Cockburn has always been suspicious of politicians who don’t drink. The track record there isn’t very good: Hitler, Biden, Trump, Che Guevara, the grand old Duke of York Prince Andrew. Contrast that to history’s legions of statesmanlike squifflers, from Winston Churchill to George Washington to Vaclav Havel.
Hence why Cockburn is struggling to understand why Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel is under fire for getting a bit tibbly.
Nessel, a Democrat, apologized on her Facebook page Wednesday for having had too much to drink at a tailgate party before a college football game. She admitted that she’d been imbibing on an empty stomach, and said she’d later felt sick and had to leave the stadium so as to, as she put it, “prevent me from vomiting on any of my constituents.”
Cockburn notes that this has to be the first time in history that a politician has put such a hypothetical into writing. Yet if George H.W. Bush can yak into the Japanese prime minister’s lap, then surely Nessel doesn’t have too much to worry about here.
Exit quote: “Against all that, Nessel seems like the puritan of the bunch. And perhaps, Cockburn reflects, the real problem here isn’t the boozing but the expectation of outrage that now accompanies our every slip-up. ‘My staff has pleaded with me to hire a crisis-management PR firm,’ Nessel noted in her post. Even with a splitting headache, she still had more sense than that.”