Eliot Spitzer Was Either Crying or Ejaculating on Live TV This Morning

Politics nerds can rejoice today, because former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who’s currently on a campaign to win both the office of City Comptroller and the hearts of New Yorkers, may have gotten a little teary on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Tuesday morning.

Since there’s no reason you should sit through 15 minutes of Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough boringly bickering in a fashion that MSNBC seems to regard as entertaining and newsworthy, here’s the short clip of Spitzer’s “moment,” which occurred at the end of his interview. Brzezinski asks Spitzer what’s changed in his life in the past five or six years, and Spitzer responds solemnly, “A lot of pain. A lot of pain….you go through that pain and you change.”

Mika told Politico that she found the exchange “pretty powerful,” perhaps because her job description is spending her mornings chastising Joe and whatever other randos they’ve chosen for the show that day for their Frat boy antics:

“He was raw and all there. It was pretty powerful. Don’t know if it’ll change things for him, but I do appreciate a person who’s made mistakes coming and facing the cameras and facing the questions. That’s actually a test of character. There are those that choose not to do that.”

HOWEVER some hardened politics experts aren’t convinced by Spitzer’s almost-tears routine; the New York Post‘s John Podhoretz told Dylan Byers that “It looked completely fake”:

“Did you see tears running down his cheeks? See, because when people cry, usually these things called tears run down their cheeks.”

New York Magazine’s Dan Amira argues “that Brzezinski basically commanded [Spitzer] to provide an emotional answer — ‘as personally as you can answer this question, don’t give me a pat answer, don’t give me one that you prepare in your mind’ — to her banal question. That doesn’t mean Spitzer’s emotion was necessarily fake, but if it wasn’t, he certainly has good timing.”

Now that we’ve debated whether politicians can fake emotion or not, let’s play a game: is this the face of a man who is coming or crying?