Neil Gaiman responds to Minnesota Republican House Leader who called him a "pencil-necked geek" and a "thief"

Neil Gaiman has responded to the remarks of Minnesota GOP House Leader Matt Dean, who called him a "pencil-necked geek" and a "thief." As you'd expect from Neil, the remarks are classy, funny, and bang on. Meanwhile, Gaiman's tweeting a link to Dean's website appears to have crashed it, as his 1.5 million followers went to see who the idiot was who was randomly calling novelists thieves.

1) It's funny. Sad that this is the kind of thing that elected officials say in public, but still funny. It's the kind of thing that you expect to hear at school from fourteen-year old bullies, before they tell you that they'll be seeing you by the lockers with their friends, not what you expect to see from an adult.

2) It's kind of nice to make someone's Hate List. It reminds me of Nixon's Enemies List. If a man is known by his enemies, I think my stock just went up a little.

3) I like "pencil-necked weasel". It has "pencil" in it. Pencils are good things. You can draw or write things with pencils. I think it's what you call someone when you're worried that using a long word like "intellectual" may have too many syllables. It's not something that people who have serious, important things to say call other people…

And also I think that if you're a Republican in Minnesota, and you read my books or my blog, you could do worse than tell Matt Dean what you think of this kind of bullying schoolyard nonsense from someone who's meant to be representing you. Honestly, it makes you all look bad. Here's a page with his details. It has an email address, his office address, and it even has a photograph*.

* (I would not be human if I didn't admit that I looked at his neck in the photograph, to see if it was as mighty and bull-like as I felt he had implied, and that I might have been just a tiny bit disappointed.)

Neil Gaiman's Journal: The Opinions of a Pencil-necked Weasel-thief…