Anderson Cooper doesn't do anything to this guy. They spend ten minutes going around and around on the same things, and Cooper never takes him to task for the most obvious failings in his speech and reasoning; never once does he say “it sounds like you're trying to apologize for the words but not the sentiments they expressed.” Instead, he keeps asking him to own up to them. Cooper's motivations are totally inscrutable to me. This is part of the problem with these anti-bully/anti-gay slur campaigns; sometimes you have to meet bullying head on and call these motherfuckers on their shit; instead, we go around and around with them asking them questions they don't understand or answer, or both. Lame. Call it like it is: this guy is a redneck asshole. He, of course, believes the things he said and probably says them all the time. His apology is meaningless and he shouldn't have been given an opportunity to resign. There was a time when people in positions of relative journalistic freedom—people like Edward R. Murrow—would just go for the jugular, embarrass a dumbass and leave him gasping for breath and move on. Now we have guys like Anderson Cooper who posture and dance but never really go anywhere. Meanwhile the right spends 90% of its time on the attack getting people fired up, leaving us on the left to wonder what happened. Irritating. As for “letting him off easy”, that's precisely what Cooper did here; all this piece of white trash had to do for ten minutes was stay on message and it was over. Totally painless and he got to be on TV, to boot.
