To cleanse the palate, many are woke but few are so woke that they stay focused on progress even while working on a turtlehead.

But then, as Jim Treacher says, David Corn is never off the clock. He’s always … on doody.

This is an all-time top 100 tweet, probably the best to combine politics and scatology since Ron Perlman boasted about pissing on his own hands before greeting Harvey Weinstein. In 30 years children will ask “What was Twitter like?” and I’ll show them this as the essence of the form — petty grievance, virtue-signaling, a reference to AOC, and a distinct sh*t smell.

I just spotted obscene anti-@AOC graffiti in a bathroom stall in the Phoenix airport. Yes, really. (Not going to post a photo of it.)

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) March 5, 2019

“Yes, really.” What got me is that his tweet wasn’t directed at the airport’s official account, as you’d expect if all he wanted to do was alert staff that there’s graffiti that needs cleaning up. (A normal human would have pulled a staffer aside at the airport and told them, but whatever.) This was more of a PSA to the world that Ocasio-Cortez’s good name had been besmirched by an unknown ruffian in a bathroom somewhere in America and Corn would not tolerate it, even while mid-deuce.

The airport account finally did, ah, get wind of his tweet and went looking. No graffiti.

It was in black marker that could be wiped off. I know because I tried. Follow me and I can DM a pic. Thanks. https://t.co/s0VY19WQTy

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) March 6, 2019

Sounds like The Case Of The Bathroom Fascist was solved by the custodial staff having gone in there at some point and cleaned the wall, as they routinely do, thus preventing the next reporter who drops bait there from being traumatized while attending to his business.

Some righties found the whole thing suspicious, accusing Corn of having invented the story for attention. Not me. If you were going to fabricate an ominous Tale From Trump’s America, you wouldn’t choose an offense that’s so trivial and the story wouldn’t place you on the can while it played out. This smacks of a guy who was tired, not thinking clearly, and inclined to overshare about a perfectly mundane experience he’d had — the coin of the realm in Twitter-land — rather than a two-bit Jussie Smollett. Plus, he has photos — sort of.

I didn’t want to post a pic of the graffiti because that would be spreading the work of a deplorable. But here’s a pic showing where it occurred with the message blacked out. No doubt, disbelieving conservatives will still call this a Deep State plot. Oh well. pic.twitter.com/PEBf8p3hC4

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) March 6, 2019

Corn making the whole thing up for easy retweets would be far less weird, frankly, than him observing some men’s room graffiti and thinking “The world needs to know about this” while snapping pictures.

Your exit question: What made this newsworthy in his mind? If the graffiti had been about Nikki Haley, would it still have warranted comment?