Sigh. Cantor spokesman @BDayspring blocks dissenting twitter followers.

I don't follow all that many people on twitter, just because I like to be able to keep up with what's going on, and tweetspam flying by just makes my eyes cross. As such, I'm pretty aware of who I haven't heard from in a while.  Sometimes people go on vacation or otherwise take a break from the 'nets, but those are the rare cases.  People blocking you from following them, however, sometimes takes a little while to notice.

Here's the background:

Back in mid-August, one of the people I started following was House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's spokesman, Brad Dayspring (@BDayspring).  As the alert reader will imagine, I have many differences of opinion with the gentleman from Virginia, and his spokesman, by definition, is no different.  So, like any twitter follower who follows people with whom he or she disagrees, I occasionally reply to tweets that I feel are lacking in intellectual honesty, and especially if those tweets are designed to defend or hypocritically obfuscate destructive economic or social policies.

During the ensuing three weeks or so, I replied directly to nine of @BDayspring's tweets.  I referenced Cantor himself in several others as well.  On September 2nd, I blogged about his amazingly irresponsible and reckless disaster relief funding offset idea, writing among other things:

"Here's a pro-tip [for Cantor]: you should probably go ahead and add disaster relief funding to the list of uncuttable programs [like veterans benefits and homeland security]. At least that way the people who are currently digging out of previous disasters will know that you won't completely screw them over to score ideological brownie points with the extreme side of your party."

I, like many others, joined in choruses of derision, accusing Cantor of holding disaster victims fiscally hostage when he reiterated a position he also held back in May to the effect that additional disaster relief funding for agencies such as FEMA should be directly offset with cuts elsewhere in the Federal budget.

Here are two representative replies I made to @BDayspring during this outcry:

September 2nd:

@BDayspring And your boss's plan to help disaster victims in his own district: Operation Fiscal Hostage. #shameful

August 25th:
@BDayspring Can anyone tell me the last time a House Majority Leader held his own constituents hostage over disaster relief funding? Anyone?

ThinkProgress posted a clip of a hallway press conference at the American Action Forum on September 13th in which Cantor seemed to be confused about the best way to walk back his earlier position and try to avoid looking and sounding like a hypocrite:

And to shed some light on the hypocrisy of this whole thing, there is his diametrically opposing stance from back in 2004, when it was apparently OK to fund first and ask questions later.  In August of 2011, Dayspring released an email to the press which did very little reassure any actual disaster victims.  Seems to me that a disaster is a disaster and lives are lost & destroyed regardless of the government's balance sheet.

So, what was it that prompted Brad Dayspring to block me?  It wasn't when I called his boss's new U-turn policy shameful; it wasn't when I (along with many others) accused his boss of holding his own constituents hostage to a cruelly misguided ideology.  No, this was my last tweet to him on September 18th, which conveniently includes a quote of his original:

"@BDayspring: Remember when LL Cool J was a rapper?” // Remember when Cantor didn't hold disaster victims fiscally hostage?

Apparently that was the final straw, because I haven't seen another tweet from Mr. Dayspring since that time, and am now unable to follow him. Surely it wasn't my hijacking of a tweet about LL Cool J that got Brad's knickers in a twist.  Perhaps it actually caught his attention, and then he bothered to look at my other postings, concluding that I wouldn't notice if he blocked me.

Putting one's fingers in one's ears to avoid dissension is probably the most childish response to said dissension.  Nine tweets in 3 weeks from a guy with ~75 followers is apparently intolerable... to the spokesman for the United States House of Representatives Majority Leader.

The really funny part of all this is that I'm still able to follow Eric Cantor himself.  Perhaps even funnier is the fact that, unlike YouTube, Twitter is ever so helpful, allowing me to see everything that goes on, retweet at will, and even address Brad directly, and he can't do anything about it.