A FULLER REPORT: Anderson Cooper’s hat trick!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2011

A truly appalling performance: Last night, cable TV’s biggest waste meat corrected himself on the air.

His brow was furrowed, so you knew that he meant it. Anderson Cooper apologized for getting that tax matter wrong in Tuesday night’s debate (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 10/19/11).

Cooper’s mistake was enormously basic. It took a real waste meat to make it. But it wasn’t Cooper’s only mistake in Tuesday night’s proceedings. Let’s take note of two other key moments where Cooper failed to act.

For one point, we’ll refer you to Kevin Drum. This concerns a claim Herman Cain kept making—a claim Cooper should have been prepared to address:

DRUM (10/19/11): Cain kept claiming that a new report on his website showed that the poor and middle class wouldn't see their taxes go up. That apparently prompted enough excitement to crash his site. When it came back up, I found the report, which doesn't appear to include any kind of distributional analysis at all.

Dittos. If Cooper had actually prepared for this important task, he would have reviewed Cain’s bewildering report. For ourselves, we agree with Drum. When we reviewed that report yesterday, we couldn’t find any relevant data either.

You can bet the house that Cooper had no idea what Cain was talking about. Like so mnay others on cable, this big waste meat is paid millions per year—and he hadn’t prepared.

Another failure came in the hour after the debate. Cooper shared this moment of shame with an entire panel.

Coop asked smokin’ hot conservative firebrand Dana Loesch to comment on the Occupy Wall Street movement. Loesch fulfilled her two contractual obligations to CNN. She made outrageous/stupid remarks. She looked good while she did it:

COOPER (10/18/11): Dana, I heard you scoffing when [Occupy Wall Street] was compared to the Tea Party.

LOESCH: There's a couple of things. There's a couple of things that I have to say. I disagree with the notion that this is anti-greed. Any movement that protests for a living wage, regardless of whether or not you're employed, employed, is the epitome of greed, No. 1.

No. 2, there's no, there's no responsibility given to Washington at all whatsoever. This current administration is propped up by Wall Street. This is the Wall Street president. This president has received more from Goldman Sachs and the very entities that these protesters are out there protesting than any other president.

Three, I think the grassroots element in this has been hijacked already. One of the things that the Tea Party—the Tea Party had to deal with two fronts. The Tea Party fought against Republican establishment. I was very involved in New York 23. Newt Gingrich and I went round and round over Dede Scozzafava. I was—the establishment was not of me; still is not a fan of me.

And we also had to fight against progressives and progressive agenda, where you have the Occupy Wall Street— They have the endorsement of the president. They have the blessing of Nancy Pelosi. They're also endorsed by the Nazi Party of the United States. They're also endorsed by Communists. These are things that we did not see with the Tea Party movement. So there's another difference. I could go on and on and on, but those are the three major differences that I see between both of these movements.

There are many points to dispute there, but let’s focus on that third major difference: Occupy Wall Street is endorsed by the Nazis! The Tea Party movement is not!

No one batted an eye about this representation. Cooper said nothing, as always—and Donna Brazile simply plowed ahead as if nothing had been said. Cooper is gigantic waste meat; the problem seems to be spreading to his panels. Borger, Fleischer, Gergen and King also took Loesch’s statement in stride.

Cooper stood around tugging his dick Tuesday night when he should have been making Perry and Santorum stop their ridiculous talk-over-everything-Romney-says filibusters. (In one widely-aired clip, note the way he grins and chimps when the camera goes to him.) Hours later, he was still tugging his dick—and the kids at Occupy Wall Street were now in league with the Nazis!

What an absolute piece of meat is Gloria Vanderbilt’s best baby boy! The next afternoon, he was back on TV, doing his tabloid pretend-to-talk show.

Topic: “Are we a germ-obsessed society?” We will be by the time Cooper gets done! Partial synopsis: “Anderson also meets a mother of four who took matters into her own hands after a trip to a fast food restaurant play area revealed various bacteria, bodily fluids and clumps of hair.”

Prediction: In hands like these, your society’s downward spiral will never get undone.