Remember last week when the president of the United States congratulated Kansas City’s Super Bowl champions for representing “the Great State of Kansas … so very well” in a since-deleted-and-corrected tweet? People familiar with the admittedly confusing geography of Kansas City (hint: the NFL team actually plays in Missouri) had one of those brief, nervous, laugh-to-keep-from-crying, covfefe-esque chuckles we’ve become so familiar with in the past four years. Many predicted a Sharpiegate sequel while the red-hatted faithful predictably argued that the error was actually somehow correct both before and after it was corrected.
The next day, OKC Mayor David Holt probably not coincidentally tweeted, “A lot of people don’t think about all the work that a city must undertake to host an event like the Super Bowl, so I just want to take a moment to congratulate the great people of Miami, Oklahoma for a terrific job last night!” The calculated shade was subtle enough to keep trolls from turning Holt’s mentions into a dumpster fire, with most replies offering some variation of “LOL” or reminding people that true Oklahomans pronounce it “My-am-uh” for some reason, but our favorite response was, “This must be a joke.”
If you’ve already forgotten all of this (or covfefe or the Greenland thing or the flushing the toilet 15 times thing, etc.), it’s probably because in the days since, the Senate essentially voted that the president is above the law; the Presidential Medal of Freedom was awarded to a talk-radio bigot; the botched Iowa caucus and response to it cast serious doubt on our ability to get out of this mess anytime soon; and we can’t even begin to speculate on what previously unthinkable abominations will have transpired in the time between us writing this sentence and you reading it. If any of this is a joke, it isn’t funny and we would like for it to stop now, please.
