In his combination of unctuousness, mendacity, mock-reasonableness, petulance, bullying, hypocrisy, overweening arrogance, brazen aggression, self-pity, victimhood, and bogus moral preening, it’s hard to beat Congressman Anthony Weiner. He’s the perfect face of the modern American Left in all its glorious pathology; why anyone takes these people seriously is utterly beyond me, so transparent are they. And yet for some, their sweet nothings continue to resonate.
Here he is with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, doing what lefties do best: lie, equivocate, lecture, browbeat, and implicitly threaten, even when they’re caught red-handed:
I mean, how hard was it to see through Tony Weiner? Or an even worse mountebank, John Edwards, who positively oozed phoniness from every pore — and yet somehow wound up on the Democratic ticket as the sidekick to another pretentious poseur, John Kerry? Not to mention Maerose Prizzi as Speaker of the House for four infelicitous years. In a bad sign for the Big Tone, Maerose has fired a warning shot across his bow with her call for an ethics investigation; Weiner ought to take the hint and pack it in.
By comparison, a genial snake-oil salesman like Bill Clinton comes off as a somewhat lovable rogue, if you don’t count the cost to the nation of his perjury and its continuing repercussions. The country is paying a heavy price for the media’s childish celebration of what a good liar Clinton was — the problem is that much less good liars have proliferated in his wake.
Indeed, it’s as if the party of Jefferson has been taken over by the Duke and the Dauphin from Huckleberry Finn, always on the lookout for suckers and easy marks: Sad to say, such willing suspenders of disbelief seem to comprise about half of the electorate these days.
As I said back on Election Night 2008: ”This is an unlovely party filled with unlovely people, as America’s about to find out once the Obama pixie dust wears off.”
Take a good look, America.