Meatheads All Around

Four things can be true at the same time.

We will come back to that. 

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Some of you may remember Bill Gleason, esteemed professor or chemistry at the Minnesota medical school. Starting in about 2007, for probably the next 7 to 10 years, he tweeted about me between 20 and 150 times a day, seven days a week. For literally years.  He left a few comments here before I blocked him, too.

Many of you remember – he started a blog about me, mostly involving insane rambling about, well, things he thought I was doing. 

He once started passing word around that I had had a DWI. Democrat bloggers back in 2012 were a lumpen unimaginative bunch, so a whole lot of them repeated it. Turns out he’d read one of those spam “public records” websites, where you can pretty much type in any name and it will say “so and so has a DWI – send us $20 and will send you what we’ve got.“. I actually had a pretty solid defamation case against him – but those involve a $20,000 retainer and no guarantee of a payoff even if you win. 

Anyway, eventually, Prof. Gleason died. Turns out his fixation on me wasn’t the only manifestation of mental illness. 

I wrote my condolences to the family, and left it at that. I was a decent human being. He wasn’t – but by that point those who needed to know, knew, and for the rest it didn’t really matter. 

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So – four things can be true.

First: Rob Reiner was a pretty brilliant guy. A Few Good Men and This is Spinal Tap are two of my favorite movies ever. And almost nobody deserves to get murdered, certainly never by one’s own child.

Second: President Trump’s statement on Truth Social about Reiner’s passing was fairly tacky and tasteless. But it’s not like it sprang from the middle of nowhere, because…

Third: it is a fact that Reiner spent the last 10 years of his life pretty much railing nonstop about not just the President, but Republicans in general. It was some pretty seriously demented twaddle. Like, Alex Jones calling him and saying “Rob, bubbie, dial back the crazy a slosh”. I ended up muting the guy on Twitter years ago,, because the signal to noise ratio was pretty much nonexistent. 

The fourth? I don’t feel any need to participate in some performative critical ticket punching. The president was tacky, and if Reiner had been a conservative this past decade, he would have been written off as a conspiracy fruitcake.  My condolences to his family, the film world and his fans. Of whom I was one, when he wasn’t running his fool mouth on Twitter.

Hope I’ve settled that for good.