Talk about building them up to knock them down.
With his red sweater and earnest questions about energy policy at the Clinton/Trump town hall debate, Kenneth Bone quickly became a shorthand for all that is right about American democracy: mutual respect, caring about the issues, and the truly unifying power of a pun on the word “bone.”
While cable news networks quibbled about whether Clinton or Trump had won the debate, the internet knew who the true winner was, and everyone wanted to be in the #bonezone.
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Kenneth spent most of this week touring TV studios, packing in a schedule of public appearances of which any political commentator would be envious. He’s even slated to be one of the guests on a special live edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live! airing after the third presidential debate.
Now that guest slot—and his reputation overall—may be in jeopardy.
The first rumblings of discontent came when Ken started cashing in on his newfound fame (as any of us would, really), posting an illegal ad for Uber’s luxury car service Uber Select on Twitter on Thursday (his following on the social-media network has skyrocketed from seven, two of which were his grandma, to 237,000 and climbing.)
Ken’s de-beatification was made complete, however, after he was invited to host an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit.
The wheels fell off the Bone-mobile as Ken unwisely used the same alias in the AMA that he had used to make a variety of decidedly less than wholesome remarks over the past few years.
Here, for example, is Ken weighing in on the hacked nude Jennifer Lawrence pictures:
“Maybe she should have been more careful with her pics, but the bad guys are still the ones who sought them out and looked at them. By which I mean guys like me. I saw her butt hole. I liked it.”
That’s so gross that you can almost imagine Donald Trump saying it. Lawrence herself has said of the stolen images, “Anybody who looked at those pictures, you’re perpetuating a sexual offense. You should cower with shame.”
It turns out that Bone was a regular participant in several NSFW forums, including one devoted to pregnant women in swimsuits, who he referred to as “beautiful human submarines.”
He even admitted to committing “felony insurance fraud”:
Most damaging of all, he suggested the killing of Trayvon Martin was “legally justified”—however we should note that Bone did go on to add that George Zimmerman, who was acquitted in the killing of the unarmed teenager on the basis of Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law, was a “big ole shit bird.”
“Bad guy legally kills kid in self defence,” he wrote. “Sucks for everybody, including us due to media fuckery.”
Will this election cycle drain the good out of everything?
