Congressman Gary Condit (D-Modesto, CA) could have kept his mouth shut. He could have let a dying story die. After four months of missing, Chandra Levy was well on her way to falling off the back pages of the major newspapers.
Before the interview, it seemed that everyone speculated on the obvious–the details of Condit’s affair with Levy and how it relates to her disappearance.
By all accounts, including Condit, Levy was in love with the Modesto representative. It was assumed to be a mutual feeling. Only the most crass and jaded would speculate on Levy’s social designation: is she a whore or is she a lady?
Leave it to Gary Condit to display himself as such a lying, megalomaniac posterchild of everything that modern politicians stand for, that his statements actually bring such a question to the debate. When you respond to questions about a romantic relationship with statements like “she might have been in love with me but I was not in love with her”, then you fit snugly into the asshole genotype.
Then he made matters worse by suggesting that he was on such good terms with the Levy family that he wouldn’t discuss details of the relationship in the interview. The Levy family made no such request.
Levy frequented Condit’s apartment. She never brought ID. Why? What did they do? Stare at each other? The logical guess is that they engaged in good ol’ wet and sloppy Modesto-style Californication. He wasn’t expected to get that detailed but he was expected to admit the relationship, say that he cared for her at one point in his life and maybe even shed a Hollywood style tear.
Nobody wants to know about Condit’s committee and subcommittee work. Nobody cares about his legislative accomplishments. The whole point of the interview was to discuss a missing woman. Condit succeeded only in painting a picture of lustful encounters with a misguided groupie.
Condit feels like the media “got it wrong”. It’s hard to get it wrong when the only responses were canned, idiotic wannabe Clinton comments. That brings up another significant point about public contrition: the golden rule of Washington.
The only way to destroy your political career in D.C. is to be caught with a dead girl or a live boy. Condit is hanging precariously in purgatory and ready to burn from having a dead girl on his career. Clinton was just having fun with Monica, nobody was physically hurt or killed. Kennedy was a Kennedy with Teflon genes to protect him from his own dead girl.
Condit is nobody.
Condit didn’t shoot himself in the foot, he shot himself in the head. Al Sharpton could have handled himself better than this fool and gone on with his political aspirations. Condit made a very public and very bloody political suicide on national TV. It’s not necessarily proper to give violent descriptions to inherently nonviolet Washington politics but there’s no other way to describe what Condit did to his political career.
Everyone knows the real Gary Condit now. With four months of constant national coverage, the possibility remains that Chandra Levy is alive. Poetic justice would have her alive in hiding while nurturing the eventual birth of a big, fat and healthy Baby Gary, Jr. As for the political career, burn, #!@*)?#!%^@%, burn.
