House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was promptly ridiculed by social media users after she said she would be “be reading a poem written by Bono about Ukraine” at a St Patrick’s Day lunch with lawmakers.
Responding to Ms Pelosi’s announcement, Dan Stewart of the Financial Times quipped “hasn’t the poor country suffered enough”.
“More U2 being put onto our phones without permission,” Chris Geidner of Grid News added, referencing when the U2 album Songs of Innocence appeared on all Apple devices in 2014.
Author Rumaan Alam simply said, “I’m a republican now”.
“This was designed in a lab specifically to infuriate me,” Evan Greer tweeted.
Left-wing pundit Hasan Piker joked, “maybe nukes aren’t so bad. Now I think we SHOULD do a no-fly zone”.
“The cause endures, the hope still lives, and the cringe shall never die,” political science professor Sam Rosenfeld added.
“I think she may be confused,” one Twitter user noted. “The ‘Ukraine’ poem I believe she’s referring to ‘by Bono’ is actually the one U2 posted last week by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko.”
On 5 March, U2 posted a rendition of the poem My Friendly Epistle, published in 1845.
“It’s true that Liberal Internationalism has been completely vindicated as an ideology, while Isolationist Nationalism and Far-Left Anti-Imperialism have exposed their failures to the world. It’s also true that we are unbearably cringe,” Oz Katerji wrote.
“I’m embarrassed for everyone involved,” one Twitter user said.
“This is genius. Then Putin will start listening to U2 and realize that war is wrong after hearing Sunday Bloody Sunday,” another account holder added.
Video emerged later on Thursday of Ms Pelosi reading the poem, before introducing Riverdance.
