In congratulating Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, on casting his 12,000th vote last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had an #oops moment. The Kentucky Republican referred to the 82-year-old’s Twitter following in a floor speech Tuesday, after noting Grassley’s annual 99-county tour through the Hawkeye State.  

“No wonder he began his ascent into Twitter legend-dom with four simple words: Attending events in Iowa,” McConnell said. “That tweet is hardly as infamous as ‘Assume deer dead’ or ‘Staff has now informed me of what a Kardashian is. I’m only left with more questions.'”  

But the Kardashian tweet actually belonged to another Twitter-savvy octogenarian: former Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich . Dingell tweeted in July 2014 that his staff had to explain the famous family, but he couldn’t make sense of the celebrities.  

Dingell has fewer than half the number of followers as Grassley — more than 34,000 compared to nearly 92,000 — but both have a reputation for entertaining the social media masses in 140 characters or less.  

Twitter mix-up aside, McConnell pointed to one story that was emblematic of Grassley’s dedication to his home state, and, of course, involved a pithy tweet from Iowa’s senior senator, who in a few months will become the longest-serving senator in Iowa history.  

At the end of his 99-county tour, McConnell recounted, Grassley conducted his annual ritual of getting a blizzard from Dairy Queen. But he arrived before the ice cream shop was open, and subsequently tweeted , “‘I’m at the Jefferson Iowa Dairy Queen doing ‘you know what’ !!!”  

“That’s some tweet,” McConnell said, “but in this Dairy Queen story you have the perfect metaphor for our colleague from Iowa: early riser, driven, devoted to tradition, open to change, never afraid to mix it up.”  

https://youtu.be/nD4mMrio4U8  

Related:
John Dingell Stumped by Kardashian Craze

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