TRENTON, NJ – From deep within his COVID-19 quarantine, Governor Phil Murphy made an April Fool’s Day appearance to announce an executive order to change the state bird. Let us not kid you. Governor Murphy isn’t the one who sends out tweets and Facebook posts from his official Governor Phil Murphy accounts. Those are handled by well-paid staffers who craft his daily social media messages, most likely inexperienced former campaign workers who needed a state job.
With that out of the way, pretending it IS Phil Murphy who posts those messages, on Friday, Murphy’s account called for the state bird to be changed from the Goldfinch to the middle finger.
Phil Murphy knows a lot about the middle finger. He gets it almost any time he leaves his safe urban confines in North Jersey, but should the middle finger really replace the Goldfinch?
It would be the most New Jersey thing you can do in its raw form, but it’s probably never going to happen. You would see a bipartisan panel on nursing homes before that happened.
So, for now, the middle finger will be New Jersey’s unofficial state bird, reserved for the state’s congested highways and, of course, the next time Governor Phil Murphy comes to your town.