Chris Sununu (still not) banned from CNN after humiliatingly dishonest hot take

See, this is what I'm talking about.

Many of you longtime readers are aware of my past advocacy for a single proposal I think would improve the quality of U.S. political punditry immensely, if we had the decency to enforce it. There are some political takes so incredibly stupid, I have argued, that pundits ought to be banned from pundit society for giving voice to them. Not minor, stupid little flubs, mind you; I'm talking about Hot Takes that are both so obviously wrong and which go on to wreak so much damage and destruction that barring the perpetrator from polite circles is the only decent response possible. There should be a "career death penalty" for punditry that's that bad.

This came up most often in the aftermath of the Iraq War, as we contemplated the spectacular wrongness of supposedly "expert" war promoters who slathered Americans in absolute unadulterated bullshit, when it came to claims of how brief the Iraq War would be, how the war would quickly "pay for itself," how we would be Greeted As Liberators, and the other horrifically obvious lies.

The Career Death Penalty proposal is that once your incompetent, bungling pundit takes become responsible for killing, say, a six or seven-figure number of your fellow human beings, you have lost your privilege to yell things at the rest of us and have to go get a job doing something else. Get. Lost.

You could work a retail job. I promise you there's not a retail job anywhere in America that will let you kill a hundred thousand people without imposing at least some consequences, and learning to work within those limitations might help you achieve some measure of personal growth. The only private sector jobs I can think of that would let you keep that privilege of large-scale civilian murder would be health insurance executive or manager at a chicken processing plant; if you still need the thrill of drafting up memos that get other people killed you could go with one of those.

Bungling or lying your way into nationstate-scale murder campaigns are not, however, the only Hot Takes that ought to be met with professional consequences. The whole premise of political punditry is to analyze the current state of things and offer up some expertise-centered theories on what might improve things slightly; the whole premise of the bit is that you are there, your every pore visible on our new HDTV television screens or your every stray thought cluttering up op-ed pages that could more usefully be used to show comics, because you are so versed in the issues at hand that it would be irresponsible for journalists to not seek out your glowing, fabulously well-paid wisdom.

If you're instead going to stink up the place with craven lies, deliberately misleading the audience for the sake of boosting your own career or that of the partisans you've sworn a freaky little blood pact with? That is the opposite of news. It doesn't even count as punditry. You are not an issue expert. You have no insight that the nation needs to hear. You're precisely the sort of person that real "news" organizations are supposed to be dedicating themselves to exposing—so why the hell is anybody, in any of these organizations, plopping you down in a chair and inviting you to do your nose-honking and ball-juggling at their big important news desk?

Why, and I do mean this sincerely even though in the current environment the question sounds like an outright joke, would any ostensible news organization intentionally book jackasses who have no idea what they're talking about?

So after that introduction and trip down memory lane, let's talk about Chris Sununu and our Sunday shows, shall we?

[CNN HOST DANA BASH]: [Elon's] not that much of an outsider. In fact, one of the criticisms and the concerns is that he has billions tied up in government contracts. You don't see a conflict of interest?

[GOVERNOR OF AN ACTUAL STATE BECAUSE HIS DADDY WAS A GOVERNOR FIRST CHRIS SUNUNU]: Everyone has a conflict of interest—

BASH: —but that's like a pretty big one.

SUNUNU: The guy's worth 450 billion as of today and this month, so I, I don't think he's doing it for the money. He's doing it for the bigger project, the bigger vision of America. He doesn't need the dollars, he really doesn't. So it's not about 'oh, if I get involved in this I'll get another little contract here or there, that's, that's nothing to him. So I like the fact that in a way, he's so rich he's so removed from the potential financial influence of it.

All right. Deep breath.

