Is S.E. Cupp The Dumbest Pundit Working? An Examination.
Is S.E. Cupp the dumbest pundit working today? It's an interesting question, especially in light of heavy competition from the likes of Dylan Byers, but some recent opinions that have sprung from her brain give me cause to believe we may have a winner here.
Exhibit #1: She suggested the best course for Gov. Chris Christie, in light of the traffic jam scandal, is to resign and run for President while trumpeting said resignation-in-disgrace as a reason to vote for him. No, really.
“I’ll tell you what will happen: his supporters, both in New Jersey and across the nation will come out,” Cupp argued to colleague Jake Tapper. “He will be a martyr and a hero, and over the next two years, he’ll quietly go about plotting a presidential campaign.”
We have video!
Now, I realize part of the pressure of being a pundit is trying to come up with novel arguments that stand out from the crowd, and this certainly achieves that goal. However, novelty should always come second to not sounding like a complete idiot. I don't want to have to explain why this is the stupidest idea ever, so here's the short version: If you want a story to die, the last thing you want to do is make it the defining moment of your career that was so all-important it forced you out of office. You definitely don't want it to be what every reporter asks you about every time you go out campaigning, which will happen if you resign. You absolutely do not want reporters asking you why it is that you think you can be President when you were such a failure as governor that you had to resign.
Exhibit #2: This column she wrote about marijuana. Wonkette has taken a crack at it, but man, there are some just amazing sentences that pack more derp into a few syllables than I ever thought possible.
Will pot smokers become a sought-after voting demographic?
You'd think they just granted suffrage to pot smokers.
Will Republicans look like school marms if they oppose legal marijuana?
What is this "if" shit? I think the years-long freakout over their apparent recent discovery that women think of contraception as health care already secured that.
Will liberal supporters suffer when the law change inevitably creates more drug users?
Nearly half of Americans admit to having smoked pot. Most of the other half wisely decline to discuss their illegal drug use with strangers over the phone. I don't know if you could create more drug users, honestly. Though, being full of derp, Cupp probably will think the inevitable spike of people admitting to pot use now that they're less afraid of going to jail for such an admission should be treated as an actual rise in the number of "drug users". (By the way, alcohol and caffeine are also drugs. So, really, is aspirin. But even if you limit your scope to people using drugs for their mind-altering purposes, the "problem" of "drug users" is already near-universal.)
The piece goes on like this at length. The entire thesis appears to be, "As a reactionary, I know I have to be against anything that liberals are for. So, uh, yeah, pot bad. Liberals bad! Pay me!" Seriously, there's paragraphs like this:
The same argument used against guns is used for pot: that legalizing pot and making it more available will reduce crime. No good liberal would say the same of guns, though there is substantial evidence to prove more guns equal less crime.
She declines to offer that evidence. Maybe she means, by "reducing crime", that Stand Your Ground laws, by legalizing cold-blooded murder in many cases, reduces the number of murders they have to bother prosecuting. Needless to say, she displays an inability to understand the difference between laying dead on the ground because of a gunshot and laying in front of your TV mindlessly watching cartoons for an hour because you hit the weed a little hard. Someone who cannot understand that difference does not need to be a paid pundit expressing opinions.
But it gets worse!
But for other Democrats who, like him, promote an expansion of the health nut state, but want to also support legal marijuana use, does it really work to rail against trans fats and restrict the smoking of cigarettes but allow pot smoking (and the sloth and munchy-induced snacking that comes with it)?
S.E. Cupp appears to believe that liberals intend to throw people in jail for possessing trans fats.
I think we have a winner in the Dumbest Pundit Alive Olympics. At least until Ross Douthat starts thinking about vaginas again.
