This week’s Liberal Media Scream features ranting CNN host Don Lemon tying everything he doesn’t like to one of the most popular presidents in United States history: Ronald Reagan.
“Reagan was horrible,” said Lemon, who suggested that the Republican’s two-term presidency paved the way for the Capitol riots.
Shouting over fellow CNN host Chris Cuomo, Lemon said Republicans are also bad for respecting Reagan.
“They hold him up to a gold standard. When you look at what he actually accomplished, he didn’t,” he said.
From the Thursday, Feb. 11 CNN Tonight, during the handoff from Chris Cuomo’s 9 p.m. show to Lemon’s 10 p.m. show:
CHRIS CUOMO: Reagan and Bush Republicans were nothing like these guys.
DON LEMON: I don’t know about that.
CUOMO: Just the issue of immigration. Look at how Reagan and George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush talked about immigration.
LEMON: Reagan was the first presidential election that I voted in. And listen, … I’m just saying that people hold him up to be — Reagan was not perfect. Reagan was horrible when it came to—
CUOMO: Perfect? He gave us one of the biggest deficits we’ve ever seen, and he absolutely fed the divide.
LEMON: That’s what I mean. They always hold him up as a gold standard. But when you look at what he actually accomplished, he didn’t. He was horrible when it came to racial issues. He was horrible when it came to the AIDS crisis. He was horrible when it came to uniting the country. He didn’t unite the country — he was a divider. And so they hold him up as a gold standard. … I just think it’s degrees, but I think the Republican Party has been moving in this direction forever.
Again, they are the party of everything that they’re trying to pretend that they’re not. Now saying, “The people in the Capitol, that’s not us.” Yes, it is you! “The people that were in Charlottesville, that’s not us.” Yes, it is you! Those people are not marching for Democrats. And this whole weird thing that they keep saying, “What about the riots and the demonstration that happened this summer?” That’s apples and oranges. First of all, the demonstrations, the protests were for something that’s real. It was for inequality. It was for police brutality. It was for all those things. It was people who were rising up for their rights. What happened at the Capitol was built on a lie.
- Media Research Center Vice President for Research and Publications Brent Baker explains our weekly pick: “Such disdain for the late former president, who is a hero to conservatives and an inspiration to many oppressed by communism around the world, shows the baselessness of the widespread media line that they had to be hostile to Donald Trump because he posed a new kind of dangerous and racist threat to democracy and all that is good about the United States. If Lemon had a CNN show in the 1980s he would have been just as hostile to Reagan, calling him a racist night after night, as he was and is to Trump. Conservative presidents come and go, but the media contempt for them never wavers.”
Rating: 4 out of 5 SCREAMS.
