People are trolling U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse with a novel sort of torture: Nickelback.
First, someone signed the Nebraska lawmaker up for Nickelback updates on every email he owns.
MORE: Who's viewed less favorably: Donald Trump or Nickelback?
Naturally that just invited more abuse:
Sasse later intimated that his colleague, U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, was the culprit. It seems sort of unlikely for a statesman like Hatch, an observant Mormon.
But Hatch nevertheless gleefully piled on:
By the way hatred of Nickelback is actually kind of an official thing. A Finnish university student once conducted a study examining why the Canadian rock band that's sold a zillion albums still manages to stoke such angst.
"Nickelback is too much of everything to be enough of something," was her totally meta conclusion. "They follow genre expectations too well which is seen as empty imitation."
Back to Sasse: not to blame the victim but he did possibly give his tormenter the idea by getting so publicly up in his feelings about the band:
That's like if Clark Kent went around telling people he's Superman and that kryptonite will render him powerless, amirite?
It's not the first time Nickelback has been wielded in rage. Cops in one tiny Canadian town once adopted Nickeback as a DUI deterrent.
"(T)he Kensington Police Service will be out for the remainder of year looking for those dumb enough to feel they can drink and drive," the force said in a social media post last year. "And when we catch you, and we will catch you, on top of a hefty fine, a criminal charge and a years driving suspension we will also provide you with a bonus gift of playing the offices copy of Nickelback in the cruiser on the way to jail."
Kensington, Prince Edward Island, has a population of around 1,500 but the Nickelback guys felt wounded enough to demand an apology, which they received.
We're betting Sasse sticks to his guns.
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