This is funny, though perhaps not for the staffer involved, Steve Wymer.
A staffer in Sen. Wayne Allard's office is wearing some serious egg on his face after dissing first responders in a release that was supposed to ballyhoo his boss's resolution to declare a national day of recognition for police, firefighters, and rescue personnel.
The paragraph in question:
"First responders in Colorado have recently provided critical services in the face of blizzards and tornados," added Allard. "Since I don’t think first responders have really done anything significant in comparison to their counterparts who have dealt with real natural disasters, I have no idea what else to say here…"
Whoops.
Within 19 minutes that was corrected to:
"First responders in Colorado have recently provided critical services in the face of blizzards and tornados," added Allard. "This resolution celebrates them and all first responders serving our nation."
As someone who works with dummy type all the time, I can attest that Wymer is not alone in making this mistake. Everybody in the business probably does it at some point in their career. It's fun and subversive -- until the inevitable screw-up. What you quickly learn is to use neutral words or -- better yet -- easily noticeable nonwords like "XXXXX" or "DGDGDGDGDG".
Wymer was clearly joking, so only the most humorless partisan would try to make a case that he was dissing emergency personnel. The question is whether this reflects poorly on his judgement or maturity. As someone who has done something similar, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that one. Hopefully Allard is the forgiving type and Wymer gets a chance to learn his lesson without losing his job.
Allard, humor, politics, midtopia
2 comments:
In today's zeitgeist, making jokes about something like this is a bad idea. Believe me, someone WILL try to make something out of this. Humor is verboten in today's political culture even though I think it humanizes things.
Oh, the usual suspects already have.
Humor's okay as long as it's actually funny, and is clearly intended as a joke. The problem with instances like this is that everyone starts wondering if it was a joke or a Freudian slip.
Post a Comment