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Article snippet: Pettiness, such pettiness, in this noxious swamp of maybe-morons. “I’m not going to deal with petty stuff like that,” Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson told reporters on Wednesday, declining to refute an NBC report that he had privately called President Trump a “moron” this year. “This is what I don’t understand about Washington. Again, I’m not from this place. But the places I come from, we don’t deal with that kind of petty nonsense.” There was no immediate estimate available for the collective pettiness of Texas, where Mr. Tillerson was raised, nor of the oil industry, where he spent his career until Mr. Trump summoned him to the pettiness hub along the Potomac. But for a certain class of Washington denizen, Mr. Tillerson’s slight opened a new front in the nation’s forever-war against the reputation of its capital. The thrashing of Washington culture by voters, nonvoters, members of Congress — that much is a sacred rite. A sitting secretary of state, at odds with his president and blaming the city’s trifling instincts for stoking tensions, is another matter. “It’s profoundly paradoxical,” said Rick Tyler, a longtime Republican strategist who served as communications director for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas during last year’s Republican presidential primary race. “His boss is the most petty person ever to come to Washington.” Barney Frank, the retired longtime Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, marveled at how wholly a sitting government in Washington h... Link to the full article to read more