CNN's Don Lemon's massive WTF moment is just--Did the aliens get him too?
A woman is like an egg salad sandwich on a warm Texas day... Full of eggs, and only appealing for a short time. - Sheldon Cooper, quoting his father, The Big Bang Theory
Did he drop the brown acid? Go off his nut from an RFID chip Bill Gates planted in his latest COVID booster? Suffer Havana Syndrome? Trance channel his inner Mel Gibson?
What in hell possessed Don Lemon, an otherwise likeable, intelligent, and customarily level-headed CNN host to utter sheer madness on last Thursday’s CNN This Morning show with co-anchors Poppy Harlow and Caitlan Collins? The subject? Newly-announced 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who has floated the idea of mandatory competency tests for presidential candidates of, shall we say, a certain age. Like 70. Quite possibly a double-dig at both 80-year-old President Joe Biden and 76-year-old wanna-again Donald Trump, who’s going to be mad as hell that Haley dares to challenge him.
Quoth Lemon:
“She says people, you know, politicians or something are not in their prime. Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime, sorry. A woman is considered to be in their prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.”
I’d be more outraged if it weren’t so jaw-droppingly bizarre. It’s the sort of thing you might expect Donald Trump or Josh Hawley or maybe Nick Cannon to say.
His female co-stars looked at him with WTF? looks on their faces.
“Wait a minute—prime for what?” asked Harlow with a tight smile.
That was Don’s early warning that maybe he’d better ‘splain himself, and make it good. So he ‘splained.
“That’s not according to me—”
“Prime for what?” Harlow asked again.
“—It depends it just like, prime, if you look it up, if you Google ‘When is a woman in her prime?’ it’ll say 20s, 30s and 40s. I’m not saying I agree with that—”
Sounding rather a lot like a 1.4 grade point average 15-year-old who uncritically believes everything he sees on Google, Lemon tried to explain himself further when challenged by his co-anchors and only dug himself in deeper. It was like aliens were controlling his mouth or something. Maybe the conspiracy theorists are right about the recent upsurge of suspicious unidentified flying skeet over the United States and Canada.
I guess we missed one!
Alien interference might well be the only logical theory to explain what happened last Thursday morning, the WTF-ness level we haven’t reached since Donald Trump accused ex-President Obama of spying on him.
“—So I think she has to be careful about saying politicians aren’t in their prime.”
Harlow tried to help him out. “I think you need to put on qualifiers, like prime for like child-bearing or—”
“Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just saying Google what the facts are — Google it, everyone at home, when is a woman in her prime,” he said. “And I’m just saying Nikki Haley should be careful about saying that politicians are not in their prime and they need to be in their prime when they serve.”
It was like he had no freakin’ clue those ages are commonly cited for what are widely considered women’s best ages for reproduction and sexual attractiveness, however realistic the first and offensively sexist the second.
The woman’s campaigning for political office, not Miss America. Not even Ms. Menopausal America. Again I have to ask, WTF, Don???
What truly blew my mind was Don Lemon talking like an aging angry incel about a 51-year-old woman as though she should only be evaluated on her fertility and fuckability.
I mean, for fuck’s sakes, Don Lemon is gay!
Was he hoping to have a baby with her or something?
Maybe he’s worried about her period
Never mind the fact that when a woman is ‘in her prime’, according to Lemon, she’s not even eligible to run for President until after the first fifteen years. Which leaves her, what, maybe ten or fifteen good years to campaign for the White House until menopause sets in and God only knows what could happen, she could be one of those crazy mood-swingy menopausal chicks who might start a nuclear war before Putin because she’s having a bad day and Don Lemon just said something mean about her on CNN?
Sooooo glad we didn’t have to deal with crazy weirdness and bother about the nuclear button during, say, the Trump years. No periods there to worry us!
In 1970 presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey’s physician claimed women’s ‘raging hormonal imbalance’ made them unfit for certain jobs, like, you know, <wink wink>, public office. In 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro became the first female vice-presidential candidate, a female caller to a Boston radio show wondered whether she’d been through menopause yet. (At 48?)
It didn’t help this was the same year doctors started talking about ‘pre-menstrual syndrome’, or PMS, when some women experienced heavy-duty mood swings and physical pain in the days leading up to their period, which lent credence to the historical male paranoia that the monthly shedding of the unused uterine lining made women more likely to blow up the world. Even worse, it quickly became many women’s lazy excuse for not taking responsibility for irritable behavior they were well able to control.
And anyway, Don, I didn’t know one of the mandates for a woman becoming President is she has to be able to make a baby or something. Maybe that’s the real reason Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election.
Competency checks for aging presidential wannabe primers
What Lemon took issue with was Haley’s competency checks idea. I guess he’s not keen on it.
While I don’t intend to vote Republican in 2024 - or ever - I’m with Haley on this. I’ve been saying we need it ever since Washington began whispering during Ronald Reagan’s second term.
“The President might be going senile.”
