Joy Behar’s Idiotic Kyrsten Sinema Take

CLAY: Buck, I don’t know about you, but, man, some days it feels like there are so many just negative stories out there, and so I think we can at least bring some humor and some fun by pointing out who I believe is the dumbest person in all of media, which, honestly, we should probably have, Buck.

BUCK: Like an ongoing contest? Should we actually have real parameters here for the dumbest person in the news media?

CLAY: I think we should have a bracket challenge for the NCAA Tournament come March — the dumbest people in media — and let our listeners vote and set up an entire bracket challenge. Different regions. We can have your television region. We can have your radio region. We can have a lot of fun with it. But I think Joy Behar is close to being a number one seed in stupidity.

I understand she’s originally a comedian so she’s probably not renowned for intelligence in the first place, but we have a lot of people clipping different segments from television for us that we can check out and make sure ’cause hard to be on top of everything that idiots out there are saying on a day-to-day basis.

But without fail when I see a really stupid take, it’s either Joy Behar or Don Lemon or maybe Joy Reid 90% of the time. Those three, I feel like, are the triumvirate of stupidity. We might need to at another one to put them on the Mount Rushmore of Idiocy. I don’t know who you would think, but would you agree that it’s tough to beat Don Lemon, Joy Behar and Joy Reid?

BUCK: (Behar impression) “Uh-huh. Clay is mansplaining again here on the show! He’s a sexist and a mansplainuh!”

CLAY: I think you could disagree a lot with Rachel Maddow or Anderson Cooper, for instance, but I don’t think that they’re insanely dumb in the arguments that they make.

BUCK: People… I know enough people that have worked with and for… Rachel Maddow is not dumb. She’s a smart lady. She’s wrong and I think she’s disingenuous, but she’s not dumb.

CLAY: Yeah, right. So I think it’s hard to attack those guys, whereas I genuinely am not that convinced that Don Lemon, Joy Behar, and that crew are actually very intelligent.

BUCK: I actually think Matthew Dowd, who I think is running for Texas… I don’t know if you know who he is.

CLAY: I don’t even know who that is.

BUCK: He had some takes of political analysis that are, like, nuclear explosion-level stupid, and then there’s also Steve Schmidt who is of the Lincoln Project.

CLAY: Yeah, he turned on Trump, right.

BUCK: (impression) “He’s all of a sudden going on TV and he’s like, ‘If we don’t get rid of Trump, the whole nation is on fire. Send me check.'”

CLAY: Is he the one who picked Sarah Palin for McCain?

BUCK: Yeah. You knew that there was something coming up with him because in the HBO movie the entire movie was to mock Sarah Palin. Not Recount. That was the election one that was… Game Change. In that movie, he was played by Woody Harrelson which is like the one man of character which means that he worked with the people making the movie and they made him look good as he fed them stuff about how terrible Sarah Palin was. That was that game.

CLAY: Yeah, no doubt. Well, Joy Behar has decided — and there have been others who have defended the idea that you should follow Senator Sinema into the bathroom with a camera and record things from inside of there, but the idea that they would put her on television? Have you seen it? There have been Democratic operatives willing to do this?

BUCK: The Democrat left believes in this and will defend it, actually. If you turn on some of the more far-left stuff, too, that’s out there, there’s a bunch of these kind of internet left-wing outfits. I don’t want to name them on this show and give them the pumb that they don’t deserve, but they will defend this stuff. They’ll say absolutely it’s worth it to chase…

Remember, there’s also a lot of disingenuousness around this. The issue is not yelling at a politician. Right? When people want to yell, “Let’s go, Brandon!” at the sitting president as he drives by, that’s the First Amendment, baby. “Let’s go, Brandon!” We all know, right? So that’s the thing that happens. The problem is not a public person with Kyrsten Sinema. It’s Kyrsten, right?

CLAY: Yeah, I always cross that up too. It’s Kyrsten, Kirsten?

BUCK: There are probably some Kyrstens and Kristens listening right now together, and we could agree the name is either Kristin or Kirsten, ’cause it’s just too hard for the rest of us.

CLAY: That’s why I keep saying “Sinema.” I just use her last name.

BUCK: Yeah, Sinema. There we go. And they act the problem is, “We’re challenging power.” No, that’s not the problem. The problem is we want to live in a somewhat — just a little bit — civilized country these days. I mean, there are people who think it’s okay to put their phone on speaker in a restaurant, Clay, good heavens.

There’s a lot of barbarians out there. But we want to live in a civilized country, and that means you can’t follow anyone, including politicians into the bathroom while their doing their business and videotape them with the toilets flushing.

CLAY: Right. That’s a pretty basic request. I think 90% of people in America agree with that. One of the dumbest people in America on television, Joy Behar, disagreed. This is what she said on The View.

BEHAR: Sinema is MIA all over the place! She’s not around. They (sputtering) call her to have a meeting; they trying to get her on the phone. She doesn’t… (sputtering) She’s like a missing person. So, this is the only alternative they have.

CLAY: First of all, this idea that Sinema doesn’t know that people have this political position? People are like, “I need to have a meeting so I can advocate for my position.” I know what your position is. There are lots of people advocating for your position.

I don’t need to hear you advocate for that position in order to have my opinion on that position change in any way, right? I mean, it’s not a novel issue. Also, she can’t solve it herself, and there are lots of ways that you can advocate for a position without running your camera in a bathroom while someone’s doing their business.

BUCK: And let’s also remind ourselves here that I think the normal human response to somebody doing this kind of targeted harassment is, “Oh, what’s that thing you want? ‘Cause now you’re really not going to get it. Oh, you think this is the way to get what you want by trying to…?” And, by the way, you see this, and I think there’s a huge part of the vaccine story.

Not to get on a whole vaccine discussion now. But a huge part of the backfire is people who believe in freedom and individual agency and autonomy have a revulsion against others saying, “You must do this.” Right? “You have to do this.” They push back on that. And I think even though Sinema, let’s be very clear, is a person of the left; she’s very much a Democrat.

She’s not… Manchin’s a little bit different category. Sinema is to the left of Manchin okay? She’s not obviously AOC but she’s to the left of Manchin. And when you try to make someone do what you want in this way, I think the normal response… I think Sinema might even have put this out in a statement which is, “You think I’m gonna do what you want now?” Don’t negotiate with bathroom terrorists! That’s the rule.

CLAY: Yeah, no doubt. And that was my argument about how Biden totally bungled this, Buck, was all he had to do was be basic and decent and he might be able to gain a little bit of favor with Sinema. But when he said it’s part of the process, and then he had to have Jen Psaki come clean it up for him, that was an imbecilic response.