CAMDEN — So Kobe Bryant just won an Oscar and Charles Barkley hosted Saturday Night Live only weeks after commentator Laura Ingraham said that basketball players should "shut up and dribble."
Now there are many who will say that Ingraham was only chasing a reaction. She didn't really feel that way - she just wanted to stir up controversy. I don't care for the excuses. Not only were her thoughts "barely intelligible" - as she described Lebron James - but she made every respectable reporter look bad by not even getting her facts straight.
Ingraham said James left high school early.
As Maury Povich would say: The lie detector test determines that was a lie.
She also said that someone who makes millions of dollars to dribble a ball isn't in a position to give business advice.
Considering that James probably made more in one year than Ingraham has made in her entire life, that is also a lie.
I don't get into politics, but I hate contradictions and Ingraham is a constant one. The super conservative once dated super liberal Keith Olberman. I have nothing at all against adopting children from overseas, but I wouldn't support building a wall if I had three children from Russia and Guatemala like she does. Oh, and the ever-so-patriotic (sarcasm) Ingraham also worked for the Dartmouth Review - a paper that has been in several racial disputes and once published lines from Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in its masthead. Unlike Ingraham, I do research.
I'm not someone who is easily offended because I know people get their high off of views, but I wounder how Ingraham would've reacted if someone told her to just shut up and cook. As the father of a beautiful and intelligent daughter, I would be just as much against that ideology as I currently am against hers.
In closing, I'm not a big Kobe Bryant fan, but Ingraham seeing Bryant win an Oscar has to feel like she begged the coach to let her guard him in the closing seconds, and he hit the game winning jumper because she forgot to play defense.