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The Internet has had quite a run of PC-police work lately, from the outcry against the ultimately fired ESPN writer behind that awful "chink in the armor" headline about Jeremy Lin to the backlash piled on Foster Friess shaming him into apologizing for his lame birth control joke. And, more recently, after Rainn Wilson tweeted a rape joke at 7 p.m. last night, the Internet fought back. He's deleted the offending tweet, though it's already proliferated around the Internet.
Ugh. Wilson apologized at approximately 11 a.m. today.
Apparently my poorly conceived date-rape tweet upset a lot of folks. Not a good topic to joke about.Sorry & won't do that again.
— RainnWilson (@rainnwilson) February 21, 2012
7 to 11 -- that's a 16-hour-offense-to-apology timeframe, a lifetime in the Twitter era. Surely, there will be those who say he should have apologized faster and not only that, that he never should have made the joke in the first place. But countless comedians have made their names with off-color, offensive jokes. And Wilson isn't person to have made a terrible joke on Twitter, nor is he the first public persona to get in trouble for something he said via social media. He's just the most recent.