Dramatist Nancy Mace is absurd
Go ahead, you keep shaming women for being raped. Good luck with that.
Above is how Nancy Mace brought ten minutes of madness to a close on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Her rhetoric was cheap, dishonest and utterly ridiculous. Once again, she has fully used a media opportunity to embarrass herself, and deliver an exposition on shallowness and pure cravenness.
The comments she made after the January 6 attack incited by Trump and her posture today are simply breathtaking for their cynicism. Mace’s lack of self-awareness borders on the clinical as she demands entitlements, and proves belligerence is not wisdom and obstinacy is not courage. Mace isn’t just unprincipled. She is a supernova among the attention-seeking and narcissistic personalities that dominate the US Congress. She is the elected official version of the personality type that would love to live in a tree house with 80 cameras and 20 people so long as her every move was recorded. She is the millennial Norma Desmond, washed up and lost in a world of mirrors, where in the end, the only one looking back is Mace herself shouting into the void, “Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.”
George Stephanopoulos asked a question over and over again that is fair, appropriate and absolutely necessary to ask an elected official of the United States Congress on a Sunday morning public affairs show that has aired 43 years worth of shows asking questions of elected leaders.
During much of the show’s history, it was a venue where some of the nation’s most important leaders and journalists would engage in robust and meaningful interviews about issues that shape the lives and fortunes of scores of millions of people around the world. Once upon a time, the network Sunday shows were bastions of seriousness and substance that informed the public and framed debates around monumental topics that ranged from war and peace to civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and human rights.
The decision to book Nancy Mace served what journalistic purpose exactly?
What great insight did she stand ready to reveal? What great decision was she on the precipice of making that needed public examination? What committees does she chair? What power does she hold to set the congressional agenda?
Her booking was an act of laziness and tiredness. It is a monument to a degraded journalism and the ethical desert of corporate newsrooms. Before Nancy Mace’s insanity can be repudiated, it makes some sense to ask why it is that the emptiest politicians are the most famous. Just a week ago, the Secretary of Defense said that he believes that there will be a military conflict between NATO and Russia should Ukraine fall. How can it be that the person that ABC News put on Sunday morning to be questioned by the smartest person at the network was Nancy Mace? Celebrating her and inflating her is as cynical as she is. She loves attention, and somehow that has become the only qualification that matters in official Washington.
The problem in many of America’s newsrooms is that they are filled with people who see the most frivolous among us and confuse the qualities of banality for something interesting. What I’m trying to say is that the Swedish Defense Minister from NATO’s newest member would have been a better choice, but exploitation, not information, is the business model beyond just CNN.
At any rate, after showing footage of Nancy Mace talking about her experience as a rape victim, the question Stephanopoulos asked her was this:
A judge and juries have found Donald Trump liable of rape and for defaming that victim of rape. How do you square your endorsement of Trump with the testimony we just saw?
She responded with this:
I will tell you I was raped at the age of 16. Any victim of rape will tell you that I've lived for 30 years with an incredible amount of shame for being raped. I didn't come forward because of that judgment and shame that I felt. It is a shame you will never feel, George. And I'm not going to sit on your show and be asked a question meant to shame me about another potential rape victim. I'm not going to do that.
Stephanopoulos responds:
It's not about shaming you. It's a question about Donald Trump. You've endorsed Donald Trump for president. Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury, and found liable for defaming the victim of that rape by a jury. It's been affirmed by a judge.
Mace says in response:
It was not a criminal court case, number one. Number two, I live with shame and you're asking me a question about my political choices trying to shame me as a rape victim, and I find it disgusting. And quite frankly, E. Jean Carroll’s comments when she did get the judgement joking about what she's going to buy, it makes it harder for women to come forward when they make a mockery out of rape. When they joke about it. It's not okay. I also find it offensive when you're trying to shame me with this question.
Over and over again, she tried to bully Stephanopoulos by weaponizing her victimization, and wielding it as a shield to defend a convicted rapist. At the same time, she blames questions about her actions, decisions and breathtaking cynicism about her political support for a rapist as a rape victim on Stephanopoulos, whom she accuses over and over again of “shaming” her.
Incredibly, the morally deaf and blind Mace seems so intellectually addled that it hasn’t occurred to her that, while she is demanding an absolute immunity from questioning because she was raped at 16 over her political support for a rapist at age 46, it doesn’t extend towards other rape victims. Her empathy extends as far as the frame of the mirror holding the image of the only person Mace can truly see, which is Mace.
It is important to remember that her entire staff has quit within the last couple of months, and her public behavior has been erratic — to say the least. This interview, such as it was, is a sad spectacle in that it shows a person unraveling under the pressure of fame and emptiness. She is like a cross between Wendy Williams and George Santos, a hybrid of both and more. They are all ‘can’t look away walking disasters’ that are as much a reflection on all of us as it is on all of them.
In sum, it’s pathetic and stupid. Truly.
Remember this: the next time you see Nancy Mace, you should feel pity. The next time you see the logo of the show that puts her on, you should feel contempt. After all, those are the people who think you are stupid. The broken person in front of you is proof.
Mace maintains a double standard regarding her political endorsements. She wants to be a representative of the victims of rape, but endorses someone who has been indicted and found guilty of that crime! She fits the MAGA mold 100%‼️
Nancy Mace, like Lindsey Graham, are simply media whores. They have nothing relevant to say. They need attention like a whiney child. Rewarding them with attention only reinforces the negative behavior and makes us all dumber listening to them.
The media has to be more discriminating as to who to interview. Stop enabling these hollow, desperate people.