That right there is the nationally broadcast wisdom of Republican Chris Sununu, a for-the-moment-still-sitting state governor who was on one of the interchangeable Sunday news Meet The Liars programs getting asked about Elon Musk for some reason—and that's already a pointless exercise on par with asking a bottle of ranch dressing to weigh in on 2025 tech trends. Why are you asking this? Why would you think Chris Sununu, a professional bullshitter whose political savvy mainly consists of pretending to have convictions for a bit longer than his peers before giving up and backing the orchestrators of an attempted coup, which in our new political environment actually gets the sucker labeled a moderate, would have some insight into the latest pro-insurrection opportunist to crawl up Trump's aging colon? Any insight, that is, that was not based entirely on party-obedient partisan vibes?

So that's how we got treated to the 53rd nationally broadcast car crash of this particular Sunday. A political figure with no expected insight on a petulantly far-right billionaire's career of relentless government teat-sucking was asked to weigh in on whether or not the man's fortune being nearly entirely tied to government handouts, government contracts, and tweaks to government regulations might count as a conflict of interest interest when putting him ostensibly in charge of deciding which of those government programs live or die; it's met with a buffoonish, utterly dishonest mash of an answer that requires us to presuppose that the last five hundred years of human history were all a figment of our g——n imaginations.

Oh—as an aside, we just learned that the reason Musk now appears to have no other job or hobby other than clinging to Dear Leader's lapels is that he really is treating "clinging to Dear Leader's lapels" as a full-time job. No, really: The New York Times helpfully reports that "For much of the period since Election Day, the billionaire has been staying at a $2,000-a-night cottage at Mar-a-Lago, giving him easy access to the president-elect."

You know Trump is billing him full price and then some for that stay. Trump never misses an opportunity to squeeze money out of a chump—but he's also been getting free labor as part of the deal, sez the Times' Sedition Whisperers:

"Mr. Musk’s employees from his various businesses have also been integrally involved in the transition, vetting prospective candidates for senior administration jobs, in interviews at the Trump transition headquarters in West Palm Beach."

So before we even get into Musk ostensibly heading a new federal "department" that doesn't exist and, therefore, neither has actual powers nor any anti-corruption checks and balances whatsoever, we've already got Team Tesla and Team Space X "vetting" which Americans ought to be considered for senior administration positions, allowing Musk to press against the hiring of anyone who might, say, have closer ties to Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates than to himself. How convenient!

But none of this is worth noticing, says (checks headline to make sure) partisan plate-spinner Chris Sununu. Why, if anything, the richer you are the fewer conflicts of interest you have—surely, Mr. Musk is so fabulously wealthy that he no longer cares about sabotaging companies in rivalry with his car company, and no longer cares whether rival billionaires nick gigantic government space and defense contracts, and is furthermore not engaged in any of the nearly comically self-dealing policy advocacy that has Republicanism's own policy stances turning on a dime in accordance to whatever he last burped out in Donald Trump's presence.

He's SO RICH he's REMOVED from caring about the financial advantages he gets from the policies he asks for. The conflicts are so all-encompassing that it WRAPS AROUND. You and I, we have conflicts of interests because when we drive across an interstate highway bridge we'd rather not die when it collapses for lack of maintenance, which means we have a conflict of interest when it comes to deciding whether or not to maintain the national infrastructure, but ELON MUSK, now this is a man with no remaining worldly concerns at all. When he, for example, demands his party's racist anti-immigrant fervor ignore the visa programs that allow him to import workers at rates far below typical U.S. salaries, and when he furthermore threatens all-out pouty war against anyone in the country who dares argue him on this, he is doing it SOLELY out of legitimate national policy concerns. The same with removing EV vehicle rebates that Tesla's most significant competitors have all been relying on. The same applies to Musk's reported private conversations with the notoriously murderous Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin, and his subsequent refusal to allow Ukrainian military access to his observatory-blinding ozone-destroying Starlink satellites. And so on. It's all for America. If we promise to be very good and let the nice billionaire do all of it, perhaps he will buy America a horse.

All right, look. Here's how I think that segment should have closed out, after Sununu opened his face-hole, plopped that whopper down on the bright shiny desk and obliged the viewers to stare at it—and you can see it in his eyes, as he works for the answer and goes a bit vacant in his embarrassment at what's coming out of his own mouth.

