I know, right? Well, hold on, just hear me out…

Maybe it’s just that I want to, um, stick up for a fellow Hoosier. But after listening to Sydney Leathers for a few minutes, she seems like an okay kid:

I’m sure it’s sexist and provincial to say so, but she’s surprisingly poised and well-spoken for a small-town girl whose thong selfies are all over the place. It is kind of odd that she claimed to want anonymity just a few days ago, and now she’s talking to Inside Edition. But hey, once the cat’s out of the bag…

Lisa Weiss, one of Weiner’s previous sexting pals, has warned Leathers that she’s going to get a lot of nasty comments and not a lot of support. I wonder about that, though. She’ll get nasty comments, of course — this is, after all, the Internet — but I think she’ll get more support than the last round of sextees.

Weiner was still in power the last time this happened, so Team Blue had a lot more (ahem) skin in the game. A lot more incentive to lie and deflect blame and malign the victims. “If those stupid teabaggers are saying this is true, it must not be!” But now Weiner’s basically a novelty candidate. Like Bozo the Clown running for president, except funnier. Even the leftist jackasses who defended Weiner last time (and slandered Andrew Breitbart in the process) have turned on him. So I think that Leathers and any other women who step forward are going to have a much easier time of it. It’s not fair to those women from a couple of years ago, especially since they had the excuse of not knowing just how insane he is, but that’s politics.

I still want Weiner to stay in the race, because it’s amusing and it passes the time. But I feel kind of bad for Ms. Leathers. She seems like a pleasant young woman who made a very dumb mistake. Sure, she sexted with a married man who had already disgraced himself in front of the entire world for doing the exact same thing. Sure, she was (is?) silly enough to agree with him politically and think he’s some sort of star. Sure, she was perfectly willing to consummate the relationship in a Chicago “sex bunker.” Sure, she chose a site called TheDirty.com to tell her secrets. Sure, she told her friends she was looking for a big payday out of this. And yeah, okay, sure, she’s actually comparing herself to Zoe Barnes from House of Cards. (That last one might be the most embarrassing of all, for any number of reasons.)

Hey, nobody’s perfect!

I’m not going to buy her book or anything, and I’ll roll my eyes along with everybody else as she tries to parlay this into what passes for fame these days. But she’s a product of her time. Can’t blame her for that.

…

Okay, I guess you can blame her for that. There are plenty of young women out there who would never do anything so stupid and reckless, and then expect to be rewarded for it. Not everybody wants to be Snooki.

Yeah. Forget everything I just said. Go ahead and blame her. It’s all the same to me.

P.S. In related news, TV’s Andy Levy says: “I have zero sympathy for Huma at this point. She is as bad as he is. They are power-hungry pig-people and they deserve each other.”

P.P.S.

P.P.P.S. Allahpundit with the three-pointer: “This isn’t the first time [Leathers] fell in love with a prominent Democrat only to find that he’s an embarrassing liar and a total disappointment. She worked on Obama’s campaign in 2008.”