Chuck Grassley’s Twitter a series of riddles

Senator Chuck Grassley (R–IA)

Senator Chuck Grassley (R–IA)

As you can see from the picture above, in which he takes the con position at the annual Symposium On the World, Chuck Grassley is very old. At 79, he has been a United States senator slightly longer than my brother has been alive. The invention of the internet happened shortly before he qualified for Social Security, and neither of Al Gore’s brainchildren pleases him much. Yet he uses them both. I presume he cashes his Social Security checks in nickels at the grocery store with only his customer loyalty card as ID, because his Twitter is baffling cipher. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for drawing it to our attention.

Screen Shot 2013-05-06 at 9.47.43 AM

Here’s an exemplar of the form. In addition to using the same pronoun twice consecutively for different antecedents, Grassley has left a telltale double-space between “it” and “it,” suggesting that he types full sentences and then edits them down to get below the 140-character limit. In this case, “us” refers to congresspeople, and the second “it” refers to some unknown link Grassley forgot to include. He does not use a lot of links—q.v. his reference to “Monday WSJournal editorial.” Thanks to the vagaries of written English, it is unclear whether Grassley read it or he wants us to read it.

Fortunately, attentive follower/early 1960s chanteuse Corinne Marasco supplies a dissenting link that tells us what the fudge Grassley was talking about. Here is where remember that Grassley is not just a kindly old Iowan, but also one of the Senate GOP’s go-to hit men. As Ezra Klein explains, the Grassley amendment does not un-exempt Congress from Obamacare, because that exemption does not exist.

The Grassley amendment was meant to embarrass Democrats by requiring them to buy insurance on state exchanges rather than continuing with their current policies. The Democrats’ typically inept response has created a tangle of legislature both inordinately complex and incredibly boring, which gives Republicans the advantage. When a legislative issue gets too boring for Americans to follow, Chuck Grassley is there with a rumor. That he is willing to spread false information about legislation on which he himself is working is just one of the reasons he’s the Senate GOP’s most folksy attack dog.

Being just folks is among Grassley’s great strengths as a politician. Much of his Twitter feed consists of accounts of town hall meetings in rural Iowa, including number in attendance and issues discussed. He’s very good about thanking people for inviting him to things. Plus, he reports the kind of commonsense wisdom from good, working people that you won’t find in Washington, DC:

Screen Shot 2013-05-06 at 10.12.29 AMIsn’t that great? Granted, I can’t think of exactly how you could make a living by voting, unless Ike from Waterloo is referring to A) thirty-year Senator Chuck Grassley or B) people who vote for candidates who favor welfare spending. Even if we accept the idea that any government assistance at all—say, food stamps—constitutes “a living,” the total number of Americans who get welfare does not exceed the number of Americans who work. Actually, the more I think about it, the more Ike from Waterloo seems like kind of an asshole, if not an outright liar. But the Senator from Iowa has no problem repeating Ike’s claim to his 68,000 followers.

That’s another of Grassley’s strengths: he does not appear to give a wet crap about whether you know he’s full of it, or whether you know he knows you know that. Grassley’s willful obliviousness is a weapon that he wields with elan. On the morning in 2009 when his Senate committee abandoned attempts at bipartisan consensus on health care reform, for example, he tweeted “Barb made oatmeal.”

That’s the kind of cavalier dismissal of his own audacity that separates the career senators from the mere public servants. The beauty of Chuck Grassley’s Twitter feed is that you can’t tell when he’s deliberately obfuscating from when he is just a 79 year-old using Twitter:

Screen Shot 2013-05-06 at 10.31.17 AM

You think Grassley has been sucked under a wordslide of inscrutably abbreviated nouns there at the end of his tweet—as he enjoys a celebration honoring donors to a campaign whose name is about imagining the impact the campaign will have had—but then, from the maelstrom, you get “bye.” In the midst of a joylessly tweet so banal that no one, even its author, could possibly enjoy it, we glimpse the ghost in the machine.

That’s the best part of Chuck Grassley’s Twitter feed: the man is in there, somewhere, if only reflected in the intern he tasked with managing his phone. Behind all that nonsense is a wily 79 year-old man. I see that as a metaphor for Grassley’s career. He’s an old-fashioned farm boy from Iowa, sometimes boring and always down-home as all get out, and he’s doing every bit of it on purpose.

Combat! blog is free. Why not share it?
Tweet about this on TwitterShare on FacebookShare on Reddit

1 Comments

  1. Remember when we were all growing up in our respective generations, learning that one of the great challenges for the US was that so few people actually voted in elections? When elected officials tried to encourage the exercise of this right?

    Good times.

Leave a Comment.