The shame of shaming

Kyler Murray of Oklahoma won the Heisman Trophy Saturday night, a pinnacle moment in the life of any young athlete and one in which Murray thoroughly deserved to revel.

Unfortunately, the withered souls who inhabit Interwhatsis Land decided otherwise.

Not very long after Murray held aloft college football's highest award, see, some floating turd in human form decided to ruin his night by re-posting a few years-old Murray tweets. The tweets included homophobic slurs. Murray was 14 or 15 years old when he tweeted them. They were therefore about as relevant to the young man bench-pressing the Heisman as winged flight is relevant to an armadillo.

Nonetheless, a number of major media outlets -- USA Today, the New York Post and Yahoo among them -- decided this was a story. And so they gifted Turd Boy with prominence he in no way deserved by posting "news" items about Murray's tweets.

This compelled Murray to have to apologize for something he did when he was a child. Just to completely clear the air, he also apologized for 1) writing "a bad word" on the blackboard when he was in fourth grade; 2) leaving a flaming bag of dog poop on old man Johnson's front porch one Halloween when he was 12; and 3) christening the dining room wall with crayoned artwork when he was 3.

OK, OK. So he didn't do any of that, so far as the Blob knows. Or apologize for it.

That, after all, would have been absurd. And yet the idea that he should have had to apologize for those tweets is no less absurd. And the idea that major news outlets would consider said tweets newsworthy  ...

Well. That, boys and girls, is off-the-charts absurd.

Look. Some people have always been awful, and that's just the reality of it. They are indeed withered souls, and their driving instinct is to rain on however many parades they can get to in a given day. It doesn't really matter whose parade it is, or if the withered soul doing the raining knows anything about them. Spite for spite's sake is the only goal.

The unfortunate part about that is it's 2018. This means social media has made the withered souls' dissemination of spite easier than it's ever been. And that includes the withered soul in the White House.

What the alleged mainstream news media needs to do is stop aiding and abetting that dissemination.

Let the withered soul in the White House fire off all the pointless juvenile tweets he wants. Let Turd Boy excavate all the pointless ancient history he wants. Ninety percent of it isn't news; it wasn't before social media made it so accessible and public, and it isn't now. So quit treating it like it is.

You know the sad thing about that?

Once upon a time you didn't have to tell anyone this.