In the summer of 1987, while Colonel Oliver North testified about the unraveling Iran-contra scandal on national TV, rumors began swirling around the 76-year-old President’s mental focus. That he couldn’t. That he kept reminiscing about his Hollywood career. That he confused his World War II experiences with scenes from his old movies (his actual service never left the state of California). CBS News reporter Lesley Stahl reported a bizarre meeting with him in which he didn’t seem to know who she was, then snapped out of it and was fine. His aides said they’d witnessed episodes like this before.
It’s never been proven Reagan was senile in office, although he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s five years later, and died ten years after. But we all still wondered. Reagan was the oldest elected President at the time, a few weeks shy of his 70th birthday on his first Inauguration Day. He’s now third oldest, with Donald Trump having broken his record (age 70 and three quarters) and now Joe Biden is the oldest, 78 when he became President.
If our Presidents get any older Congress may have to pass a new entitlement for federally-funded Depends. Wait for it—Biden will be 82 if he runs again in 2024.
Nikki Haley is practically a teenager by comparison, and at 51, she’s in the age range of what a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll found in December many Americans preferred for a candidate, 51 to 65.
The only one of the three who are ‘in their prime’, if Americans are evaluating presidential mental acuity vs fertility and fuckability, I’m quite sure only Nikki Haley can pass that test with flying colors.
In fact, I’ll bet she can pass the other test. I bet Melania Trump would pick her, too.
I don’t know if Haley meant her idea as a dig at her possible future opponents, especially the guy who will probably give her a mean, misogynist nickname if she gets in his way in the polls, but I’m down with her suggestion. Sure thing, a mental competency test for both Biden and Trump, and any other 70 y.o.+ candidates next year.
Don Lemon thinks it’s ageist, but I don’t. While there is such a thing as early senility - it can hit people even in their thirties - that’s not nearly as common as in the elderly, and 70 definitely qualifies as elderly.
Then again, maybe he’s afraid Nikki lied in her response to his record-breaking cluelessness.
Responded Haley, “I wasn't sitting there saying sexist, middle-aged CNN anchors need to have mental competency tests, although [Lemon] may have just proven that point.”
She might be right. I’m only half-kidding.
The WTFness pandemic
Don Lemon will be 57 on March 1st. His comments were so deeply weird, so beyond what I would expect from a CNN commentator - Okay Grandpa! - I’m beginning to wonder about his own mental competency. I won’t call for his suspension, or resignation, I think he’s an otherwise fine commentator, but the supreme WTFness of his superlatively ignorant WTF moment makes me wonder if aliens are really behind America’s national backslide toward imbecility.
I mean, WTFness has been in vogue in America for a long time, but got a rocket-powered boost with Donald Trump, a man who demonstrated much sharper mental and verbal acuity twenty years ago.
Last week I read Twitter with my Tucker Carlson WTF face (Twitter is Ground Zero for worldwide loopy mentally deranged thinking) and I think I said out loud, “What the fuck? Are you really that fucking stupid? How can you still be preaching pointless mental health solutions to out-of-control gun violence for people who will never want it, use it, or acknowledge they need help, rather than keeping guns out of the hands of violent idiots?”
I mean WTF, we can keep abortions out of the hands of women who need them, right? And we can’t do anything about idiots with guns? How hard can this be to comprehend?
Whether it’s the left or the right, the U.S., Canada, or elsewhere, my WTF meter just broke from overuse. Some of my WTFs are ongoing, like WTF?? when people claim men are women on their say-so (Can they not see the openly deranged, abusive male-entitled misogyny that characterizes transactivism?) or that whales are being killed by windmills (Marjorie Taylor-Greene, natch, one of Congress’s leading WTF’ers).
After all, we also have:
People who think COVID vaccines kill more people than COVID
An entire ‘news’ organization we now have incontrovertible evidence bald-faced lied to America about a stolen election because telling the truth sent their audience screaming to an even more idiotic news source and dropped their stock price
We have to explain to feminists men are not women no matter what they tell you (I’ll bet they’re the easiest women to lay)
Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring
President Obama was born in Kenya, even with the 1961 Honolulu newspaper birth announcement
9/11 was an ‘inside job’ by George Bush (Or the Jews. A few have suggested Osama bin Laden, but that’s just crazy talk!)
Sometimes, you wonder if someone slipped supersized stupidity pills into the nation’s water system. Remember when we used to laugh at the Middle East because they were convinced the Jews were behind 9/11 and that Mossad-controlled sharks were attacking swimmers in the Red Sea?
Which brings me back to the aliens who, for all I know, were the real brains behind the Muslim-munching marine monsters.
Anyway, I don’t know where Don Lemon got his last glass of water before that morning show but I hope it wasn’t from Lake Huron. They still haven’t found the debris from that last UFO the government shot down and God only knows what the aliens packed it with.
Given the way Lemon spoke last week, my money’s on alien RFID chips that turn gay men into Amy Coney Barrett.
If you’re interested in learning more about what the aliens may or may not have planned for us I suggest an earlier article, The Aliens Might Be Here And They Probably Don’t Want Kinky Buttsex. (Hope that's not going to ruin your weekend plans ;) )
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