Supplemental: The Houses of Anderson Cooper County!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2014

Incompetence has its rewards: We’ll give you this:

Except to the NFL kingpin himself, it doesn’t much matter if Roger Goodell keeps or loses his job.

Nothing much turns on Goodell’s job status, except the joy of the chase.

That said, we’re not sure when we’ve seen a dumber performance than the one turned in by Anderson Cooper and the CNN team as they’ve staged their dimwitted rampage against Goodell over the past two weeks.

How dumb has the CNN gaggle been? Just try them:

When they read Don Van Natta’s report for ESPN, they didn’t notice that none of Van Natta’s “sources” were said to have attended the June 16 meeting they said they were describing.

When Goodell said that he’d been misled at the June 16 meeting, they couldn’t imagine what he possibly could have meant. Their cluelessness persisted even as their own reporter, Miguel Marquez, kept hitting them over the head with the obvious possibilities.

In the ultimate tour de force, Erin Burnett said she couldn’t see the difference between dueling claims that Rice had possibly “slapped” or “hit” his fiancée, as opposed to having “punched” her. In the world of Erin Burnett (and others), those words are all the same.

You really have to be dumb as a rock to turn in the work this gang has produced. Either that or you have to be faking.

We’ll guess it has worked both ways.

On the brighter side, incompetence has its rewards! Cooper has staged a classic “outrage event” over the course of the past two weeks.

We’ll guess the suits have been well pleased. After all, CNN is a big profit-chasing corporate entity, not unlike the NFL. Except CNN is much worse!

At any rate, it certainly hasn’t been all furrowed brows for CNN’s Silver Fox! In June, he added Litchfield County’s historic Rye House to The Houses of Cooper County!

The New York Post got there first. Emily Smith delivered the good for Page Six.

We can’t swear this is all accurate:

SMITH (6/21/14): Anderson Cooper and his partner, Benjamin Maisani, will be relaxing in historic splendor in Connecticut’s affluent Litchfield County this summer. Multiple sources tell us the CNN anchor has splurged on a massive, 10,127-square-foot Tudor revival stone mansion, called Rye House, for the mid-to-high seven figures.

The tony estate—sold by Karen Shaw, a former Miss Connecticut who starred on “Dallas” and “The A Team,” and her husband, Marc—was built in 1908 and designed by Wilson Eyre, a founder of House & Garden magazine. The home includes an Olympic-size swimming pool and tennis court, and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Its 18 rooms feature original chestnut wood paneling, limestone fireplaces and a hand-carved marble staircase. There’s also a private four-bedroom guest wing. The 280-acre grounds boast Japanese pagoda trees, wisteria, magnolias, a walkway with stone pillars and a grape arbor.

...Depending on which local you ask, Cooper bought the property in leafy Litchfield for anywhere between $5 million and $9 million.

It’s only 280 acres, but the place is just for weekends and summering. According to Smith, Cooper’s New York crib is a Greenwich Village firehouse he bought in 2010 for $4.3 million.

Remember when Cooper was helping us ask if the Clintons have too much money?

By July, the picture was darkening. Yahoo Homes reported the underside of the Rye House acquisition. Apparently to help swing the deal, “Coop” was selling his side-by-side waterfront homes in or near the Hamptons. Combined asking price: $6.2 million.

For your best tour of the new Cooper manse, we’ll suggest that you click over to Curbed. The big old drafty mausoleum doesn’t look inviting to us. But you know our motto in such affairs:

You can only be in one room at a time.

(“Sell your clothes but keep your thoughts.” We believe Abraham Lincoln said that!)

You can count this as an addition to our award-winning series, The Houses of Journalist County. The series resumes next week.

Remember—there’s nothing “wrong” with being wealthy and owning strings of drafty old homes.

There's nothing “wrong” with any of that! We’re only asking a basic question as our award-winning series proceeds:

Could journalism ever emerge from the fabulous mansions of Journalist County? If you watched Cooper’s insulting performance the past two weeks, you may have received your answer.

Our award-winning series resumes on Monday with The Houses of Nantucket, Mass. What emerged from the chase for those “cottages,” tucked among the swells as they are?

Do we hear the war in Iraq? We’re not sure that answer is wrong!

Correction: It wasn't Abraham Lincoln at all! It was Thoreau. Click here.