Deadspin Rips ESPN for Hiring Conservative

Greg Howard, writing for Deadspin, threw a hissy fit because ESPN announced the hiring of Will Cain, a conservative, as a reporter.

Howard posited that ESPN “intentionally operates under the conceit that sports exist within a vacuum, untouched by the outside world except for instances in which the outside world intrudes on the sports universe,” and thus hiring Cain violated that “conceit.”

Using his best potty language, Howard called Cain “a career political sphincter best known for not actually being Tucker Carlson. He has long shat up your TV with his right-wing views on Fox News, and The Blaze, and CNN, and MSNBC, and anywhere else that will have him. He’s fun to watch! He works for ESPN now! What the f—?!”

ESPN triggered Howard’s diatribe with a press release describing Cain’s new duties, writing that Cain “will primarily work with ESPN’s Features Unit and E:60 and see his work appear across ESPN’s various platforms.”

The evidence Howard cited to savage Cain consisted of Cain’s appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO in which Cain, listed as “Commentator, ESPN,” likened Tom Brady’s alleged lying about balls in DeflateGate to the lying of Anthony Weiner and Monica Lewinsky’s lying about balls of an entirely different sort. Maher predictably asked, “Isn’t lying about b— jobs way less important than lying about the things Republicans lie about? Like global warming isn’t real?”

Cain responded, “One of your great failings is your inability to see the intellectual response in the global warming debate. The response which is: you can’t predict the future. Thousands and millions of variables dictating what the climate will be 100 years from now and you’re gonna give me Celsius it will be? That is intellectually dishonest.”

Howard, distraught that Cain would question one of the Important Truths Of Our Time, wrote, “It’s a hell of a thing that ESPN allowed Will Cain to show up in Maher’s studio. It’s a hell of a thing that he was allowed to shoot the s— with Maher about politics. It’s also a hell of a thing that this loquacious fleshbox of mayo incarnate was allowed to do so under the banner of ESPN.”

Howard couldn’t resist using the tried and true Leftist trope “GOP White Boy Stereotype,” writing, “Cain has carved out a role as a shill who works to further the interests and ambitions of oil corporations, Republican political candidates who attempt to hoodwink and/or energize their base, and those who vilify women and/or minorities while denying their agency.”

Of course, Howard had a completely different response when leftist lightweight Keith Olbermann was rehired by ESPN in July 2013: “It’s been 16 long years since Keith Olbermann left ESPN’s SportsCenter to make his name as a political commentator at MSNBC and, most recently, Current TV.”

Olbermann, of course, had a little history of political commentary of his own, having once described Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who investigated President Bill Clinton, as a “persecutor” whose face reminded him “of [Nazi] Heinrich Himmler, including the glasses,” telling his audience that George W. Bush’s policies were a first step “towards this totalitarian state that Orwell wrote about,” blurting out, “the leading terrorist group in this country right now is the Republican Party,” gushing on the night Barack Obama was elected in 2008, “You’ve seen those videotapes of Walter Cronkite, the night that man landed on the moon for the first time, when Neil Armstrong stepped out, and he could just barely get out monosyllables. Politically, that’s what this is. This is man on the moon,” and accusing Tea Party members of racism, intoning, “And I think, having now been one for 51 years, I am permitted to say I believe prejudice and discrimination still sit defeated, dormant, or virulent somewhere in the soul of each white man in this country.”