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Estonia's President Writes His Own Tweets, Confirms His Own Silliness

Being president of Estonia must not be all that taxing. How else can you explain the amount of free time Toomas Hendrik Ilves apparently has to noodle around with Twitter and talk to reporters?

By Alexander Abad-Santos
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Being president of Estonia must not be all that taxing. How else can you explain the amount of free time Toomas Hendrik Ilves apparently has to noodle around with Twitter and talk to reporters?  Last we checked in with Ilves, he was tweeting angrily at The New York Times' Paul Krugman over a perceived slight. If you thought that Ilves might be done—you know, having a nation to run and all—you were obviously wrong.

"Yes I send my own tweets," the Estonian president told The New York Observer's Hunter Walker, taking full ownership of his immature one-sided spat. "It was a sincere and immediate defense of the major and often difficult efforts of Estonia to deal with the economic crisis and to stick to the rules adopted in the European Union." Yes, IIves really did invoke the charter of the European Union to defend his (so far) unanswered flames to Krugman.*

And lest you think it un-presidential to tweet whatever he wants, Ilves has a message for you:

Update 12:52 p.m. EDT: Krugman has responded. "I’m hearing from various sources that my rather mild-mannered post on Estonia has generated a vitriolic response from the nation’s president. I’m not going to try to track the thing down," Krugman wrote in a blog post today. 

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.