeting tomorrow, demanding that the platform suspend Trump’s account for his repeated violation of it’s terms of service by inciting hate and violence against all those he doesn’t like.

Think about it – if Twitter and Facebook would just cut off his accounts, Trump would be forced to communicate like all other president’s in US history, by talking to the press and speaking from the WH in official form, not Tweeting from the toilet during one of his rampages.  Think of how much more peaceful life would be for millions of Americans if we could just silence the son of a bitch on social media.

So, please join in to the effort to #suspendtrump.  Pass it on.