The Genesis of ‘#F**kYouWashington’
Eventually, another tweeter set Jarvis straight and crafted this into a hashtag. We could see where this was going. Jarvis, one of the smartest promoters and meme-catchers out there, cultivated and curated a wave of angry tweets, retweeting the best ones, eventually harshing on the censorship that stopped his Howard Beale hashtag from trending. Most of the tweets came from liberals angry at the debt impasse. A small sample:
@mcullen546: #FuckYouWashington for calling programs that we pay for entitlements
@mwynn: We see through your public pension theft conspiracy so #fuckyouwashington
@Mr_Pettapucci #fuckyouwashington or letting corporations steal our natural resources and sell them back to the people for profit.
@rogldr5 #fuckyouwashington for all this posturing to assure your reelection.
@bguthro: #FuckYouWashington for playing russian roulette with the world’s economic stability
He retweeted critics. TPM’s Josh Marshall pointed out that the hashtag put blame on all parties, instead of Republicans. “To use threat of default to leverage policy changes that can’t be one at the ballot box, an unprecedented tactic which amounts to threatening vast damage to country if policy demands r not met (sic),” he wrote. “Generalities instead of specifics serves no purpose.” By making rage generic, Jarvis was muddying the story of the current crisis, making it one of Washington failing, not obstructionist Republicans holding spending and debt limit votes hostage until the last minute in order to extract demands.