On Wednesday, former president Barack Obama issued a tweet to mark the death of world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking that was hilariously inappropriate for two reasons. One is patently obvious, the other a trifle more subtle.
Here’s the tweet:
Of course, the first thing plenty of people noticed was that the narcissistic Obama was at it again, finding a way to get himself into the story despite the fact that he was supposed to be celebrating Hawking’s life:
Obama does have a habit of doing things like that, as when he offered this picture on the 57th anniversary of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat:
But the other, more subtly inappropriate message from Obama’s Hawking tweet was that he just pooped on Hawking’s life work. Hawking was an acknowledged atheist, so the idea of him “having fun with the stars,” as though Hawking would think there was anything out there for him after his death, would have been contrary to everything Hawking believed.
Hawking said in 2011, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”