A senior moment or a secret code? Twitter puzzled over Sen. Chuck Grassley’s ramblings about ‘dead pet pidgin’
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley has triggered an avalanche of speculation and snark after announcing that he found someone’s lifeless pet bird in his front yard. He followed up by reminiscing about a time he hit a deer with his car.
Using his unique style of social media prose, the 87-year-old Republican lawmaker informed the world about his troubling discovery.
“If u lost ur pet pidgin /it’s dead in front yard my Iowa farm JUST DISCOVERED here,” he tweeted. The senator listed the identification information on the bird’s leg band, adding: “Sorry for bad news.”
The message immediately sparked theories that Grassley’s Twitter had been hacked. However, two hours later another tweet appeared: “I assumed deer dead bc it was night and no carcas,” he wrote, apparently in reference to a legendary 2012 tweet in which he disclosed that he had just hit a deer.
“In case of this pidgin i could actually pick up bird. No life whatsoever,” Grassley helpfully clarified.
The rather unusual Twitter thread caught the attention of Grassley’s senate colleague Mike Lee, who joked that he had asked the Iowa lawmaker to “take care of my pigeon, not kill it.”
@ChuckGrassley, I asked you to TAKE CARE of my pigeon, not kill it. (His name was Sebastian). What the heck? Is this payback for my position on ethanol? #LilSebastianhttps://t.co/IkqV1czCUS
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) September 20, 2020
There were plenty of other zingers in response to Grassley’s bird obituary. Entrepreneur Adam Best quipped that reading Grassley’s creatively-worded tweets was like taking hallucinogenic drugs.
Chuck Grassley tweets always make me feel like I ate too many magic mushrooms. https://t.co/XLQ6arZKVt
— Adam Best (@adamcbest) September 19, 2020
Some jokingly speculated whether the tweets could be connected to the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and if the senator was cryptically dropping clues about whether he would support replacing her before the presidential election.
let’s check in with senate republicans and see how they’re handling the enormity of the moment https://t.co/fYGc91fPMS
— j.d. durkin (@jiveDurkey) September 19, 2020
Since it’s Twitter, there was also paranoid discussion about Grassley communicating with his “Russian handler.”
Grassley is famous for his distinctive Twitter lingo. In one classic message, the senator defiantly told then-president Barack Obama that he's "not a nail” and couldn’t be “hammered” into agreeing to healthcare reform.
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