Yeah, why not? He’s completely untrustworthy, crippled by tragically poor judgment, willing to lie to an almost pathological extent to cover up his transgressions, and fully prepared to smear his political enemies if he thinks he can profit from it. He’s narcissistic, nasty, and yet somehow so insecure that showing him idle flattery on Twitter might earn you a photo of his nob. Oh, and by his own admission, he’s apparently unfit for work in the private sector. So then: Why not let him run the country’s biggest city? More power, not less. Because he is, after all, a fightin’ liberal, which clearly impresses sophisticated progressive Janeane Garofalo. He fights. He never really wins or achieves much by doing so — his weakness as a legislator is one of the reasons Democrats have been so willing to run him over — but he hates those wingnuts and isn’t shy about saying so, which is reason enough to let him govern America’s financial nerve center. Skip ahead to 3:00 and drink this in, bearing in mind that she’s hardly alone in her Weiner admiration, even now, among the lefty base.

She gets a smattering of applause from Maher’s audience too, of course, just as a reminder that there really is no idea so stupid that they won’t cheer for it. Exit quotation from an incisive Matt Lewis, who succeeds in perfectly, er, sizing Weiner up: “Being a political rock star isn’t what he does for a job — it’s who he is.”