Via Mediaite, he’s kidding, obviously, but in service to a point. I can’t find the full clip yet to confirm Mediaite’s account, but here’s their description of the rest of the segment:
After the humorous introduction, O’Donnell gets serious– looking back at a history of liberal politicians that have survived sex scandals because their constituents admired their work. O’Donnell notes that, as much as he mocks Newt Gingrich and other Republicans for their private misgivings, he only does it because of their hypocrisy. “Nothing should matter to you less than the legal sexual conduct of [a politician],” he concluded, adding that he believed Rep. Weiner’s career was safe “no matter what he tweets.”
Ah yes, the hypocrisy. One of CNN’s anchors floated that idea tonight too, that maybe Weiner’s off-limits here because, unlike those preachy Republicans, he doesn’t lecture people about their sex lives. That’s the left’s evergreen fig leaf for why it’s cool to revel in GOP sex scandals but not Democrats’. Scott Brown is pro-choice, pro-civil union, and voted to repeal DADT, which puts him slightly to the left of where Bill Clinton was when he had his scandal. Anyone think Brown would get a pass from MSNBC if he got caught sending pics of his schwanz to some coed in Seattle? That’d certainly qualify as legal sexual conduct by a politician, yet I do believe it’d be mentioned on “The Last Word.”
Also, am I to understand from this that if Weiner now comes clean and admits that he accidentally tweeted the pic himself, everything’s copacetic even though his office falsely claimed he was the victim of a serious cybercrime? No penalty, moral or otherwise, for that?
Hot Air has the video.
Amazing!
All Lawrence O’Donnel was saying was that sexual scandal in the case of politicians is more relevant when those politicians have railed against the same moral indiscretions of their enemies–as was the case of John Ensign and Newt Gingrich and David Vitter (who chastised Bill Clinton for his moral turpitude). Now that’s hypocrisy.
This is sooooooooooo tawdry, for thr reason that it blatantly exposes (no pun intended) the double standard of the socialists.
Larry Craig gets ousted because he allegedly “tapped” a signal of gayness or something like that in a men’s room, and yet Weenie boy gets a pass because he says “he was hacked”? Really? So how do we know this? Perhaps he is, even now, sending a lewd pic to my daughter, or to yours- or perhaps even to someone’s son, just because he feels “entitled”, and will claim he was” hacked” again- is this code for “I can do whatever I wish”?
It seems to me that Democrats have taken upon themselves the very position of who judge morality away from Republicans and the “religious right”. By virtue of this, they must now on be held to the same level of ethical behavior that they hold their opposition to. Otherwise it is they who are practicing hypocrisy.