At least those are the noises he’s making today on his blog, Right Now (get it?). In a post titled, “So, who were the young men hassled by Bob Etheridge?”, he writes:
Politicians can expect journalists or political operatives, some armed with cameras, to occasionally lie in wait for them outside fundraisers. Sometimes they strike gold, as when Republican trackers captured video of Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley exiting a lobbyist fundraiser (damaging enough on its own) and one of the then-Senate candidate’s aides accidentally pushing reporter John McCormack over a railing. (The aide apologized to McCormack.) But it’s something else to ask the people with the cameras who they are and get nonanswers about “students” and “projects.” This is why I originally asked who “TMZ’d” Etheridge, as that gossip site often posts videos from people who identify themselves, to celebrities, as “fans,” without revealing their names or their plans to post the videos they take.
Despite Weigel’s demurrals that he doesn’t condone what Etheridge did, he still seems to think these kids were under some sort of obligation to comply with Etheridge’s demands during the assault. When Etheridge “asked” the people with the cameras who they were, he didn’t get an answer until after he’d walked up to them, hit the camera, stolen the kid’s phone, and grabbed the kid’s wrist, all the while snarling “Who are you?” in his face over and over. The young man, instead of responding with equal force, told the Congressman he was a student working on a project. He called the Congressman “Sir.”
This isn’t enough for Weigel, apparently. When somebody asks you a question and uses force to make you comply, well, you’re just supposed to comply.
Sounds kinda wingnutty to me, Dave!
P.S. Reason‘s Michael Moynihan: Hating the Ideology, Not the Methodology.
P.P.S. As Pablo notes in the comments, the claim that John McCormack was accidentally pushed is maybe not so true. Although as I’m sure Weigel would point out, the video is “grainy.”