Remember Scott Brown? The last important thing he did was mysteriously tweet “Bqhatevwr” in the midst of a barrage of peculiar late-night tweets that were oddly devoid of punctuation, correct spelling, and other indicators of standard English. Brown of course deleted the tweets shortly after they became a Twitter-wide sensation, but, to refresh your recollection, here they are:
Anyway, Maria Stephanos recently conducted Brown’s first extended post-election interview, and she asked him about his late-night Twitter frenzy. Here’s what he had to say:
STEPHANOS: How about that tweeting thing?
BROWN: Anyone ever hear of a pocket tweet? Pocket dial? It was pretty simple, you know. I have an iPhone 5, actually, where is it – if anyone has an iPhone 5, OK? The keys are small. It’s very, very sensitive. Ayla was teaching me how to obviously get on Facebook and Twitter, and there were some areas I didn’t really understand. It was after her concert, and we were here right in the living room. And I responded to a couple of people, and then put it in my pocket. The next thing, I wake up, and I said…
STEPHANOS: It becomes a news story, Scott!
BROWN: It trended worldwide. Worldwide trending, on a pocket tweet.
STEPHANOS: So you’re saying it was just a mistake?
BROWN: Well, what else would it be? What, am I just randomly pressing numbers and throwing it out there? It just shows you, though, as a public figure, someone is waiting for – especially because I was considering running, so it was like, “oh, haven’t heard from him,” and now allegedly I’m drunk-tweeting. First of all, I rarely drink. The last time I was ever drunk was at my bachelor party. That was, what, 28 years ago? 27 years ago? So, I guess no one has ever pocket dialed or pocket tweeted before.
Now, with all due respect to ex-Senator Brown, that is a ridiculous explanation. You can conceivably put your phone in your pocket and then accidentally dial someone’s number (the “pocket dial”) or accidentally post a tweet; such a tweet would probably consist of a couple of nonsense characters like “asdf” that accidentally got pressed. But sticking your phone in your pocket whereupon it accidentally types “bqhatevwr” and then posts to your Twitter account – no, that is not possible (or, more precisely, the probability of such a thing happening is vanishingly small). And the fact that “bqhatevwr” was immediately followed up by the correctly-spelled “whatever” shows that, in fact, a “pocket tweet” is not what happened. So, ex-Senator Brown is … embellishing, shall we say. Gizmodo goes into more detail about how “bqhatevwr” could not possibly have been a “pocket tweet” (key condition that would have had to be met: “Scott Brown has a very bony butt”).
What really happened is almost certainly this: Brown, irked by whatever it was that “Michael,” “Bud Parsons,” and “Matt” had to say to him, decided to respond by saying “whatever” to each of them. He hilariously mistyped that response to one of them, resulting in the now-famous “bqhatevwr” tweet (it’s unclear who he was talking to, since not only did he misspell “whatever,” he also did not include an “@” to make the tweet part of a conversation with another user), and then continued with his weird series of tweets, culminating in the grammatically-incorrect “Your brilliant Matt.” Whether or not he was drunk, I have no idea – he says he wasn’t. But he surely was not pocket-tweeting.
I have no idea why Brown went to so much trouble to concoct a story that obviously makes no sense.
Getting it done.
We all had a good chuckle over the #bqhatevwr incident. But we all recognize it was a silly moment. That could have been the end of it. Former Senator Brown could have simply said, “Hey, the keys on the phone are small. I wasn’t drunk, but I did simply misspell it and click send. Understandable accident. Shouldn’t be a big deal.” And that would be it. Ultimately, nobody truly cares that he misspelled a word on Twitter.
But, instead, even over a silly, little incident, he can’t take the “whoops” on the chin. Of course it can’t be his fault. It can’t be his responsibility. It was a “pocket tweet.” It was the phone’s fault. Not his fault.
