Don Lemon vs. Joe Rogan

or, "you're as big as the ankle you bite"

In 1966, Richard Nixon was a man of the past, a dead-ender. A former vice-president, he’d been unable to even win a race to become the governor of California in 1962, and had famously snarled at the end of that campaign that the press wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, gentlemen, ‘cause this was his last press conference. He was, more or less, what Dan Quayle is to us in 2021. But he also wanted to run for president.

Trapped by diminished stature, Nixon punched up. As Rick Pearlstein writes in Nixonland, the former vice-president began making the most demeaning and aggressive statements he could about President Lyndon Johnson. Nixon staked out an adversarial position for the mere sake of being adversarial, making a display of taking the opposite of whatever position Johnson had just taken about hot topics like the war in Vietnam. And he carefully pushed Johnson’s buttons, probing for the other man’s personal wounds. In 1964, the press had gotten images of Johnson lifting his beagle by the ears — so Nixon worked it into the script, joking publicly about the president trying to get Congress to do what he wanted by hauling them around by the ears. He used caustic, colorful, humiliating language, repeatedly and calculatedly, intending to provoke a response.

He did. Johnson lashed out at him, responding to the stream of public attacks with an angry public attack. The point, Pearlstein writes, is that the Nixon got the sitting President of the United States to make Richard Nixon his equal in political stature — someone who argued with presidents. Nixon made himself plausible as Johnson’s future political opponent by getting Johnson to treat him as his opponent, as someone who President Lyndon Johnson debated.

The indescribably stupid and infantile CNN “horse de-wormer” attack on Joe Rogan is precisely that, and so is their desperate attempt to keep it going by attacking Rogan for attacking them for attacking him. (For crying out loud.) Rogan subsequently called the dismal CNN pissant Don Lemon a “dumb motherfucker” for persisting with an obviously dishonest and ridiculous attack:

They don’t understand that when they say things that are absolutely untrue, it diminishes their authority. They’re not even aware of what they’re doing…But when you’re saying something, and then the person you’re saying it about has literally ten times the audience you do, you dumb motherfucker. Do you know what you did? You just proved my point.

They’re aware of what they’re doing. They’re attacking someone with literally ten times the audience they have, hint hint. Quick: Can you name someone else who got endless free publicity from a “conflict” with media figures who made a spectacle of how much they hated him?

I invite any really famous person to launch a high-profile attack on me for this post. It’ll be tough, but I can take it. By the way, it would hurt me so much more if you could do it on prime time television.