HATEFUL CNN HOST’S TWEET CALLING FOR RAPE MYSTERIOUSLY DISAPPEARS:
Some of CNN host Reza Aslan’s other disgusting and hateful tweets are mysteriously disappearing. The cable network star drew controversy when he called Donald Trump a “piece of shit” last weekend. He lamely “apologized” and declared, “That’s not like me.” Except, of course, it is.
Yet, some of Aslan’s old hateful tweets are no longer on his page. On August 21, 2012, he tweeted, “Just to be clear I was indeed wishing someone would rape congressman Todd Akin. I’d hate to be misunderstood.” That tweet is gone. Here’s a screen shot:
Victor Davis Hanson explores the bang-up past couple of weeks at CNN, the “Crude News Network:”
CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was forced to confess that he was both “crude” and “unprofessional” when, during an-on-air panel discussion, he cut off Trump supporter Jeffery Lord with the following putdown: “If he took a dump on his desk you would defend it. I mean, I don’t know what he would do that you would not defend!” What a strange simile for an anchor to use in front of a national audience.
Then there was the macabre photo moment of comedian Kathy Griffin—a CNN New Year’s Eve show co-host with Anderson Cooper—hoping to recapture fading attention by holding, in ISIS fashion, a gruesome bloody decapitated model of Donald Trump’s head. Like Anderson Cooper, Griffith later apologized, but given that she was not so central to CNN, she was expendable and so let go. Her dismissal helped spark her subsequent whiny rant that she was now herself a victim of an untoward backlash from the Trump family. (The passive-aggressive Griffin herself once ridiculed Sarah Palin’s Down’s Syndrome child with “Oh, Palin, ur goin down so hard, you’d better just stay in Wasilla w ur “retarded baby”).
After the recent savage terrorist attacks in London, CNN’s “religion” scholar, Reza Aslan (heretofore infamous largely for eating cooked brain tissues with self-described religious cannibals in India), wrote: “This piece of s— is a not just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He’s an embarrassment to humankind.” Aslan is channeling the vulgarity of other journalists, which in turn has brought the inner vulgarian out of politicos like Tom Perez, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, John Burton and other Democratic grandees.
These vulgar anti-Trump biases of journalists and celebrities on CNN are not new. We remember, for example, the December 2016 hot-mic, off-camera video joke of CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux and her producers about the idea of President-elect Trump’s plane crashing. CNN, we also recall, was one of the first networks to air the existence of the fake-news dossier about Trump’s supposed sexual escapades in Moscow last January. The list of unhinged statements by CNN panel members and anchors could be expanded, but the point is not bias per se, but what accounts for the recent emphases on the grotesque (beheading chic, references to feces on a desk, scatology like “piece of s—t”)?
The answers are many. Propriety has largely vanished from American discourse, a legacy of the 1960s when “f—k” and “s—t” superseded old expletives like “damn”, largely because of the supposed revolutionary shock effect on polite, staid society. Now a coarsened culture has become indifferent to commonplace obscenity and we are in a downward spiral of always seeking the next scatological or sexual one-uppance.
And then add to the above Bill Maher, star of CNN’s sister network surviving his on-air N-bomb last week, something that ordinarily would terminate the career of any white media figure not named Quentin Tarantino.
The left wants the rest of us to believe that Trump is some sort of strange aberration from an otherwise genteel elite society, when in fact he was created by the increasingly profane media overculture, and his mere presence in the White House is driving leftists into even cruder levels of discourse and violence. Or as Glenn writes, linking to Rod Dreher’s recent post titled “The Storm Before the Storm,” “The thing is, you don’t get Hitler because of Hitler — there are always potential Hitlers out there. You get Hitler because of Weimar, and you get Weimar because the liberals are too corrupt and incompetent to maintain a liberal polity.”