What if Washington, Hamilton, Lincoln and Kennedy had Twitter?
When it comes to politics, the nastiness isn’t new, only the character limits.
By Clare Doody
Thomas Jefferson once called John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character.” Adams missed no opportunity to remind his fellow Americans that Jefferson was a godless libertine, a Francophile (back then, as in the 2004 election, France was considered the f-word) and a boor whom even Martha Washington didn’t like. Abraham Lincoln said Stephen Douglas’s theories about popular sovereignty were “as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.” You get the idea.
The better question may be: If we could scroll that far back in Twitter history, what would the presidential snark of yore have looked like? Perhaps something like this…
A version of this story appeared on PostEverything, part of the Washington Post Opinions section.
