Jeffrey Lord, the Manservant Hecubus of cable news who is called forth whenever Donald Trump’s name is invoked, has been cut loose from CNN after interminable months of providing a craven, partisan defense for every statement or action by his master as a means of propping up the network’s appearance of “balanced” coverage, embarrassing both himself and CNN by being an unapologetic, openly trolling shill, no matter the blatant intellectual dishonesty it required.
Sorry, that is a typo. That should read, “after he tweeted a Nazi slogan at someone.”
Lord, a human Q-Tip stabbed deeply into the American ear canal, today tweeted “Sieg Heil!” in a message to Angelo Carusone, head of the liberal watchdog organization Media Matters For America that, like so many of us, wasted far too much time commenting on Lord’s dissembling non-sequiturs masquerading as putting modern politics in a “historical” perspective.
Lord, a $20 bill brought to life after an ’80s stockbroker used it to hoover magical cocaine, later defended his tweet by repeatedly saying he’d been using it by way of “mocking a fascist”—an extension of a column he wrote for The American Spectator, denouncing the organization as fascists for its call for ad boycotts against Lord’s (only) friend, Sean Hannity. Nevertheless, CNN announced today, “Nazi salutes are indefensible. Jeffrey Lord is no longer with the network.” Cool, so that’s what it took.
Lord’s firing comes amid a recent string of them spurred by the contention between CNN and the White House, which has previously seen the network part ways with Kathy Griffin over a photo and Reza Aslan over tweeting that Trump is a “piece of shit.” Unlike those incidents, of course, losing Lord will only intensify that discord, removing the network’s most eminently bookable conservative bootlick for what is surely already being branded a “thought crime” by the sort of people for whom Lord represents the last true bastion of journalistic honesty, rather than the kind of guy who will continue to lecture everyone on how liberals are the real racists despite 20 straight minutes of being told he’s a deflecting, disingenuous dipshit.
In a way, it is almost not worth it. But in another, very real way, to be able to turn on CNN for one fucking night without having to see Jeffrey Lord clogging up the national discourse with his sycophantic rhetorical farts, it absolutely is.
Anyway, in typical troll fashion, Lord has issued a single statement on his firing:
Though Lord has not yet announced his post-CNN plans, presumably he will return to Ronald Reagan’s crypt and await his beckoning to Trump TV.