A cautionary tale...
MSM - Americans shut down DC today. God Bless America! #912dc http://bit.ly/1alHjA
The link took me to a very nice video of the events of the day, so I shared the message with my followers:
Inexplicably, in response, I received a flurry of hateful messages from liberal trolls. An occasional tweet from a bitter liberal is to be expected, but it is unusual to get a batch of them all at once, and I've never gotten that kind of response to such an innocuous message. So I investigated — and when I scrolled down to the first liberal tweet, I found this unsolicited message from Alan Colmes:
here's the teabagger mentality rt @RightKlik REAL Americans shut down Washington today. Not liberals...REAL PATRIOTS.
Yes, this was THE Alan Colmes of Hannity and Colmes fame. I checked the account, and it was directly linked with Alan Colmes' Liberaland website.
For those not familiar with Twitter lingo, "rt @RightKlik" indicates that Alan is quoting (or at least faithfully paraphrasing) something I have tweeted. RT means "re-tweet". Somehow Alan read a lot more into my tweet than was ever intended. He had turned a celebratory tweet into an obnoxious taunt.
@AlanColmes is arguing with me on Twitter. Does that make me as cool as Hannity? #tcot #912dc #p2
It makes you cooler than Hannity, he got paid to hassle and rassle with that loony lib. You're acting as a patriot
Sad…Hannity's old liberal sidekick twisted words…mis-ReTweeted me: http://bit.ly/123M5I @AlanColmes #tcot Actual tweet: http://bit.ly/vualR
The links took my followers (and Alan's followers) to my original tweet and to Alan's mangled retweet.
A torrent of conservative vs. liberal crosstalk ensued, but still no response from Colmes. I began to wonder if someone had hacked into Colmes' Twitter account. Maybe Colmes wasn't really behind any of this. Perhaps he had just hired an incompetent ghost writer.
@RightKlik sorry if I miss-rt'd you
@AlanColmes You did misrepresent my tweet. I accept your gracious apology. #tcot #912dc #sgp
RT @ScnPalin REAL Americans shut down Washington today. Not liberals, not special interest groups. REAL PATRIOTS. Apologies to @RightKlik
I need to get better at Tweeting. I do apologize. And I'm doing it on my own. It's not a Joe Wilson apology.
The Joe Wilson jab was unnecessary, but Colmes' apology was very thorough and seemed quite sincere.
I have to give Colmes a lot of credit for owning up to the mistake. I'm really impressed. But I learned an important lesson — libs can do a lot of damage without even trying!
Be careful Tweeple!
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Update:
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Apology accepted.
Update II:
Apparently I'm not the only one. NewsBusters reports.
