TUESDAY: Where is the number 2 a 5?

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2026

On our most-watched "cable news" program: Sometimes, the stupidity seen on the Fox News Channel reaches a special level. 

Last night, the studied dumbness was truly world-class. Consider our failing nation's most-watched "cable news" program, the padded room procedural known simply as The Five. 

Also, consider Gutfeld!, its spiritual cousin—the painfully numb-nutted messaging show which comes on the air at 10 o'clock Eastern, 7 o'clock on the coast.

There are quite a few serious topics a show like The Five might explore. We'll cite one example—Mayor Mamdani's current proposals for the New York City budget.

Stating the obvious, the dumbbells assembled to rule this show wouldn't be able to conduct any such real discussion. Quickly, let's consider one of the topics these dumbbells did pretend to explore, a topic which was also beaten to death five hour later on Gutfeld!

Yesterday, The Five pretended to discuss one of the ways New York City was hoping to dig out from the snow. In a perfect capture of this program's gong-show essence, the "discussion" started like this:

MAYOR MAMDANI (videotape, outdoors in the snow): Due to the historic nature of this blizzard, we've increased pay to thirty bucks an hour. And you can walk into any Sanitation garage until 8 p.m. this evening, and starting again from 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. All you need is to bring is two forms of I.D. to ensure you get paid.

WATTERS (chuckling): Call it the Snowcialist state! Zoran the Destroyer says you don't need I.D. to vote, but you need five forms to touch a snow shovel.

PERINO: [Laughter] 

In that tape, Mamdani was urging New Yorkers to help the city shovel out from the snow—but what followed was classic The Five! The tape showed Mamdani referring to two forms of I.D. 

Without so much as batting an eye, Watters raised the number to five!

No explanation was offered. Struggling to compose herself, the increasingly awful Dana Perino, lovingly adjusting her hair, switched it right back to two:

PERINO (continuing directly): I mean, it's just so obviously funny. And what's great is that—I know that he's an intelligent guy, and he's quite charismatic—that he doesn't realize, as he's saying the words out loud, how ridiculous it sounds to need two forms of I.D. to shovel, but not to vote.

We'd somehow gone from two to five, and now we were back at two! Again, we've seen no statement from Mamdani concerning forms of I.D. needed to vote.

At this point, Watters threw to the disordered Young Master Gutfeld himself. After offering a hackneyed digression on bureaucracy, the little guy offered this:

GUTFELD: Five I.D.s! Now that is redundant—for shoveling snow! Now he brought it back to two, which is good...

The termagant went with five, then said that Mamdani "brought it back to two." The fellow didn't explain his comment—but when Gutfeld finally finished talking, Watters returned to this:

WATTERS: Emily, if you actually present five I.D.s and you get a shovel, can you just go to the bar for a couple of hours and come back and get paid?

COMPAGNO: I don't know. I would think so. I don't know if I have five I.D.s....

It was a modernized version of Who's On First, performed by a messaging troupe composed of corporate clowns

On this occasion, the children kept jumping from two to five and back to two, with no attempt to explain. Held until last, twice-weekly liberal co-host Jessica Tarlov now said the shoveling offer was actually a pre-existing approach used by Gotham mayors in blizzards of the past.

Sometimes an attempt to get snow shoveled may be just an attempt to do that! 

The New York Post had invented the grisly conflation of 2 and 5 in its original pseudo-report on this topic. In this follow-up report, the Post did a bit of semi-explaining, even as the paper adopted a new snarky approach:

Mamdani admin. fails to attract any shovelers for hours at NYC site

S’no thank you. 

The Mamdani administration failed for hours to attract any emergency shovelers at one Queens garage Sunday—while planning to try to dig out New Yorkers with a fourth of the force the city used for its last mega-storm. 

[...]

While city officials said they expect to have attracted a total of 1,400 public shovelers to start round-the-clock shifts beginning Sunday night, that quantity is still a fraction of the 6,454 people who were recruited for the 2015-16 winter season, which saw up to 3,500 shovelers working simultaneously at peak times that period.

[...]

The mayor has recently caught some backlash over the city’s rigorous sign-up requirements for the program.

While some have called on Mamdani’s administration to change the requirements so as to allow more people to pick up a shovel, city officials claimed there was little they can do about it.

“We know there has been some press about the requirements, and we want to be clear: As with any employer, the City of New York has a legal obligation under federal law to verify work authorization and maintain proper documentation before issuing payment,” DSNY press secretary Vincent Gragnani told The Post.

“We are not legally permitted to hand out checks without completing that process,” he said.

“Ensuring compliance with employment law isn’t red tape for its own sake—it’s what allows the program to operate responsibly and sustainably, helping keep our city running through the toughest winter days.”

Even Rupert Murdoch's Post was now making it sound like the I.D. requirements hadn't come from the laughable mayor himself. As usual, the Post's reporting wasn't precise enough to create any clear understanding about the source of the I.D. requirements.

As noted, it was the Post itself which performed the original act of conflation. It had referred to two forms of I.D. in the body of this report, transformed to five in the headline. A panel of deadbeats—four of The Five—decided to have some low-IQ fun with the whole situation. 

This has been standard fare on this braindead channel since the first snow fell. Going from 2 to 5 to 2 to 5, four hounds from Hell burned yesterday's hour away in this and other ways.

Stupidity's easy, explanation is hard. We may someday be able to tell you about the additional intellectual rot on display all over this channel last night.

Meanwhile, what about Mamdani's budget? That would be an actual topic.

These dopes are too flyweight to go there. Tarlov continues to suffer.