Adam Scott politely requests Mitch McConnell keep his fucking tweets off Parks And Rec's Ben Wyatt
Although it’s only been off the air for a little more than four years, NBC’s Parks And Recreation now feels a little bit like a lost relic of a long-bygone, more optimistic era, what with its fantasies of helpful elected officials, functional government, and gold-hoarding libertarians who actually give a fuck about the people around them. But while we might all be struggling to keep our Leslie Knope spirit in a decidedly un-Leslie Knope world, it’s still good to see one of its cast members stand up against efforts to co-opt its good-hearted characters in service of decidedly un-good-hearted messages and campaigns.
All of which leads us to the above tweet, directed from actor Adam Scott toward the team supporting world’s-worst-pet-turtle Mitch McConnell, politely asking that they not use images of his character, teen-politician-turned-accounting-whiz Ben Wyatt, for any of McConnell’s campaigns in the future. It’s a sort of 2019-spin of the old efforts by musicians to keep politicians they loathe from using their songs, except in this case, it’s literally Scott’s face being appropriated for political messaging he vehemently opposes.
And also, because it’s 2019, the “Team Mitch” campaign not only didn’t delete the tweet in question; they actually responded with a second Parks And Rec image. Which is less depressing on the grounds of lack of etiquette—this is Twitter, after all—but because it suggests that the people running a campaign for McConnell, who has repeatedly put himself on the side of organizations like ICE and who orchestrated an ongoing, obstructionist campaign to seize control of the Supreme Court, believes that Mike Schur’s series about good governance and basic human decency was about people like them.
Oh, and then Mark Hamill got involved, because, again, 2019.