First off, there should have been a very loud gonging sound the moment those last words left his lips.

"I'm sorry," host Dana Bash should have said. "It seems you've triggered the Stupidity Alarm, CNN's warning to viewers that the thing they just heard is so stupid that no actual news analyst or informed political figure would have dared say it. We'll have to go to break."

And the network would cut to commercials. When the program resumed, Sununu would no longer be in the studio and Bash would address CNN's audience directly:

"I'd like to let viewers know that CNN has determined that the previous guest's attempted punditry did not meet our network's standards. While CNN welcomes a broad range of ideologies and makes no particular ethical demands of our many paid and unpaid guests, we do still have standards, and foremost among them as that we don't want to be known for broadcasting statements so stupid or so dishonest that our viewers come away from our network less informed than when they first tuned in. Mr. Sununu's suggestion that billionaires are inherently more trustworthy because they already have all the money and have no interest in acquiring more money is, we have determined, such an egregious example of stupidity or dishonesty that it should not have been aired. To you, our viewers, we apologize, and Mr. Sununu will not be booked for new appearances on our network until our Pundit Stupidity Review Panel has conducted an investigation of this incident."

I'm not suggesting that partisans who punch CNN viewers square in the face with obvious, transparent lies be dismissed summarily, you see. There ought to be a process. I'm fully on board with the creation of an in-network panel of experts who can review these decisions. Chris Sununu could appeal his case, arguing for his claim that billionaires are "removed" from conflicts of interest because they are already so rich that they wouldn't bother trying to bend government to their will.

It is not the stupidest thing anyone has said on CNN in the last six months, Sununu could argue. I was not intentionally lying when I dribbled out that viscous stream of Talk Show Diarrhea; you can't prove I don't really believe my obviously unhinged statement, my ridiculous, utterly asinine claim that flies in the face of all human experience since at least the dawn of the industrial revolution.

But the important part is that it would not matter whether Chris Sununu was intentionally lying to Americans or was just the stupidest, most gullible sack of molding cheese to roll squishily into their studios; the point of news analysis is to provide news analysis, and if some complete m--—f—er wants to sit at that unbearably shiny table and claim that wealthy people are "removed" from conflicts of interest then holy effing eff, that person has exposed themselves as among the least informed people on Planet Earth and, as a rule, we should put a halt to this national media obsession with collecting up stone-cold idiots and shoving them in front of our news cameras so that they can vomit out Earth's Stupidest Thoughts at us. The news is not supposed to be a game show. It's not supposed to come with prizes for the people most willing to humiliate themselves or tell lies to others. This isn't even remotely how "news" is supposed to work.

There is no genuine way Sununu believes that that famously greedy Musk, whose entire political oeuvre has been to publicly demand governments allow him to ignore pandemics, ignore regulations, bigfoot communities, sabotage transportation rivals—both private and public—and claw for every government dollar he can strip from public coffers, is now "removed" from such concerns, now that he's parked himself literally on Trump's own property. Sununu is transparently lying, most assuredly to defend his now-craptacular party and its near-infinite collection of crooked ne'er-do-wells, and if he is not lying than he has proven himself less qualified to weigh in on government ethics than at least 300 million other Americans, all of whom are more removed from partisan conflicts of interest than he is even if they don't know a damn thing more about Musk than he does.

I don't care if this liar is the governor of a state. I don't even care if he's the governor of some state less politically cartoonish than New Hampshire. Ask him about New Hampshire stuff if you need to, but keep him out of the studio if you need to talk about grown-up things elsewhere.

This is why Americans do not trust "the news media." Hang on, this is important so I'm going to put it in bigger text.

This is why Americans have lost faith in the media: they know the media lies to them. And they know it's on purpose.

The point of Dana Bash's stunt here is identical to the point of every other news show on every other network. It's identical to the point of every New York Times story marked political, which is approximately all of them. It's the same sought-for goal as that of every op-ed page in the country.

