This is where we are now. Actors and politicians Twitter beefing over memes, GIFs and Supreme Court nominations is completely normal. Nothing to see here.

Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s social media team – the folks in charge of his re-election campaign’s Twitter account – posted a GIF featuring Adam Scott as the lovable Ben Wyatt of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation.” The tweet showed Wyatt winking at the camera and was in response to an article about President Donald Trump’s willingness to nominate a Supreme Court justice before the 2020 election.

Scott was not amused. The actor, starring on HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” replied to McConnell’s team in no uncertain terms.

“Dear Mitch McConnell & all those representing him,” he wrote, “Please refrain from using my image in support of anything but your own stunning & humiliating defeat. Thanks! Adam.”

But the online jabs didn’t end there. McConnell’s team sent a rebuttal that only the die-hardest of “Parks and Recreation” fan would recognize: an image of the news article about Wyatt (yes, the TV character) bankrupting his small town’s budget by creating a winter sports complex called Ice Town. Unable to let the diss of a TV character stand, Scott replied with a 1990s-era photo of McConnell, R-Ky., posing in front of a Confederate flag.

That photo resurfaced earlier this year as racist yearbook photos dominated the political discourse in Virginia. At the time a spokesman for McConnell said the Kentucky senator would not pose for a similar photo today.

Scott and the McConnell camp seem to have run out of steam, but this is hardly the first time that partisan politics and seemingly just-for-fun memes have failed to mix. Last year, despite not having a Twitter account, star of “Parks and Recreation” Amy Poehler asked the show’s creator to forward a message to the NRA, which had tweeted a GIF of her character Leslie Knope in a thank you to NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch.

“Amy isn’t on Twitter,” wrote creator Michael Schur, “but she texted me a message: ‘Can you tweet the NRA for me and tell them I said f— off?’ “


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