With conservative friends like these, who needs liberals?
Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh, but token conservative S.E. Cupp on today's Now with Alex Wagner blurted out on air, unprompted, the sort of ignorant, bigoted view of conservative evangelicals that you'd expect from a liberal panelist.
"Evangelicals don't even like Catholics!" the atheist pundit interrupted while fellow panelist Karen Finney was giving her take on exit polling results from the March 12 primaries in Alabama and Mississippi. Finney was saying that, if it were possible for there to be an "evangelical Catholic," Santorum would be it, given the Catholic ex-senator's ability to appeal to the social conservatism of evangelicals.
Cupp's unprompted attack on southern evangelicals is, of course, absolutely ludicrous. Indeed, Democrats tried unsuccessfully in 2007 to sink Bobby Jindal's gubernatorial run by running attack ads saying he was a Catholic who hated Protestants. That failed miserably and the former Hindu and Catholic convert Jindal won 54 percent of the votes cast for governor. Last November, Jindal cruised to reelection with 66 percent of the vote.
What's more, last night's primaries saw nearly 2/3rds of Mississippians and Alabamans voting for Catholic candidates Gingrich and Santorum. "In Mississippi, 83 percent of the electorate describes themselves as evangelicals while in Alabama that number is 79 percent," Washington Post's Chris Cillizza noted.
Cupp is entitled to her opinion, but it's a ludicrous one given that pesky little thing we call facts.
