I had an interesting day on social media.

On Facebook today, I shared a link directly from CNN; their response to the Tweet King's claim that they engaged in false reporting over the latest hacking intel.  My statement was simply that I find CNN to still be as close to neutral as a national television news service can be today.  An old high school classmate hijacked my post and turned it into a tirade about how awful President Obama and all his policies and actions have been; nowhere near the topic of the post.  Damned if I couldn't help myself and engaged him a bit (exactly what President Obama said in his address Tuesday night; so much for talking with people in real life, not online).  Probably my proudest moment in the exchange:

Some other more liberal-minded friends chimed in with me, and then I tried letting it go as I had to admit the discussion was going to keep rolling on about the Affordable Care Act rather than the original statement about the Buffoon's lies about a credible news organization.

I had a professed Libertarian former classmate claim that the term "fake news" was used by Secretary Clinton and also by Democrats eight years ago.  I don't recall that term ever being floated around before three months ago.  Another Libertarian former classmate give a laugh emoji to my sharing of Robert Reich's statement that we need to ignore and boycott the dreadful yet inevitable proceedings approaching us in eight days.  

From there, I had total strangers adding on to my post, and not in a good way.  One man flat out told me to shut up and called me an idiot.  I deleted that comment from the thread-I-never-intended-to-be because I will not tolerate rudeness.  You can disagree with me and we can have it out in discussion, but discourtesy crosses the line.  

Another side example of this: during the campaign, I only unfriended one person on Facebook - I may have unfollowed a couple others just because I couldn't handle their daily prattling as much as I'm sure some dropped me.  This person was a former coworker from before I moved to Las Vegas.  I was never very close with him to begin with, but when he got dangerously close to insulting my mother and started using the c-word on my wall in reference to Secretary Clinton, I was done with him.  And just to clarify, this was also about not tolerating certain speech, not that he disapproved of my then candidate (I was originally a supporter of Senator Sanders - topic for another time).  Most things don't bother me like that, but when you start dropping the c- and r-words, we have nothing else to discuss.

Back to today, a woman chastised me for calling him "the Orange Menace," that I had no business bringing appearances into it.  Petty of me to be name-calling?  Perhaps, but I think to a statement by one of my comedy idols, Mel Brooks, who responds to critics of The Producers when they bring up the Hitler aspect of his film and play.  From a 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace in 2001:

"Hitler was part of this incredible idea that you could put Jews in concentration camps and kill them…How do you get even with the man? How do you get even with him?  You have to bring him down with ridicule, because if you stand on a soapbox and you match him with rhetoric, you're just as bad as he is, but if you can make people laugh at him, then you're one up on him.  It's been one of my lifelong jobs - to make the world laugh at Adolf Hitler." - Mel Brooks

This is where we are with Drumpf.  He loves attention, but he hates criticism.  Helping the world laugh at him, in whatever menial way I can with limited ability, may be the only tool I have to contribute to the fight, but I will give what little I can.

So to all the naysayers and detractors who read my writings on any platform, I say, as cliche as it may sound, we are each entitled to our opinions, and I respect you for yours, but know damn well you will never deviate me from mine.