Slate "The Nicest Thing You Can Say About Sean Spicer Is That He Was a Bad Liar"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/07/sean_spicer_was_a_bad_liar_let_s_hope_his_successor_isn_t_a_good_one.html

We should fear a Trump press secretary who’s a good one.

By Will Oremus

Shakespeare’s Marc Antony posited that people are remembered for their evil acts, while the good ones are forgotten. In American public life, it is sometimes the opposite: We see their flaws while they’re in power, their virtues only in retrospect.


That’s probably a loftier allusion than Sean Spicer deserves: The White House press secretary, who resigned on Friday, is regarded more as a comic figure than a tragic one. Yet the task he had set for himself as Donald Trump’s liaison to the media was Herculean. And his performance, inept as it often seemed, was virtuosic in its way.

For much of his time as the administration’s official spokesman, Spicer was popularly perceived as a punchline: a bumbling, stammering, red-cheeked joke who wound himself in rhetorical pretzels trying to justify his boss’s bald-faced lies. That's a caricature, of course, one that's indelibly informed by Melissa McCarthy's devastating parody of him on Saturday Night Live. Still, it's fair to say that the real Spicer provided ample fodder.

Spicer made his first appearance on the White House briefing room podium in a ill-fitting suit and proceeded to berate the assembled press with an absurd defense of Trump's unfounded claims about the size of his inauguration crowd. He often responded to tough questions by furiously yet ineffectually cutting reporters off and insisting he had already answered them. He once retreated behind bushes, in the dark, to avoid questions from reporters—then evidently sought and obtained a clarification from the Washington Post that he was merely "among bushes," not in them. A devout Catholic, he was snubbed at the Vatican. He once seemed to defend Hitler.


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[dalton99a]

1. No kidding

His lies were ridiculously easy to spot

[smirkymonkey]

2. I feel a little bad about saying this, but I have to admit it.

I'm kind of going to miss Spicy. If anyone seemed like they had a hard time doing Trump's dirty work, it was him.

[Grassy Knoll]

3. Spicer's First Press Conference Exposed Trump's Insecurity's..

..Crowd Size/Popularity. Defensive Everything, Trump Sent Him
Out To The Public To Over Inflate The Facts. Bunny Spice Will
Be Forever Remembered As A SNL Skit.

[Catmusicfan]

4. For s much as I couldn't stand him you saw it on his face that first day where

He was force to read that biggest crowd statement. He realized he was working for the Devil himself and the Devil had gone insane.

[sharedvalues]

5. Then he should have quit. Instead he was complicit.

[Catmusicfan]

6. True. But he probably thought he was taking one for the Republican Team

And Priebus probably told him Pence would be in the office by now.

[SeattleVet]

7. I'm going to miss Talky Spice's 'deer in the headlights' look...

you know, the one that he got when he was asked a question that he knew he had to lie about.

It was a sort of, 'Oh, shit...here it comes! I'm going to lie my ass off and then have to spend a whole day later this week at the church in Confession and doing penance.' expression.

[Solly Mack]

8. Yep. It's a loss of comic relief, nothing more.

The best thing about Spicer was Melissa McCarthy's impersonation of his lying and antics .

[Warpy]

9. I predicted months ago that he'd be out in record time

because he got twitchier in just a few weeks than Ari Fleischer did in several years.

Huckabible-Sanders is the daughter of an evangelical preacher turned politician. I'm sure lies come very easily to her.

[eppur_se_muova]

10. Herculean ? More like Sisyphean.

Or maybe a hybrid of the two -- cleaning out the Augean Stables, and then having to redo it all over again every day.