A Liberal MP Spent His Entire Saturday Arguing With People On A Simpsons Meme Page
Arguing about memes? That's a paddlin'.
UPDATE: We regret to inform you that Andrew Laming is at it again.
Until yesterday you’d probably never heard of Andrew Laming, the Liberal MP for Bowman whose biggest claim to fame was probably the time he was called a nong on live television during an interview about the US election. Well, it looks like he’s been following American politics a little too closely, because he just produced a social media meltdown worthy of Donald Trump.
It all started with a meme posted by the Facebook page The Simpsons Against the Liberals depicting Laming as Grandpa Abe Simpson for comments he made about education policy.
This isn’t exactly new — the page has posted thousands of memes about the Liberal Party, as well as Labor, the Greens and One Nation, over the last couple of years. However Laming decided that he wasn’t going to take this lying down. On Saturday morning, people who’d commented on the image were notified about replies from Andrew Laming. Not a fake profile. Actually Andrew Laming MP, on his work account, replying to comment after comment after comment.
To be clear, this isn’t a normal thing for an MP to do. It’s the sort of thing that would leave a communications staffer sobbing uncontrollably into the keyboard as they frantically try to change the passwords to every account. We can only assume that Laming’s staffers were unable to pry themselves out of the fetal position as soon as this saga started, because he just kept responding. In fact, he kept responding for eleven hours straight.
While you were at brunch, Laming was insulting strangers on the internet.
While you were catching up on some work, Laming was claiming that he was commenting because he just wanted people to get involved in politics.
Maybe you caught up with some friends in the afternoon? That would have been around the time Laming was telling the page moderators “I deal with much larger meme pages than this in my lunch hour”, which I guess is the weird social media equivalent of trying to be the alpha?
During dinner, Laming posted to his own page “cleaning your sword after mashing 76,000 (mostly Green/ALP types); in your spare time on a weekend. #Positivelyunclean”.
First of all Andrew, that’s a weird thing to say. Second of all, eleven hours of your Saturday is not “spare time”. Go speak to your family. They’re worried.
Naturally, this all led to a shit-tonne more Laming memes.
When contacted for comment, an admin from The Simpsons Against the Liberals stated that they “have nothing personal against [Laming]” and described the stoush as “a little weird”.
Of course all of this is funny, but the icing on the cake came when someone dug up an article from 2011 about a social media guide put together by Laming advising MPs to avoid public arguments. It’s a point that was reiterated by The Simpsons Against the Liberals: “if he just ignored us, none of this drama would have happened and no one would have noticed”.