Can we please just get the hell over this idea, already? This idea that Sean Spicer or any one of the other flagrantly dishonest, crooked-minded hacks who have hitched their wagons to Trump's toxic self-aggrandizing nationalism are good people, they're just confused?
How Sean Spicer messed up, and how he can make it right
Oh, bite me and then some. Sean Spicer didn't "mess up," Sean Spicer stood up in front of the assembled television cameras of America and lied outright about multiple easily checked things. He did it because Trump was angry about the size of his inaugural crowd, and therefore Sean Spicer, a dishonest man, chose to lie to all of America about that crowd size—a plain propaganda effort, through and through—in a deeply crooked attempt to reshape reality to better flatter the pouting man-child.
But instead we'll be treated to an interview with Bush era press secretary in which he expresses mild alarm at how if Sean Spicer was being told by his boss to go out and pretend the inaugural crowd size was bigger than it was, there were better ways to do it than to go out and lie his brownnosing ass off on national television.
Well golly gee, that is indeed probably true! Sean Spicer probably could have found a way around that situation that didn't involve brazenly lying to the American public on his first full day at work.
And if Sean Spicer was a good person, he probably would have considered that. If Sean Spicer was truly a decent soul who was against propaganda but just confused for a moment, he wouldn't have spent the "press conference" rattling off multiple pre-planned lies—all of which were easily debunked within minutes after him saying them—and then thumping back offstage without taking questions. Sean Freaking Spicer could have proved himself a decent human being at any point during the last many months, and has chosen the malevolency each time. Spare me your golly-gees and your if-only-isms.
If you knew him before this point and he seemed a decent person to you, that's not worth two nickels. If you met him at a party once and he could talk for a whole five minutes without lying to the American public brazenly and repeatedly, congratu-freaku-lations, but that's very far from the point. Yes, a great many dishonest and crooked people like dogs, or make a mean potato salad, or have personally refrained from kicking your daughter in the shins for an entire evening.
And then they are placed in charge of disseminating official information in their capacity as a government official, and they prove to be dishonest. To lie. To be crooked, all for the sake of gaining slightly more government-sanctioned power in the evening than they had in the morning.
And it is your choice, at that point; do you denounce their behavior, or make excuses for it? Do you shake your head or express sorrow that the nice man up there chose to disseminate obvious propaganda rather than do their one and only duty on that stage—to give the public accurate information about the state of their country—or do you put on your big-boy pants and confess that a man who cannot help but lie about the event you witnessed with your own eyes and ears and feet only yesterday has already, on their first day, proven themselves unworthy of the public trust?
It is only the proper functioning of our nation's government that is at stake here, cocktail-circuit-goers. Take your time in deciding.