During today’s debate between Sen. Creigh Deeds and Bob McDonnell, I was awfully surprised to see this appear on McDonnell’s Twitter feed in the midst of it:
@CreighDeeds confuses audience, mass hysteria ~staff #vagov
Mass hysteria? Whatever Deeds had said, it had left the audience throwing chairs, pulling each others hairs, weeping openly, screaming, running around in circles, and crowding for the exits. What could it be? What had he said that was so offensive?
Well, that’ll have to remain a mystery. NBC 29’s Adam Rhew was covering the event, and I was glad to see him write on Twitter, shortly thereafter:
Mcdonnell ppl tweeting deeds creates “mass hysteria” in auditorium. What? The press didn’t hear it
I expect openly biased coverage from each side of a campaign in press releases, blog entries, comments to the press, tweets, etc. But lying? That was the stuff of the RPV under Jeff Frederick. If McDonnell’s camp is just going to resort to Making Shit Up™, then this campaign is going to get awfully ugly between now and election day.
Lying?!?
Shocked.
Truly.
Are we talking the fire and brimstone coming from the skies, rivers and seas boiling? The forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanos, the dead rising from the graves? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together kind of mass hysteria?
Who are we gonna call to clear that up?
This is why I hate twitter. I came up with four or five different interpretations of that statement while avoiding writing a paper(did he confuse them with mass hysteria? Was hysteria the tool or with what the audience was confused? Did he think the audience have mass hysteria? Was the mass hysteria after the confusion? &c). Would it kill McDonnell to use an article? Even more to the point, Twitter is worth about $1 billion. You can buy a bunch of articles, and the space for all those extra characters with that.
OR, you could write something that isn’t so obviously stupid. (Oh, the irony!)
I’m going back to yelling at those damn kids to get off my lawn now, kthxbai.