Bitter Don Lemon isn’t sorry for sexist remarks and clearly doesn’t like women
The problem with Don Lemon is that nobody has ever told him he’s not as good as he thinks he is.
He’s handsome and works in an industry that can inflate even the most constrained egos. Clearly, the CNN anchor has no constraints. He has allowed his ego to grow bigger than a Chinese weather balloon.
We are watching in real time the inevitable process of cutting Lemon down to size.
It’s not CNN doing that.
He’s doing it to himself by exposing his toxic chauvinism to female colleagues.
Ever since he lost his solo primetime show due to low ratings, Lemon has been having an internal tantrum that regularly erupts on camera. He doesn’t want to share the limelight with anyone, let alone a couple of broads.
So he has been mean-girling his female co-hosts, boorishly interrupting, mansplaining, hogging the limelight, denigrating them, demoralizing them, correcting them, talking over them, and even, reportedly, berating them off air in front of the crew.
Lemon’s latest bout of misogyny came Thursday when he declared that a woman Nikki Haley’s age is too old to run for president. At 51, he said, the former UN ambassador is not “in her prime.”
Haley’s pitch is that it’s time for a younger generation to take charge. True enough, considering the president is 80. But Lemon, who is five years older than Haley, spotted what he regards as a weakness in her argument.
“Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime, sorry,” he said. “A woman is considered to be in their prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.”
At the time, he was looking straight at co-host Poppy Harlow, age 40.
“What are you talking about? Wait, prime for what?” she challenged him.
Lemon kept digging. “It’s just like, prime. If you look it up. If you Google ‘when is a woman in her prime?,’ it’ll say 20s, 30s, and 40s.”
Harlow did a sarcastic double fist pump: “Ah! 40s! I got another decade.”
Their co-host, Kaitlan Collins, 30, stared at Lemon in disbelief.
Lemon: “I’m not saying I agree with that.”
Harlow, head cocked to one side: “I think we need to qualify it. Are you talking about prime for like childbearing?”
Lemon, sensing her ire: “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just saying what the facts are. Google it. Everybody at home, when is a woman in her prime? 20s, 30s, and 40s. I’m just saying Nikki Haley should be careful … because she wouldn’t be in her prime, according to, you know …”
Harlow, smiling: “Google?”
Collins looked aghast at the rant, which clearly was aimed at Harlow.
“Google it,” said Lemon.
Weird that he was Googling such a question.
But what he meant was: “Don’t interrupt me, woman! Watch and learn. I had my own primetime show, don’t you know? I won three Emmys. Eat your heart out, Poppy! I was voted class president in my senior year! I was in Out Magazine’s Power 50 ‘most influential LGBTQ people’ of 2017! Why am I here? It’s not fair. Waaah.”
‘Not moving on’
The fact is, Lemon does not like women. He does not care to share a camera with them.
In December, he reportedly reduced Collins to tears because she had “interrupted” him on air.
Two weeks ago, he delayed a commercial break to sneer at Collins’ interview with House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), who had criticized Big Tech censorship of The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Back in the studio, Lemon was unimpressed.
“That’s the time that we’re in, where facts are sort of flexible,” he sighed.
“That’s why we’ve got Kaitlan Collins on the Hill, fact-checking in real time,” said Harlow brightly.
Lemon plowed on as if she hadn’t spoken.
“Citing uncredible [sic] sources like citing the New York Post as a credible source,” said the purveyor of fake news, who gave Jussie Smollett secret tips to keep his racial hoax going.
Google it, said the pretend journalist who cites Google as an authority.
Harlow tried to get the show back on track: “Kaitlan, that was a great interview. All right. Moving on.”
Lemon wasn’t having a woman tell him to move on.
“Not moving on,” he snapped. “Hold on, please, with the music,” he told the producer trying to switch to a commercial.
Turns out CNN boss Chris Licht is annoyed by the disharmony on a show that is a ratings dog.
So he hauled sour Lemon into CNN’s editorial call Friday. Well, not exactly.
Lemon phoned in from Miami, where he was sunning himself at a $2,000-a-night resort.
He was supposed to apologize, but couldn’t help delivering a homily on how he isn’t a misogynist, even though he plays one on TV.
“The people I am closest to in this organization are women … The person I am closest to is my mother, a woman … I’m going to continue to be who I am.”
Lemon isn’t sorry. He’s annoyed that he has to explain himself.
“The reference I made to a woman’s ‘prime’ this morning was inartful and irrelevant … and I regret it,” he tweeted.
Inartful means “awkwardly expressed but not necessarily untrue.”
So Lemon meant what he said, and he was poking at a co-host he regards as past her “prime.”
Getting up there
Truth be told, Lemon is no spring chicken. Primetime is behind him, 60 is knocking on his door, and he’s about to find that you end up with not the pretty face you were born with, but the one that reflects who you are.
That’s the thing about aging. It reveals how a life was spent. The face settles into patterns of petulance or self-mastery, selfishness or generosity.
Needless to say, the negative emotions don’t come out nicely.
Lemon should learn not to be so self-engrossed so he can save face, in more ways than one.
Joe’s handling of Ohio is ‘toxic’
For two weeks, the Biden administration refused to okay FEMA assistance for what clearly was a disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, after its toxic train derailment with wider implications for the water table and the food supply. But shortly after Donald Trump announced Saturday that he’s heading to East Palestine, FEMA did an about-face.
Amazing the change since the Biden administration refused Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s belated request for federal disaster assistance, with an official saying, “FEMA is on the front lines when there is a hurricane or tornado. This situation is different.”
The difference is Trump always put Americans first and still makes an impact.
But the pressing question is who authorized the “controlled burn” of toxic chemicals on the derailed train that appears to have exacerbated the problem and created a toxic mushroom cloud akin to a World War I chemical weapon?
Hazardous materials specialist Sil Caggiano told Tucker Carlson last week he was “dumbfounded” by the decision to blow up the train, “dumping all the chemicals into a trench and lighting them on fire … When you lit this stuff on fire, you were creating phosgenes, you were creating hydrogen chlorides. You created this plume and up in this plume were the incomplete combustion products of everything that was there … stuff was precipitating down into people’s property … Now we’ve found vinyl chlorides in the water.
“There’s got to be some plan going forward,” he said.
No plan from Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. When he finally managed to turn his attention from the skin color of construction workers, he addressed the disaster, but only to dismiss it because, hey, trains derail all the time, so what’s the big fuss.
“While this horrible situation has gotten a particularly high amount of attention, there are roughly 1,000 cases a year of a train derailing,” Buttigieg said.
Reader Alfredo has an assignment for Secretary Pete: “Why don’t you bring derailments of trains in the United States down to zero! You get what you accept.”
