Bad

This is...inexcusably bad. Period. Bye, Eric. https://t.co/AlewFJLp8f

— Zandar Wakandar (@ZandarVTS) May 7, 2018

OK, I'm really sad now. I've long had a kind of personal thing about Schneiderman, in that when he was a state senator and I was a harried househusband our kids were in the same public school, not that I've ever met him, and I've loved watching him fight the good fight in our national emergency, suing the Trumpery right and left and stopping evil in its tracks. That will go on, obviously it's the staff that does all the work, not the attorney general himself, but he was just not supposed to be like that; he was supposed to be on the clear right side, as Mayer and Farrow write:

Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, has long been a liberal Democratic champion of women’s rights, and recently he has become an outspoken figure in the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. As New York State’s highest-ranking law-enforcement officer, Schneiderman, who is sixty-three, has used his authority to take legal action against the disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein, and to demand greater compensation for the victims of Weinstein’s alleged sexual crimes. Last month, when the Times and this magazine were awarded a joint Pulitzer Prize for coverage of sexual harassment, Schneiderman issued a congratulatory tweet, praising “the brave women and men who spoke up about the sexual harassment they had endured at the hands of powerful men.” Without these women, he noted, “there would not be the critical national reckoning under way.”

Now he's denying the very persuasive, and awful, stories that are being told about him. My kneejerk partisan first thought was like the first thought I had about Al Franken, that he must be the victim of some kind of conspiracy (I still kind of hope it's in some sense true of Franken) but you can't—at least I can't—sustain the thought for even a page of this story (here's a link to the Times coverage). It's really very bad. Damn.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.