This is just like the “secret meetings with Kings & Queens” incident. Yeah, the comment was an obviously ridiculous exaggeration. But what killed me about it – and what got virtually no coverage at the time – was his short-lived and false explanation for it:
It wasn’t his fault he offered such a silly and untrue exaggeration. It was the early hour of the day and the fast-paced radio interviewers. Can’t be his fault! Of course, when the videos came out of him using the passage over and over again in speech after speech, it became clear that it was part of his stump speech, or at least a stock answer he learned to rely on, rather than an off-the-cuff slip-up. But he was just incapable of admitting that he personally screwed up, even about relatively small potatoes.
He seems incapable of truly taking responsibility for anything. Even little silly things. Nobody is blaming the guy for crashing the economy. Nobody is blaming the guy for plagiarism (this time – though, recall, when he was caught plagiarizing, it wasn’t his fault; he blamed the summer intern, yet again not taking personal responsibility!).
Not only is he unable to take responsibility, but he covers up the silly moments with obvious untruths. Instead of having the dignity to say “Yeah, I made a little, teeny, tiny mistake. My fault.” and move on, he consciously chooses to insult our intelligence and, frankly, lie to our faces about it. Diplomatically put, it’s buffoonery of the first-class, and it’s absurdity like this that makes most of us roll our eyes and throw up our hands when the mainstream media offers him far more credibility than he may deserve. If he can’t be honest about simply misspelling a word, why should anyone trust him to be honest about things that actually matter?
This boy-man seems totally incapable of honesty. Moreover, he seems to talk to a group of supporters whom he deems dull-witted.
His artificial explanation jives with neither reason nor technology.
At 0:42 in this video, on the truck:
Oy. [Head hits table.] “How those things work?” He never shut up about the truck, either on the campaign trail or apparently even in bed at night. He and his campaign team practically made “the truck” the candidate. Yet he insults our intelligence by dismissing it as some kind of spontaneity. Again, oy.
At 1:52 in the same video, on when he knew he was going to lose and his margin of defeat:
It wasn’t “a little percentage.” He lost by 8%, nearly 230,000 votes. It wasn’t “a little percentage in terms of turnout.”
At 2:30 in the same video, on his (actually, more his wife’s, as he notes) complaint about what the voters focused on:
It’s not clear from the interview what “line of crap” Mr. Brown thinks the people “fell” for. However, I’m sure it was higher-minded and more substantive than the entire basis of Mr. Brown’s re-election campaign, attacks on his opponent’s racial heritage.
Buffoonery.
IPhone screens are capacitive-touch technology, which means that they only respond to flesh, meat and similar. Unless Scotty had a pocket full of meat, there was no pocket dialing.
When did I buy plums? Hmm.
But not fabric.
So, Brown is learning Spanish! Hmmm. I guess the republicans think that, if they can speak Spanish, they can get Hispanic voters. Overall, I think the interview is a clear indication that he’s getting ready to run again, soon. Probably for Governor.
This demonstrates to me that Mr. Brown is even more terrified of being asked WHY he fat-fingered his iPhone than of being exposed as a liar. This is a common calculus among people with deep insecurities — sadly, it is usually (a) unconscious and (b) frequent.
This guy is seriously disturbed. At some level, he knows it — he is terrified that he will be discovered, and so he confabulates to hide it. He’s bright enough that it usually works.
He will do just fine as a Fox commentator just as he is. He is dangerous as a public official.
He is not a mature human being operating with full control over his actions, words or motives. It is really clear that the poor man suffers from a need to fill the holes in his ego/id that were allegedly created by his oft neglectful and abusive childhood. The childhood that wasn’t much different than many kids with some level of dysfunction in their childhood/family. Defensive, narcissistic, insecure. I feel bad for him….pretty pathetic. At least he has three women to taking care of him today.
There is no way that truck has that much mileage. In January, 2010, he showed an odometer reading of 200,000 on a car that was, at that time, five years old. No way that he could work at the state house and do that many miles. He probably just changed the odometer to read in Kilometers instead of miles. It’s usually a simple menu option.
Someone just be sure to remind Scott that proper hydration is as important as speaking Spanish if you want to be a GOP bigshot.
Scott Brown said he is considering a run for Massachusetts Governor (front of B Section, Attleboro Sun Chronicle.)
He and Charlie Baker can have a knife fight over this one (which will be fun to watch!)