Obama and the hashtag of doom

Obama held a “Twitter town hall” today. He answered questions posed by people with made-up Twitter handles like “RenegadeNerd” and “John Boehner.”

BUT REAL MEN TWEET STANDING UP: “First of all, everybody can sit down. (Laughter.) It’s much easier to tweet from a seated position. (Laughter.)”


In answer to the pictured question: “I think that -- probably two things that I would do differently. One would have been to explain to the American people that it was going to take a while for us to get out of this.” See, it’s not something he did less than perfectly, it’s something he explained less than perfectly. (The second thing is something about housing, but he doesn’t really mention something he would do differently.)


IT’S B-O-N-E-R: “John obviously needs to work on his typing skills.”

Asked by one NickKristof if he shouldn’t have gotten a commitment to raise the debt ceiling when he gave the Republicans an extension of tax cuts to the wealthy, he says “That wasn’t the deal that was available.” In other words, you were out-negotiated.


Speaking of out-negotiated, here he is asking permission from the super-rich to raise their taxes, because he was just raised polite that way: “As I said before, if wealthy individuals are willing to simply go back to the rates that existed back in the 1990s when rich people were doing very well... if the wealthiest among us -- and I include myself in this category -- are willing to give up a little bit more, then we can solve this problem.” If they aren’t willing, we might just remember that this country is supposed to be ruled by the majority, and we don’t actually have to beg their favor.

THE NICE THING ABOUT THE DEFENSE BUDGET: “And the nice thing about the defense budget is it’s so big, it’s so huge, that a 1 percent reduction is the equivalent of the education budget.” That said, he won’t reduce the defense budget 1%, obvs.