All of it consists of bringing an important person onto the program or into the news pages, and invite them to spout utter bullshit.

That's it. That's all. There's no higher purpose, there's no second act. Every show with a shiny lucite desk or with fake American flags flapping slowly behind the interviewer's head all consists of bringing one of a few hundred Americans—if that—deemed "important enough" for audience to hear from, handing them a microphone, and sitting back glassy-eyed as they misinform Americans to such a dramatic and all-encompassing extent that the American public has no f--king idea whether the economy is good or bad, inflation is high or low, public health is good or bad, abortion is banned or is not, the president-elect is a convicted felon or not, or of any news event at all that happened more than a few weeks back.

That's the point. News executives find it exciting and hilarious and are absolutely convinced that this is now what counts as "journalism," because it's dirt cheap and requires no more effort than sending few cars around to pick the guests up, so there are no news programs that aren't this. Newspaper owners are thrilled with coverage that consists of nothing but reprinting the most idiotic and dishonest thing that any politician or partisan hack said, because it's inherently "balanced"—you don't have to piss any of those important people off by awkwardly pointing out that actually, this or that sex-trafficking teen-raping public menace has been gaslighting Americans through his whole career and probably ought not be listened to.

Yay, everybody wins. Let everyone lie as much as they want, including people who are specifically paid by partisan groups to lie as often and as prominently as possible, call that the "news," and proclaim yourself a Custodian of the Public Trust. I am a Journalist, thinks Dana Bash as she listens to a dime-a-dozen partisan cough up a defense of public corruption so hackneyed that it caught even her by surprise. I am serving the public by letting this asshole spew his words at me.

Why shouldn't Americans turn off every news channel, when every news channel consists of the same hundred or so people lying, relentlessly, in attempts to make the nation meaner and more ignorant? Why shouldn't Americans cancel their newspapers, if their newspapers are going to consist of the same hundred people telling them the same lies in five different stories bylined by eight different reporters?

Not even dogs want to listen to what CNN is selling. For the same price as CNN, Americans can subscribe to a channel that consists of nothing but close-ups of squirrels and the sounds of cars driving by, and their dogs would love it and nobody would have to listen to anybody lie their ass off in order to promote a political and media class now so corrupt that they can't even tell the difference between Attempting A Coup and Not Attempting A Coup in election coverage and during "presidential debates."

This is the one problem at the root of all the others. When you've determined that the highest and best form of "news" is inviting the members of an achingly narrow, agonizingly privileged subgroup to all stand in the public square and lie to each other's faces, and none of it is premised on expertise but on partisanship and salary, you cannot plausibly expect your audience to react with anything other than contempt.

What is Dana Bash's current reputation? She is a talking head tasked with letting powerful figures to lie to you.

What is CNN's reputation? It is the network you go to when you want to see partisan hacks lie to you, and when CNN can't find hacks partisan enough to argue for the lies they need telling then network executives go rummaging through the bin of discredited far-right (and only far-right) extremists, throwing money at each of them in turn to tell worse lies than their previous crop could stomach.

Oh, sure Americans are going to keep tuning into these programs. I'm sure CNN and the other networks will come up with no end of new twists on the old format in attempts to keep them salacious but cheap. Maybe Tuesdays will feature the Nearly Nude News Desk. Maybe new A.I. "hosts" will be developed who will argue each topic, Crossfire-style, as viewers use their phones to vote on which lies each computer-generated fake will tell next.

But we've seen decades of this stuff, with 2024's election season amounting to literally the most vapid political coverage America has seen since the invention of television, and so far there doesn't seem to be one network or newspaper executive who thinks that the new industry reputation for promoting disinformation over facts might be the fatal flaw that's doing their industry in. It never comes up.

We'll get the Nearly Nude News Desk before we ever get an apology from CNN for promoting partisan spin over actual truth. And the anchors will go along with it, I promise you they will, because it's not like any of them have reputations worth keeping anyway.