Regardless of what you may have seen on Twitter, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is most definitely not a bedbug, according to the Cimex Lectularius Association.
“Stephens? He’s certainly not one of ours,” said a spokesinsect for the CLA. “We may be bloodsuckers, but we have standards.
“Have you checked with the crabs?”
Tags: bedbugs, Bret Stephens, crabs
Mad Blog Media 
August 27, 2019 at 1:36 pm |
Good grief. How can a Grey Lady columnist have such a thin skin? That whole Guardian article might as well have been in The Onion. The whole point of Twitter of late seems to be geared to an electronic food fight.
If you can’t take the bedbugs, get out of the sack, I suppose. At least he wasn’t called an arsehole (I’ve been called worse on Twitter).
August 27, 2019 at 2:15 pm |
p.s. I actually enjoy a lot of his columns. Just shoot me.
August 27, 2019 at 3:11 pm |
Not a fan, K. Dude seems to have been born with a silver spoon in his gob and uses it to whack the proles on the knuckles.
What a douchey thing to do, going to the provost over this shit. “Maaaaaaa! David called me a bedbug!” Jaysis wept.
The way it’s supposed to work is the columnist writes something that pisses people off, and the thin-skinned readers call the columnist’s boss and try to get him or her fired. Then the boss tells the callers to get fucked and the columnist gets back to pissing people off.
August 27, 2019 at 3:23 pm |
Hey, someone’s gotta keep the left honest. Its certainly not being done by the airhead in the White House. I figure its best to be nondenominational in my columnists, so read quite a few conservatives (Stephens, Will, Brooks, etc) as well as liberals. Or as the saying goes:
August 27, 2019 at 3:29 pm |
Too bad he quit Twitter. Someone should have reminded him that his white privilege is showing. Complaining to the provost was just plain asinine.
August 27, 2019 at 4:14 pm |
I want my conservatives funny. Like P.J. O’Rourke, for instance. “Parliament of Whores” is a great piece of work, and anyone who doesn’t at least smirk once while reading “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink” is in dire straits indeed, humor-wise.
August 28, 2019 at 12:09 am |
Yep, either funny or smart and this guy is neither based on seeing him on Bill Maher awhile back. Right up there with Ross Douchebag. David Brooks I can take or leave though I get tired of his constant “Jeebus should come back and straighten us all out” solution to everything. Organized monotheistic religions to me are as much as cause of problems as they are solutions.
August 27, 2019 at 4:24 pm |
That’s the kicker. Dude didn’t realize that getting called names is called engagement these days. Those retweets are the currency of the realm these days, and he’s complaining about them. Who does he think pays his salary? Subscribers to the physical newspaper?
August 27, 2019 at 4:43 pm |
And it was such a tame insult, too. Bedbug? Seriously? “Come to my house and meet the family, you’ll see we’re hardly insectile at all.”
If he hadn’t copied the provost on his little snit nobody would give a rat’s ass. Or even a bedbug’s ass. But nobody likes a tattletale. He must’ve been a lovely child. Bet he was a hall monitor.
August 27, 2019 at 1:48 pm |
Just texting with my sister about this creep and then I saw your post. Stephens is reprehensibile in his views and his practice of journalism. Leeches won’t attach to him.
August 27, 2019 at 1:52 pm |
I read about this in the Washington Post.
August 27, 2019 at 3:01 pm |
Yeah, I read it first in the Post, too, Libby. Nothing from Mother Times yet. But I expect there has been a meeting or two over the kerfuffle. What a knob.
August 27, 2019 at 7:43 pm |
“Leeches won’t attach to him.” I am so stealing that. Chapeau LIbby!
August 27, 2019 at 2:48 pm |
Antisocial media. Don’t do it; none of it. Brazil and France’s presidents having a twitter fit while the planet’s lungs burn up. As much as 20% of the earth’s oxygen is produced in the Amazon. Wait, that was just a dream.
August 27, 2019 at 3:04 pm |
No use for it atall atall. I peek at BRAIN’s Twitter aggregation from time to time to see if there’s anything of interest going on among the velo-folk, but that’s it.
August 27, 2019 at 3:23 pm |
Social media is like soma.
August 27, 2019 at 3:50 pm |
More like meth.
August 27, 2019 at 6:28 pm |
Or refined sugar. It must be OK because everyone is doing it.
August 28, 2019 at 2:35 am |
You know what my wife says…
She also thinks in the future we’ll look back on the crap that Zuckerberg, Dorsey and the rest brought to us like we now do the nicotine addiction industry. (aka Big Tobacco)
They knew damn well what they were doing the whole time, but their greed overcame any sense of humanity. By the time the users found out about the awful side-effects… it was too late….Brexit and Orange Hitler as prez, etc. had already happened.
August 27, 2019 at 4:32 pm |
Funny conservatives are a rare breed. Churchill was kind of one, maybe, if you squint a little and cock your head just right. Dennis Miller’s shtick went down the crapper as soon as he got political. He actually had a couple of honest looks at libertarians way back when, and then he became one and the jokes just stopped.
August 27, 2019 at 4:38 pm |
Herself and I saw the pre-conservative Dennis Miller live in California and he crushed. We used to watch his show all the time (“Now I don’t wanna get off on a rant here, but. …”).
I seem to recall that he had some sort of a skiing mishap later, and I wonder whether he rearranged his noggin somehow.
August 27, 2019 at 5:06 pm |
• Late update: The prof weighs in.
August 27, 2019 at 6:09 pm |
THAT was right on point – well done. I’m with Libby: the guy’s a prick.
August 28, 2019 at 8:29 am |
Welcome back David! You’ve been gone too long. Did you make it over here (Italy) this season?
August 27, 2019 at 9:27 pm |
Dave Karpf nailed it. I had some respect for Stephens in his ability to elucidate his point of view, whether I agreed or not. In this instance, he behaved like a thin skinned egotistical ass. Is that better than calling him a bedbug? That defense that “well, totalitarian states do it” is mindbogglingly stupid. Dave Karpf is not Joe Stalin.
Dave nailed another point. If a non-tenured academic had said the same in a less formidable institution than GW, there could have been consequences. Karpf is a tenured professor at a prestigious school. He had little to fear. For Stephens to copy the provost was bad enough. If he had done that to an adjunct at East Overshoe State Agricultural Technical College, it could have cost someone their job. I was at one time on the board of directors of a university faculty. Copying the provost actually pissed me off. If you have a beef, keep it person to person or shut the fuck up. Or take it behind the building and settle it.
JFC.
August 28, 2019 at 8:07 pm |
Hey! I went to East Overshoe! Has a very undeserved rep.
August 28, 2019 at 1:52 pm |
Twitter is for twits. This is yet another illustration of why I refuse to have anything to do with antisocial media.
I understand that anyone who has a business doesn’t have a choice these days, but I don’t and I do. Plus I still value what privacy I have left. Politics and organized religion cause enough fights, you’d think we could get by without another source of gratuitous conflict.
(Full disclosure: being an Apple stockholder I have made money off of this antisocial b.s. I never said I wasn’t cynical.)
August 28, 2019 at 4:17 pm |
Twitter is like an unmoderated comments section that wandered away from its host site and now fastens onto anything with a pulse. It makes the old Usenet newsgroup rec.bicycles.racing look like a Quaker meeting.