Boy howdy is 2017 an ugly year. Taken just from an aesthetic sense, it’s been a tableau of jagged-edged considerations that appears as you pour a cup of coffee and crack open your morning Twitter. There are the disasters, natural or man-made but uniformly horrific. There are the monster(s) in bathrobes. The sudden preponderance of people talking about nuclear war with something like excitement. The daily nastinesses of the president. The lying, kneeling billionaires. The probable crumminess of your preferred sports team. The humidity in October. If we were growing a great big cultural tree, 2017’s ring would send a tear down the cheek of some future cyborg dendrologist.
So I bring to you some news with happiness, something to shout from the rooftops if you can shake off the despair of everything else to make it up the stairs: You do not ever have to pay attention to Anthony Scaramucci again. You do not have to read the Scaramucci Post. You do not have to wait to find out what the Scaramucci Post is. You do not have to read his tweets. You do not have to talk about them. You can put yourself right back in the pre-Mooch womb you likely enjoyed until this year, where nary a solipsistic profanity can trouble you.
On Tuesday, the Scaramucci Post — the post-Washington social media outlet of the erstwhile White House communications director, whose 11 days under President Donald Trump’s employ ended on July 31 — did a bad tweet. “How many Jews,” the tweet asked, “were killed in the Holocaust?” It was a poll: Was it “Between 2–3 million”? Was it merely “Less than one million”? Or “Between 1–2 million”? How about “More than 5 million”? The poll, with its chipper game show lilt, quickly offended, and was deleted within a couple of hours of first appearing.
An explanation soon appeared that the poll was the brainchild of the hedge fund manager and friend of Mooch Lance Laifer, who runs the Scaramucci Post Twitter account. The Mooch himself, a subsequent tweet explained, “is traveling in London.” The poll was ostensibly a response to a news story about a costume company yanking an Anne Frank Halloween costume from its store; “Thoughts?” @ScaramucciPost wrote with a link to that news story before following up with the poll. (The answer, for those who don’t know, is somewhere north of 6 million.)
Maybe you saw this poll, and maybe it made you mad. It was a bad idea badly executed. Here is another thing that is bad: the Scaramucci Post. Here’s one more: Scaramucci himself. He is, in addition to his badness, a couple of other things: silly and irrelevant.
It is tempting to keep an eye on the perpetrator of history’s (presumably) first discussion of the alleged auto-fellatio of a White House strategist. After his subsequent shitcanning, the financier turned pundit turned face of funemployement created the Twitter account @ScaramucciPost in an attempt to transform the spectacle into some kind of more concrete currency. It worked, insofar as the account now has more than 24,000 followers and was referred to Tuesday in The Washington Post as a “media company,” despite not producing any non-social media. At the start of October, Scaramucci hosted a “launch party” for members of the media at a Manhattan steakhouse, where even the Mooch was unable to keep up the front: “We have no idea what the Scaramucci Post is,” he told a reporter from The Hill.
Friends. My dear friends. We do not have to join this man and his finance pals on their journey. Scaramucci is out of a job, his bridges to Trump and whatever decision-making processes our commander-in-chief goes through thoroughly burned. You do not have to follow @ScaramucciPost, or @Scaramucci, or any of his friends. He and they do not and will not have anything useful, interesting, or even particularly entertaining to say. The correct question to ask about the Mooch is, “Who cares?,” and the best part is that the answer can — should — be, “Not you.” Go ahead and not care about Scaramucci. Just close this tab, and let’s never allow this bellicose nincompoop with nothing to say to cross our digital threshold ever again.
