Politician X is the worst human being imaginable, but if it turns out he or she is not, so be it.

We need a name for this.

Monday, City Council attorney Steven Lane denied the existence of any e-mail containing a racist slur, refuting Police Superintendent Warren Riley’s assertion that Councilwoman Stacy Head used the n-word in an e-mail within an enormous batch of e-mails not being released to the public. Riley leveled the allegation on WBOK talk radio, refused to offer any substantiation, and then quickly back-tracked in a later interview. Even at the time he made his charge, Riley seemed ambivalent about whether or not he was telling the truth.

“Eventually those e-mails will come out,” he said. “And if it’s not there, it’s not there, so be it.”

This is absolutely tremendous stuff.

I am going to give it a try.

As everyone knows, tons of Mayor Ray Nagin’s e-mails have gone missing. I have heard that some contain naked photographs of  Nagin, Greg Meffert, Karl Rove and chief Riley as well as a series of unflattering videos in which they took whiskey shots out of goblet made from Osama Bin Laden’s bones near a dead boy and a live girl, who was forced to watch under threat of waterboarding.

I am assuming that eventually the FBI and U.S. Attorney will release this from whatever files they’ve been able to recover. If the particular video I’m talking about isn’t there, it will not have been my fault that you assumed that Nagin, Meffert, Rove, and Riley were terrorist-sympathizer perpetrators of violence against children.

Riley – verb – To ambivalently articulate an immediate equivocation after claiming specific evidence to support a serious allegation about the character of another person.
(i.e. I need voters to question the president’s legitimacy without sounding crazy, so I’ll Riley by telling the there is no record of his birth but that it wouldn’t matter if there were.)