An unintelligible tweet by U.S. Strategic Command went viral and raised questions about the military’s readiness.
The tweet: Stratcom, which is in charge of the U.S. nuclear forces and deterring missile attacks, tweeted at 7:40 p.m. on Sunday: “;l;;gmlxzssaw.”
- The military arm did little to restore public confidence when it followed-up with a grammatically flawed apology.
The original tweet received more than 11,000 retweets and hundreds of comments before the thread was deleted about half an hour later.
The reaction: Some Twitter users quipped that the original garbled missive was a coded message, the nuclear codes, the work of a cat or a sign of the rise of the robots.
Others sounded the alarm, with varying degrees of seriousness, about systemic failures in U.S. national security.
Progressive journalist Yashar Ali cited the Van Halen-inspired principle that small mistakes can reveal larger problems.
There was talk of impending nuclear armageddon.
On the right, Stratcom’s snafu fueled fears that the military is being weakened by progressive ideology and the commander-in-chief’s suspected senility even as China is steadily growing stronger.
“With the brain dead idiot in the Oval this wasn’t an easy tweet to see,” said MLB legend Curt Schilling, referring to President Joe Biden.
Some QAnon supporters apparently saw the latest development in an imagined operation to take down the “deep state” — spurring countermeasures by self-appointed fact-checkers.
It only made matters worse when the Canadian military expressed sympathy for America.
In 2018, Stratcom tweeted and deleted a New Year’s Eve message joking about dropping a bomb.
- Bowing to criticism, the command later apologized and said the tweet was in “poor taste.”
