CNN's GOP Convention News: Strippers Are Ready

CNN’s latest RNC coverage is about how an important sector of Tampa is readying for the convention. What important sector is under the CNN microscope? Tampa’s strip clubs, naturally.

Of all the important stories that CNN could pick to investigate, strip clubs is where the venerable “news” leader goes. The CNN story’s opening paragraph really goes for the salacious right off the bat, too.

Go-Go and Ezili are dancing cheek to cheek on a Friday night. That is to say they’re spinning, glute to glute, on a polished chrome pole at a strip club.

We know why this is a CNN story and it isn’t because CNN cares about the poor, work-a-day strippers in Tampa, Florida.  The narrative is that Republicans are the “family values” Party, yet they are obviously hypocrites because while away from wife and family, they will be attending strip clubs. 

Here is an excerpt:

A strip club with a spaceship on the roof seems an odd place to expect Republicans. At first blush, one might not equate lap dances with the political party that wraps itself in buttoned-down family values.

But at convention time, even upstanding men seem to seek out undressed women. When the Christian group Promise Keepers held a convention in Tampa a couple of years ago, attendees flooded the 2001 Odyssey, co-owner Jim Kleinhans recalls. They had such a good time that “they kept their promise to come back the next night.”

It’s sad to see CNN bringing itself down to the level of supermarket tabloid, but, well, there is a reason CNN is often in third place in the cable races these days.