In the comment thread for “Why I’m A Mooch Fan,” “seasonalaffleckdisorder” asked this morning “why you think the Mooch is acceptable in some way after he was complicit in the worst administration in U.S. history?” To which I replied:

“He’s explained it all. He had that job for 11 days, made a mistake, got fired, saw past himself, turned a corner. He wasn’t (and isn’t) Heinrich Himmler. He’s from a Long Island blue-collar family (like Ron “Born on the 4th of July” Kovic). Fellow New Jerseyan Bill Maher has an apparent place in his heart for the Mooch, whom he once called “a killer” — a kind of Scorsese character, a financial sector Michael Corleone with a common-man ethos going on, which is to say a semblance of a moral center — a dark-haired, well-dressed guy who never shot Virgil Solozzzo or Cpt. McClusky or ordered the deaths of the heads of the five families. He’s not an X-factor writer or movie fanatic like me…not a musician or a Richard Alpert-like mystic or an ex-LSD crusader or a guy with my own specific values, but he’s a non-evil operator with a wife and kids, and he hails from a culture I know and understand to some extent. There’s something about that streetcorner patois that reaches out. Mooch is a classic fiscal Republican, and that doesn’t make him Satan. Anyone who has the ability to pick himself up off the floor and say, ‘Okay, I made a mistake, that didn’t work, maybe I was an asshole, let’s examine why, on to the next episode” — anyone who can dust himself off and turn a page has my respect.”