It's every high-school kid's dream nowadays, I guess -- make those kids who were slagging you on the Internet eat their words. Only Senator Scott Brown (R-Wrentham) is not a high-school kid. He's a state Senator. Yet that is exactly what he did when he went to King Phillip High School in Wrentham and angrily read off profanity-laden messages posted about him to a student's Facebook page over the objection of their teachers. In his defense, he says that he "called them on it" and that he was trying to show them the difference between hate speech and "respectful, proper speech." So, in his mind, it is hateful for high-school kids to act like, well, like high-school kids, but respectful and proper for him to go into that classroom and intimidate them.
Of course any comments on Facebook about Brown's family are out of line, and the kids should learn not only that, but also that anything they put on the Internet is not as private as they might imagine it to be. That's a valuable lesson for them. Still, the fact that Brown, a state Senator, was so thin skinned that he felt the need to confront these kids in-person and by name is crazy to me.
And this guy is supposed to be the Mass GOP's golden boy? What is he doing trolling around Facebook anyway? I guess now that the Republicans are completely out of power, he has time to sit around all day Googling himself.
Update: Mark Bail at Granby 01033 has this to add from his blog:
Is it time to give this kind of reaction a name? Homophobic Traumatic Street Disorder? First there was Larry Cirignano of Catholic Citizenship who (allegedly) pushed over a protester protesting an anti-equality rally. He recently left his post as the organization's executive director. Now, we have a senator who gets verbally agressive with high school students in public. The guy's lucky that none of the kids got video of him. Cellphones can do that now, and kids have been uploading teachers yelling at them.
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