Pete Hoekstra
"Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House"
Representative Pete Hoekstra made the year's most unfortunate 140-character analogy on June 17. After Twitter became a tool used by Iranians angry over the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to organize protests and spread news of a brutal crackdown by pro-government, Hoekstra was quick liken their struggle to his own days as a digital revolutionary, when Republicans tweeted a lot after Nancy Pelosi prevented a vote on an energy bill in 2008. Readers were unimpressed, tweeting sarcastic analogies of their own: "My softball game was rained out today. Now I know what Hurricane Katrina felt like." or "I had to sit in the last row of our corporate jet this morning. This is what Rosa Parks must have felt like." The format proved so irresistible that Hoekstra got that most valuable of Internet things: a meme all to himself.