Mockery can be fun.<\/p>\n
And when Stephen Colbert took to mocking Arizona Senator Jon Kyl yesterday<\/a>, I had to join in on the excitement.<\/p>\n Why was Kyl the target of Colbert’s mockery?<\/p>\n Several days ago, Kyl took to the floor of the Senate to claim that 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s operations were abortion services.<\/p>\n The actual percentage is three percent.<\/p>\n Kyl’s office issued a statement. Kyl’s speech, they claimed, was “not intended to be a factual statement.”<\/p>\n Stephen Colbert, not one to let a good mocking go to waste, launched a series of tweets with absurdly false facts about Kyl, much in the vein of Chuck Norris facts or Ted Lilly facts or Captain Rabau facts, all hashed with the #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement<\/a> tag.<\/p>\n Naturally, I made a few tweets of my own.<\/p>\n I was particularly fond of this one<\/a>: “Jon Kyl developed time travel so he could father himself on a transgendered version of himself.” Yes, Kyl as the protagonist of Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies.”<\/p>\n This one<\/a>: “Jon Kyl attended Dragon*Con in 1998 as a Batgirl cosplayer.”<\/p>\n And what I think was my best<\/a>: “Jon Kyl ‘ships Megatron and Voldemort in graphic fanfic he co-writes with Mitch McConnell.”<\/p>\n You can check out my Twitter feed<\/a>, or look at the Twitter archive post from yesterday<\/a> on my blog for the complete score.<\/p>\n I wrote a few more this morning, but they’re not as inspired.<\/p>\n Though I am fond of this one<\/a>: “Jon Kyl uses AutoTune on all of his Senate floor speeches.”<\/p>\n Yeah, that one’s pretty good.<\/p>\n I’m surprised that this hashtag is still going strong, honestly. You’d think that it would burn itself out after a day, but no, even Colbert himself is still making “#NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement” tweets, like this one<\/a>: “Jon Kyl can unhinge his jaw like a python to swallow small rodents whole.”<\/p>\n The interesting thing? Since I joined the chorus of #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement, I’ve picked up at least a dozen Twitter followers. Admittedly, they all look like spam followers, so perhaps there is no benefit to following in Stephen Colbert’s satiric wake.<\/p>\n I take that back. Of course<\/i> there’s a benefit.<\/p>\n Jon Kyl is a pompous windbag (not intended yadda yadda yadda…), and poking at his pomposity is a lot<\/i> of fun. :cheers:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mockery can be fun. And when Stephen Colbert took to mocking Arizona Senator Jon Kyl yesterday, I had to join in on the excitement. Why was Kyl the target of Colbert’s mockery? Several days ago, Kyl took to the floor of the Senate to claim that 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s operations were abortion services.Continue reading “On Making Non-Factual Statements about Jon Kyl”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119],"tags":[3920,369,121],"class_list":["post-5733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-jon-kyl","tag-satire","tag-stephen-colbert","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5733\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}