Senator reaches for nonexistent glasses and takes them off anyway
Today's collective LOL at the expense of lawmakers came courtesy of Senator Orrin Hatch, who just reached for his glasses and, upon finding there were none there, decided to take them off anyway.
The 83-year-old was deep in the middle of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen when he made the gaffe. Of course Twitter pounced like a rabid fox on the nonsensical gesture.
Here it is in all its glory.
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And here's perhaps the best of the inevitable jokes that followed.
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Hatch’s communications director Matt Whitlock followed up the incident with a pretty boring explanation — “The senator wears reading glasses and normally reads over his notes one last time before questioning witnesses in a hearing” — before his official account made a slightly funnier joke on Twitter.
The glasses episode was just a sideshow, however, to the most significant event of the hearing: New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker slammed Nielsen for refusing to corroborate reports that Trump used the word "shithole" to refer to African nations.
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"Why am I frankly seething with anger?" he asked her. "The commander-in-chief in an Oval Office meeting referring to people from African nations and Haitians with the most vulgar language ... that language festers."
He finished with a devastating barb: "Your silence and your amnesia is complicit."
Topics Politics
Tim Chester was Senior Editor, Real Time News in Los Angeles. Before that he was Deputy Editor of Mashable UK in London. Prior to joining Mashable, Tim was a Senior Web Editor at Penguin Random House, helping to relaunch the Rough Guides website and other travel brands. He was also a writer for Buzzfeed, GQ and The Sunday Times, covering everything from culture to tech and current affairs. Before that, he was Deputy Editor at NME.COM, overseeing content and development on the London-based music and entertainment site. Tim loves music and travel and has combined these two passions at festivals from Iceland to Malawi and beyond.
