"What was worse — having to be heterosexual or being a politician?"

"One of the great moments" in Alexandra Pelosi's HBO documentary "Fall to Grace," according to Carl Swanson in New York Magazine. The documentarian daughter of Nancy Pelosi is interviewing disgraced former NJ Governor Jim McGreevey.

Pelosi tells me the lesson of the documentary is “Don’t let the worst thing you did define who you are now. Think of it as Tony Robbins for the HBO-documentary set.” I ask her if she worries that she is essentially enabling McGreevey’s need for attention, and she admits that the idea “does keep her up at nights.”

This is my second post of the day about McGreevey. The first was about a NYT article that was either atrocious or brilliant satire. I'm writing this one because I have now watched the "Fall to Grace," and I just want to say it's horrible. Pelosi didn't get much good footage, and we mostly see women in prison going through prison therapy, a topic that could be handled in many different ways by serious film documentarians but is here used to promote McGreevey, whom the women just adore, because he tells them they should not be defined by the worst things they've done.

Why is McGreevey doing therapy in women's prisons? Because he left the Catholic Church (because they won't let you feel good about being gay) and went to Episcopalian seminary (where it's apparently okay both to be gay and to have a gay sexual relationship), but the Episcopalians rejected him for the priesthood anyway. Is McGreevey angling to get back into politics? I bet he is, in which case Pelosi's puff piece is supposed to help. It shouldn't though, because it's so awful. Worst thing about it? The maudlin tinkling piano soundtrack that never shuts up.

"Most of his sexual interludes with men had been furtive; to him, gay culture meant Liberace and Paul Lynde."

One of many hard-to-believe sentences in this long NYT article about James McGreevey, the disgraced former governor of New Jersey. He's 55, not 75. He got into trouble putting his lover on the state payroll in 2004, not 1974. He's a big old fraud in my book, and his effort to cloak himself in "I am a gay American" sentimentality is disgusting.

Relentlessly excavating his heart and soul, he later went into psychotherapy and resurrected the calling he said he had felt since he was an altar boy in Carteret, N.J. Now an Episcopalian with a degree in divinity from the General Theological Seminary, he’s embracing the Lord’s work with the same fervor with which he once pursued politics. 

Look, I hope he's turned his life into service and good works, but this article is fawning — PR-style.

Until recently, Mr. McGreevey and his partner had kept their relationship private. This Thursday, however, is the debut of Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary “Fall to Grace,” which explores his spiritual makeover, so he’s sharing the happily-ever-after. 

Sharing the happily-ever-after? Who talks like that?

Not, he stipulates, because he’s after another ego jolt like the sort he craved as a politico, but because he’s eager to focus attention on his work.

Oh, he stipulates? Sorry, this is just making me believe he’s after another ego jolt like the sort he craved as a politico. Did the NYT writer think that passing along this fawning PR was a joke — a nudge to make us think this is such bullshit? We're shown McGreevey's partner, an "Australian financier," 9 years his junior who — we're told is "[s]turdy and handsome in an unpolished way" and "with taste for modern art." The modern art taste is nowhere to be seen in the photograph of the pair in their "pistachio-walled conservatory with worn-leather sofas and ethnic touches that could have been conjured by Ralph Lauren."

With severely cropped hair, khakis and navy sweater pocked with moth holes (his uniform), the ex-governor has the look of a missionary. Upbeat and charismatic, he laughs easily and often exclaims, “God bless!” Mr. O’Donnell has a warier, more reserved air — at least, when he’s on the record. Wearing smart corduroys and a taupe cardigan, he keeps his phone in hand and peers at the screen through thick-rimmed glasses.

Smart corduroys? Cardigan?

ADDED: The cardigan is the main thing that pushed me over the line to finding this article bloggable, because I'd just read this question in the Gentleman Scholar advice column at Slate:

Out of nowhere, my husband of 21 years has started wearing cardigan sweaters. I can't tell you how much this turns me off—the soft, sloppy, indecisiveness of the garment, not jacket, but not fully committed to being a sweater, either. He will point to younger men wearing them and say, "See? I'm bringing them back." The thing is, I'm not going home with those younger men and I don't know why the younger men are wearing them, maybe it's ironic or something? I don't know. But when I see a man in a cardigan, all I can think is Mr. Rogers. My husband usually has excellent taste but every now and then he likes to rock something positively cringe-worthy. He doesn't like me to tell him what to wear. Do I just suck it up? Or do I draw a line in the sand? Thank you!

I mean, maybe that article was ironic or something... I don't know.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian said: Oh my God. That piece has to be satire. Please tell me it's the smartest satire ever written. "

I just noticed the line — in the "smart corduroys" paragraph — "Mr. O’Donnell... at least, when he’s on the record."

AND: More from Palladian: "I'm still trying to imagine how they figured out how to make pistachios work as a load-bearing structural material."