On Saturday, conservative writer Mary Katharine Ham committed the cardinal sin for CNN commentators: she pointed out left-wing hypocrisy on the network.
Oh she didn’t say it in exactly those words, but that’s what she did.
Anchor Ana Cabrera and left wing commentator Ryan Lizza of Politico were busy agreeing with each other about how terrible conservatives are, which is the standard “news” discussion at CNN, when Ham dropped the Stacey Abrams-shaped bomb. Cabrera and Lizza had demonized Trump supporters marching in D.C. on Saturday (but not any of the violent leftists) and then Cabrera asked Ham about why won’t Trump and his supporters just go ahead and give up already.
Ham replied in part (the best part) that, “look, if [Trump] has a strategy, the strategy might be a sort of contemporaneous example in Stacey Abrams because he sees there are great accolades and attention and appetite for somebody who does not concede an election as she did not in Georgia for the governorship for two years, and she has yes feted by media and everybody. So he is looking around and saying, maybe that’s the path for me.”
She wasn’t done calling them out, though.
“I also am not a huge fan of the game where we selectively shame one side or the other for exercising their political rights to free assembly, and to come together in the capital,” said Ham. BOOM, I say. BOOM in your FACE, CNN.
“We have seen it on the left and the right all year, and it is a tendency and a bad tendency, I think, to tell one side that that’s bad and they’re going to spread the virus, while the other one sort of gets a pass,” she continued.
TELL THAT TO JAKE TAPPER.
“I don’t — the virus doesn’t discriminate based on political viewpoint, and neither do I, and I don’t think we should in general, with the giant caveat of be careful out there,” said Ham. “But I do want to be careful not to discourage this sacrosanct right to gather and vent in these ways, because it’s part of what makes our democracy healthy.”
Absolutely KILLER commentary. Watch below. You’ll love the part where Lizza tries to say there’s no comparison and has literally nothing and Ham smacks even his feeble attempt aside by pointing out that the margin in Stacey Abrams race was even BIGGER.
[wpvideo xHKCMkvl]
What was the best was how she framed the closing comment. “It’s the same thing. It’s just that you don’t like the outcome on one side.” She was saying that as a reference to Trump’s comments about the size of the electoral victory in 2016. But it was slyly an arrow aimed right at Ana Cabrera’s hypocritical heart, and you can see from the expression on her face and Lizza’s that Ham did not miss.
It was amazing. The discomfort and dissembling by Cabrera and Lizza was so fantastic I had it watch it twice.
Hope Ham doesn’t get kicked off the network. Or Twitter. Or both.