Mary Katharine Ham has the full rundown of what happened over at the Daily Caller, but let me sum it up for you. An audience gathered to hear a discussion of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, “Proud to be Right,” and got more than they bargained for. Panelist Todd Seavey veered off into Crazy Land and started attacking his ex-girlfriend (who was also on the panel), Helen Rittelmeyer.
Check out the embarassment below.
Gee, I wonder why she broke up with him.
Mary Katharine has the responses from both Seavey and Rittelmeyer here. But it’s pretty clear who the loser in this situation is, and that’s Seavey. He comes across as somewhat insane, in my opinion. When you start to trash your ex-girlfriend in a completely unrelated setting — a political book discussion — it doesn’t really matter if what you’re saying is right or wrong. You come across like a classless jerk either way.
Not to mention, considering that this video has gone viral (Stacy McCain calls this the best CSPAN moment ever), this is a great way to ensure that you never get another date, ever again. Epic fail.
Was he not supposed to be a liberal?
I ask because, just in the short clip you showed, he made several logical points that absolutely, positively, completely depend on the idea that one shows one’s compassion, or lack thereof, through the public policies one selects for promotion or resistance. Indeed, this is a central pillar of his overall thesis. If you know enough to be a conservative, you probably know enough to understand this is an enormous mistake. He gestures like a lib. He talks like a lib. He thinks a relaxation of assault laws means “living under the threat” of violence or something…like a lib. I can smell tofu on his breath through the video.
He has a very weird voice. It sounds conflicted. It sounds like he’s been blessed with an abundance of the hormones that plunge a growing boy’s voice downward in pitch, so that he could naturally try out for the bass section of the choir, but then he went and hung around a bunch of “aggressively non-threatening NPR males” in college and, because his maturity wasn’t quite there yet and he was still in his formative years, started warbling above middle-C to try to fit in.
I just barely skimmed MKH’s run-down and haven’t exhaustively studied this, but I’m ready to lay some hard cash on the line that this guy is one of the 25% who thinks Obama is doing a great job and just needs some more time to clean up the awful messes caused by the eight years of…blah blah blah you know the rest.
I dunno, he kinda looks and acts like he thinks he’s Q, but he’s no John De Lancie. It seems unfair to characterize him as a liberal, however.
She does appear to fit his description as a lapsed Catholic anarchist and I doubt she’ll be getting many dates from people who have seen the vid either.
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