By P.J. Gladnick | February 5, 2014 | 10:20 AM EST

Of all the stories written about the tragedy of the life of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman being cut short by heroin, the most bizarre has to be the article written by Lee "Sockpuppet" Siegel at the New Yorker. Unbelievably Siegel has actually found an upside to Hoffman's heroin addiction. He claims that it  helped Hoffman's performances. I kid you not.

Here is Siegel coming close to glorifying substance abuse: "...the brute, ugly fact might also be that the poison was his elixir."  If you think this quote was taken out of context, here is the entire paragraph which almost sounds like a paean to the artistic advantages of battling the demons of drug addiction:

By Ken Shepherd | June 10, 2011 | 11:04 PM EDT

How tone-deaf do you have to be to a) compare Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) to Martin Luther King, Jr. b) say the women who got Weiner's lewd photos were "hardly traumatized" and c) call on Weiner's wife Huma Abedin to call a press conference to belittle the media for attacking her hubby?

You might want to ask Daily Beast contributor Lee Siegel, who did just that (emphases mine) in a June 10 post entitled "C'Mon, America, Nobody's Perfect":