Good luck un-imagining this...

Pictured: Anderson Cooper setting the
bar for journalists. And to be clear, I'm
not being sarcastic. Like at all. 

Oh and just so we're clear, exactly no one, no one is allowed to be upset at Anderson Cooper for suggesting to political commentator and former Ronald Reagan groupie Jeffrey Lord that:

"If he [President Trump] took a dump on his desk, you would defend him."

-Anderson Cooper, presumably while

mentally writing his apology Tweet

Yes, that's Anderson Cooper inviting everyone to imagine President Trump shitting on the desk of the Oval Office; an image with no small amount of figurative truth to it.

Above: The desk in question, just in case you needed help with the visual.

He literally wrote the
book on defending Trump.

 -what? You hadn't heard? Yeah, I missed this on Friday too, but apparently he said it and has since then been apologizing, Twitter apologizing and I think getting whipped by 80 monks before the tomb of Thomas Beckett as penance (CNN has weird contracts) because this is America and we'll be goddamned if someone on CNN is right while at the same time being funny and that's the first of the several reasons that no one is allowed to get all righteous about Cooper's comment. Because he's right. You might remember Lord as the guy who once went on CNN and said: "Think of President Trump as the Martin Luther King of healthcare..." -a statement that manages to be total gibberish while simultaneously offending everyone in the world. It also makes it clear that Lord would probably defend just about anything Trump does. Yes, even the poop thing.

Pictured: Lord, in front of a photo of Reagan,
defending Trump recklessly divulging intel to
 the Russians. Not pictured: a sense of irony.

In fact, just before Cooper-in what I suspect was a moment half amused, half maybe having a stroke from the frustration-made his comment, Jeffrey Lord was saying:

"I don't care, I mean, I don't care what he says to the Russian Prime-to the Russians. I, I mean, he's the President of the United States..."

-Jeffry Lord explaining that Trump is

blameless in all things forever

"Welcome to the White House Minister,
can I get you anything? A drink? Detailed
schematics of our nuclear deterrent system?"

-Trump, for all we know

Ok, but shouldn't he care what the President is saying to the Russians? I mean, Trump isn't exactly going out of his way to convince us that he didn't secretly work with Russian intelligence to win the election, so yeah, I do kind of care what he's saying in secret Oval Office meetings that the American press isn't allowed into but Russian press is and where he's maybe bragging about firing the director of the FBI while he's investigating the aforementioned claims of Russian collusion. In fact, I care a lot. I suspect we all do. All of us except Jeffrey Lord that is.

Of course, in theory the President is
usually the one most of us voted for
so...well, here we are, right?

So again if Lord is willing to overlook all that, is dropping the First Number Two on the Resolute Desk really out of left field? Maybe not, but surely Anderson Cooper shouldn't have said what he said, right? I mean, it was an accident, a slip of the filter and admittedly unprofessional. After all, we're supposed to respect the office of the President, if not the occupant, right? Yes, in theory. But I'm not sure Trump or anyone leaping to his defense has the best case here.

"Um, no, as a matter of fact you cannot."

-All lawyers everywhere

Like, remember this horrible thing he said:

"You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful-I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just Kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything...Grab'em by the pussy. You can do anything."

-The guy who would go on to

technically win the 2016 election

Yes, I'm trotting that one out again. Sure, it's from 2005, but feel free to substitute pretty much anything he's said aloud or Tweeted before, during or after the campaign or at any point during his Presidency so far. It's all unrepentantly awful. The point is I think we're well past feigning moral outrage about how people talk about President Trump.

Trump, Billy Bush and Arianne Zucker, the women they, moments earlier,
were discussing assaulting. Sexually. So Cooper was out of line, how?