Politics & Power Quote by Meg Greenfield

Greenfield skewers the press’s addiction to hypocrisy over harm, a habit that turns moral catastrophe into a bookkeeping problem. The joke lands because it’s grotesquely specific: “murders his mother” is the kind of act no sane public sphere should be able to metabolize into routine politics. Yet her punchline isn’t the murder; it’s the predictable pivot to archival gotchas - the six-year-old statement, the “gone on record,” the smug satisfaction of catching someone contradicting themselves. She’s not excusing politicians. She’s accusing the ecosystem around them of preferring prosecutable inconsistency to unambiguous cruelty.

The subtext is an indictment of a culture where sincerity is treated as the only real scandal. Policy failures, personal abuses, and structural harms become background noise, while a flip-flop becomes a headline because it’s narratively tidy and emotionally safe. Outrage at murder would demand judgment. Outrage at inconsistency demands only citation. That’s why “matricide” is such a surgical word choice: it sounds like a policy plank, an issue position, something that could be polled, spun, and “clarified” by a spokesperson.

As an editor writing in the late 20th-century Washington press world, Greenfield is also winking at her own profession’s incentives: speed, conflict, and the craving for a clean contradiction that can be proven with clips. The line works because it reveals a dark trade: when politics becomes theater, the worst sin isn’t violence or corruption - it’s being caught without a script.