CNN can’t be serious. Seeking political commentary from Charles Barkley, of all people? That’s the low point Don Lemon, Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins sank to Tuesday morning on CNN This Morning. Yeah, there’s a real voice of wisdom.
Barkley, who’s hard enough to stomach on his profession – basketball – certainly can’t be taken seriously on politics. The TNT NBA commentator went off on Republicans before blaming both parties for ruining the country.
Barkley said, “I am disgusted with our politics. These people are elected to try and make things better. The notion that you’ve got to have every Republican vote, every Democratic vote is a flat-out joke! I can walk up to somebody who’s a Democrat or Independent or whatever, we don’t disagree on every subject and these politicians have ruined our country.”
Aside from that faulty generalization, the former NBA player who was arrested for drunk driving and for throwing a man through a bar window kind of forgot about which party made America great again during the Trump years of 2017-2021. As well as which party and president have royally messed up the country these past two years.
Barkley lumps the GOP in with the Democrats who’ve turned the southern border into an unmanageable humanitarian crisis, screwed up the economy, made a mockery of energy independence, left Americans behind in Afghanistan and yawned at violence. In fact, some of them can’t even define what a woman is, and they’re more concerned about pronouns than the cultural destruction they’ve wrought.
The heart of America’s political problem, according to Barkley, is election denying by Republicans. He lives in Arizona part of the year, and he’s especially angered over Republican candidate for governor Kari Lake, who lost a close election to Democrat Katie Hobbs:
All these election deniers – are they only saying an election’s legit if they win? That’s the thing that’s frustrating to me. Are Republicans going to say unless we win that the election was stolen? Is that the motto we’re going to have for the rest of history? If they don’t win an election that it was stolen? And that was the thing that bothered me the most about watching Kari.
Now all Republicans are unfairly tossed into one bucket with Lake.
In 1995, Barkley mentioned he was considering a run for governor in his home state of Alabama. Thank God for the people of that state who were spared such a fate when he didn’t follow through. At the time, he said the border invasion and marriage law were not important.
Related: Celtics' Jaylen Brown Calls Our Nets' Tsai for Hypocritical Punishment of Irving
In 2006, he disavowed the Republican Party, declaring it had lost its mind. Yet he hasn’t said anything like that about the Joe Biden-era Democrats, who have turned the U.S. on its head in many respects. He also told Wolf Blitzer, "Every time I hear the word 'conservative,' it makes me sick to my stomach, because they're really just fake Christians, as I call them. That's all they are ... I think they want to be judge and jury.”
Americans tired of watching months' worth of political mudslinging TV ads can agree with Barkley on one thing. Like many people, he is glad to see the 2022 election cycle come to an end, barring the December run-off for the U.S. Senate in Georgia. That’s where sensible people can come to an end in their agreement with Barkley on political matters. The more he opens his yap, the more he convinces people how little he knows.
Follow us on Twitter:
Sonya Curry: God Helped Me Not Abort Steph https://t.co/10TJiIyBxB
— MRCTV (@mrctv) November 16, 2022