As a kid I was always taught to not extrapolate the failings of an individual to the group to which he belongs. But after thinking about the Weiner incident, how can any person take anything that any politician takes seriously. Really. When I listen to a politician I get the same feeling I get when I know a student hates my guts (a good number do, in a future post we’ll elaborate on that) but is trying to play nice with me to get a better grade or to get a recommendation because they have no one else to get one from.
So, for all of you cynics out there, check out this absolutely “creepy must-see flashback“:
He called his behavior, including his many lies about claiming he’d been hacked, “a terrible mistake.” He said he was sorry so many times that his utterances reached the point of semantic satiation—completely bled of meaning and heard only as strange repetitive sounds…
Weiner owes me no apology for his serial lies because I understand that that’s what politicians do when they’re cornered by their fibs or unseemly behavior. I’m not even sore with him for scapegoating the press over a problem of his own making. That, too, goes with the territory. Nor am I outraged that he went onto national television to attempt to cover up his lies, telling Rachel Maddow that he wasn’t “trying to be evasive” and he just didn’t “know” whether the Tweeted drawers photo was of him. For me, when the mass of lies equals the mass of apologies, the whole package congeals into some new sociopathic form for which there is yet no name. (Weinerite, perhaps?) That he was caught lying about his personal life, and not about public policy, doesn’t really matter to me. By demonstrating that he’s as good a liar as he is an apologizer, Weiner tells us everything we need to know about him.
You have to click through and watch the video of him getting apoplectic that this was some vast conspiracy against him in light of the evidence we have now. And I am supposed to trust these clowns with health care reform, making budget deals, honestly appropriating highway funds, passing regulatory reforms, etc?
HT to the ever worth reading Coyote.
