Should Managers Allow Celebrities and Politicians to Tweet?

“Half of the time you open your mouth it’s to apologize for what you say the other half,” my mom shouted at me as I banged through the screen door, back into the cul-de-sac where the neighborhood game of “Sardines” was about to begin.

My sister wouldn’t be playing tonight. As I just explained to mom, I was sorry I called her that and sorry she didn’t take it well and sorry she was now sobbing uncontrollably into the coarse pillow of the couch.

If mom could be mom to every celebrity and politician, she’d have the same subtle advice for each of them: the more you think about what you’re saying, the less you’ll have to think about how to apologize for what you just said. Or, as it’s come to, what you just tweeted.

It's been a couple of weeks since Rep. Anthony Weiner accidentally tweeted a photo of his groinal tumescence, and we already have another celebrity that Friday apologized for something he said over Twitter Thursday night.

Actor Russell Crowe, for whatever reason, decided to momentarily hop off the path of sanity and into a little detour where it’s cool to lose your mind over circumcision.

He tweeted things like:

· “Circumcision is barbaric and stupid. Who are you to correct nature?”

· “Is it real that God requires a donation of foreskin? Babies are perfect.”

· “I love my Jewish friends, I love the apples and the honey and the funny little hats, but stop cutting your babies.”

· “Last of it, if you feel it is your right to cut things off your babies please unfollow and f**k off; I’ll take attentive parenting over barbarism.”

He followed that lovely diatribe with the tweet: “My personal beliefs aside I realize that some will interpret this debate as me mocking the rituals and traditions of others. I am very sorry” (By the way: exactly 140 characters; well done, sir.)

Most likely, this apology was written at the behest of (and possibly even by) some sorry publicist who had to make that horrible call this morning: “Hey Russell, it’s Robin. Yeah. About baby penises…”

That call needed to be made, but it shouldn’t have had to be made. If managers, publicists, agents, lawyers and advisers have anything to say about it – and they should or what the hell else are they paid for? – Crowe, along with Rep. Weiner, Carmelo Anthony and all the other public figures who have claimed their Twitter accounts were “hacked” should not be allowed within Uniform Resource Locator of their verified Twitter accounts.

These are people paid to help their employers earn money and power by defining a public image. Allowing any of them to tweet is like building an actual-size replica of the Chrysler Building out of toothpicks, drowning it in 92-octane, lighting a cigar, tossing the dying match onto the organized kindling and smiling as years of work dissolves into quiet cremation.

They shouldn’t be smiling.

Bill Simmons (a k a The Sports Guy of ESPN) has it down right. In a New York Times article this week, an exchange between Bill and Lewis Kay, his publicist, went like this:

…the Lakers’ defeat now a certainty, Simmons auditioned another tweet before sending it out to his more than 1.4 million followers. “We killed Osama and the Lakers in one week?” he suggested. “Too far?”

With that, Kay was finally able to shut him down. “Over the line,” he said. “And I’m speaking as your publicist, not as a Laker fan.”

If only Weiner would have leaned over to his buddy, phone in hand and asked, “What do you think? Too much penis?” I think we could have avoided (or at least postponed) some of the hairiness (or, in Weiner’s case, it would appear hairlessness) the U.S. congressman faced this week.

That said, from a fans’ perspective (and a schadenfreude perspective) I’m thrilled public figures continue to tweet. If they didn’t, we’d never have known Kanye West was looking for Persian rugs with cherub imagery and was really really upset that he didn’t get one. Or that it was God’s fault that Buffalo Bills wide receiver Stevie Johnson dropped a creampuff pass last season.

Or that Crowe still has his foreskin. Even mom can’t be sorry about that.