{"id":885,"date":"2017-09-18T11:37:45","date_gmt":"2017-09-18T18:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/?p=885"},"modified":"2017-09-18T11:37:45","modified_gmt":"2017-09-18T18:37:45","slug":"heres-why-we-should-forgive-sean-spicer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/?p=885","title":{"rendered":"Here&#8217;s Why We Should Forgive Sean Spicer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been looking through my news feeds and my social media, and I&#8217;m seeing a common theme: Sean Spicer lied to the American People, and he should not be forgiven.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2017\/09\/18\/politics\/spicer-emmys-speech\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Here&#8217;s a link to a CNN article<\/a> which goes in depth on that point.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s an example of the kind of tweets I&#8217;m seeing:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Emmys: We&#8217;re awarding several women &amp; POC tonight. That&#8217;ll fix our image.<\/p>\n<p>Also Emmys: Meet America&#8217;s favorite Hitler defender, Sean Spicer.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 (((OhNoSheTwitnt))) (@OhNoSheTwitnt) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/OhNoSheTwitnt\/status\/909777736469762048\">September 18, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The idea is that there is no room for forgiveness for any of the people doing Donald Trump&#8217;s dirty work. \u00a0They have sinned against the Will of the American People, and for that, they should be punished. \u00a0It is a great injustice to celebrate Sean Spicer at the Emmy&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d like to take a step back from that and offer some counterpoints.<\/p>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<h3>Sean Spicer was a Mouthpiece<\/h3>\n<p>The first point is that Spicer stood in front of the podium and lied at the order of the President. \u00a0We know he lied, and we knew he was lying right from the very start. \u00a0We have photographic evidence refuting his lies.<\/p>\n<p>Everyone&#8217;s saying he lied, and I&#8217;m agreeing. \u00a0I just want us to take a step back and acknowledge that they weren&#8217;t Spicer&#8217;s lies. \u00a0They were Donald Trump&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>We can criticize Spicer for his lack of integrity. \u00a0Perhaps he&#8217;s a coward. \u00a0Perhaps he believed that broadcasting his boss&#8217;s lies was for the good of the country. \u00a0We can&#8217;t know for certain why Spicer continued to do the job as long as he did it. \u00a0But he&#8217;s clearly not doing that job anymore.<\/p>\n<p>We might even criticize him for being bad at his job. \u00a0He is not the best liar Donald Trump has employed. \u00a0I think that mantle currently rests on the shoulders of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3>Sean Spicer&#8217;s Actions at the Emmy&#8217;s Confirms the Lies<\/h3>\n<p>When Melissa McCarthy stood behind a podium on SNL and mocked Sean Spicer, she gave voice to the outrage over the administration&#8217;s lies through satire. \u00a0She exaggerated Spicer&#8217;s idiosyncrasies. \u00a0She helped reinforce what we all knew: that the messages coming from Spicer&#8217;s podium were a lie, and could not be trusted or taken seriously.<\/p>\n<p>When Sean Spicer wheeled out the podium at the Emmy&#8217;s, he validated Melissa McCarthy&#8217;s performance. \u00a0He confirmed that what he&#8217;d been spouting from the podium, starting with the &#8220;largest crowd in history&#8221; comment, was a false narrative.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s huge. \u00a0Who else has left Trump&#8217;s administration and come clean like that?<\/p>\n<p>And before I leave this point, consider this. \u00a0There are still people that are drinking from the Trump trough and believe every word from the administration is the gospel truth. \u00a0Those people remember who Sean Spicer is, and they know how the liberal elite gather at awards like the Emmy&#8217;s. \u00a0What kind of message do you think Trump supporters are reading out of Spicer&#8217;s performance at the Emmy&#8217;s?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3>We Should Make it Easy For People to Leave Trump<\/h3>\n<p>Suppose Spicer didn&#8217;t go to the Emmy&#8217;s. \u00a0Suppose that Spicer was black-balled from speaking engagements, exiled to obscurity, and punished in the ways that social media seems to think he should have been punished. \u00a0What is gained? \u00a0We still have Trump&#8217;s shills and enablers doing the same dirty work that they did yesterday. \u00a0We still have a Republican senate trying to take away people&#8217;s health care. \u00a0We still have an unqualified narcissist with no empathy and a short attention span as our President. \u00a0We gain nothing from punishing Spicer.<\/p>\n<p>But if we embrace Spicer and give him a chance to tell us, through actions if not words, that he really had been a stooge? \u00a0That could give hope to every other person in the administration that has an inkling of a conscience.<\/p>\n<p>The message we should be sending is this: We know what you&#8217;re doing, and we know who is really responsible. \u00a0Grow a spine, quite doing Trump&#8217;s dirty work, and you can still come to our parties and hang out. \u00a0Maybe we&#8217;ll share a laugh about this whole mess, someday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been looking through my news feeds and my social media, and I&#8217;m seeing a common theme: Sean Spicer lied to the American People, and he should not be forgiven. Here&#8217;s a link to a CNN article which goes in depth on that point. &nbsp; Here&#8217;s an example of the kind of tweets I&#8217;m seeing: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":886,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885\/revisions\/886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}