One of the biggest hurdles any politician needs to overcome to achieve career longevity is name recognition.
Historically the best way to do that is to sponsor important legislation, or to put massive billboards all over the country. However, the first is hard to do from the backbench and the second can get pricey.
So astute MPs look for cost effective ways to get their name out there. Like fighting with a Simpsons meme page.
POW!
Stand up, Queensland LNP MP Andrew Laming. The largely unknown member for Bowman has been in parliament since 2004, and has recently been attempting to rebrand himself in the ScoMo era with the totally cool nickname “Lammo”.
It’s on his Facebook page and we assume he’s been learning a kool new signature just like the PM. We’ll come back to this.
And it inspired this:
It’s solid, let’s be honest.
Laming got in a snit on the page, and the site apologised. In the form of putting up a bunch of other posts.
Oof.
Ouch.
Harsh.
NEVER STOPS BEING STRONG.
He was similarly owned in 2016 when he originally decided to fight wth the page, where he congratulated himself for “mashing 76,000 (mostly Greens/ALP types)”, and for not knowing how semi colons work.
Sadly Laming didn’t match his eleven hour effort this time around. That’s… um, lame.
“Zing.”
But let’s just turn to the thing that inspired this little fountain of memes: no-one gets to assign themselves a nickname. That’s not how nicknames work.
Generally they’re one of two types: either affectionate monikers bequeathed by people that like a person, or barely-veiled insults. ScoMo was the latter, and he gamely adopted it because it was going to be used regardless.
So clearly if Andy wants to emulate that level of fair dinkum blokiness, he knows what he needs to do: adopt Lame-o as his new moniker. That’ll show ’em!