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What the stupidest thing you will hear today?
Here’s one way to improve your odds at an accurate answer: who is the stupidest television commentator currently polluting the airwaves?
If you said ‘Don Lemón™’, you are hot on the trail.
When I first encountered the CNN talking head, I thought he was just the latest embarrassing affirmative action hire. How could anyone take this unpleasant, unremittingly partisan hack seriously?
But it soon became clear that Lemón (accent on the ‘o’) was something special.
It was partly the brittle touchiness, partly the steady emission of self-satisfied entitlement.
Mostly, though, it was the stupidity, unwritten by ignorance and fired by adamantine self-certainty.
The latest instance is one of the best.
Responding to Rick Santorum’s appearance last night on Chris ‘Fredo’ Cuomo’s show, Lemón went on a tear about Santorum’s defense of his remarks about American Indian culture, remarks that had the moist PC-crowd in a tizzy. ‘There isn’t much Native American culture in American culture,’ Santorum said in a speech last month.
He neglected to make the obligatory obeisances about European ‘genocide’, etc. and even had the temerity to allude to ‘Christian settlers’ without disparagement.
All that sent Lemón off the deep end. Santorum’s speech was ‘horrible’, he said. Moreover, he shouted, ‘Europeans did not found this country. It was here, the Native Americans had this country before the Europeans came.’
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Indians roamed the continent. But the space between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans wasn’t yet a country. It was inhabited territory. It became a colony, or series of colonies, from the 16th through the mid-18th century thanks to European settlers, most of whom, as Rick Santorum noted, were Christians. Then there was something called the American Revolution. That began in 1776 and ended in 1783. It was prosecuted overwhelming by the European colonists, with a little help (and a little hinderance) from the Indians, and at the end a lot of help from the French. There were articles of confederation that outlined a country, but the Constitution — this country’s founding document — was framed at the Philadelphia Convention from May 25 to September 17, 1787. It was signed on September 17, 1787. It was ratified by the necessary nine states the following year, in 1788.
You might think that a prominent commentator from a major, if fading, network would know these things. But Don Lemón™ is too busy feeling slighted and calling other people racist to bother with such niceties as facts. It’s also true that Santorum is a, if not the, token conservative voice on CNN. Perhaps that helps explain Lemon’s particular determination to make him persona non grata.
I should probably note that I would never have seen Lemón’s embarrassing performance had not a friend sent me a clip. I am told that CNN’s contract to bleat out its twisted and tendentious version of the news at America’s airports has been canceled. That is a mercy for travelers, who have enough to put up with dealing with the mask Nazis and the constant blaring reminders to stay away from their fellows because of our latest Chinese import.
It is a consolation to know that so many fewer people will be subjected to its politicized idiocy, not least to Don Lemón’s aggressively stupid and bitchy outbursts.
