CNN’s Brian Stelter hosted a Sunday discussion about President Trump’s missile strike on a Syrian airbase with an unexpected PG-13 twist. Stelter spoke with both Syria Deeply co-founder Lara Setrakian and The Intercept‘s Jeremy Scahill, and the latter called out the bizarre (and continuing) response by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who remains positively giddy about the strike. Scahill bluntly assessed the matter: “You know, Fareed Zakaria — if that guy could have sex with this cruise missile attack, I think he would do it.” (A longer clip with more context is available at the bottom of this post.)

Scahill’s take was crude, sure, but consider the evidence. On the morning following the missile attack, Zakaria raved, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night.” Then on Sunday morning, Zakaria praised Trump for “striking a blow against evil, for which I congratulate him.” This is in addition to Zakaria’s recent Washington Post op-ed, in which he lavished compliments on Trump for ending his “strange flirtation with Vladimir Putin on the Middle East” by calling out the Assad regime. (As if Trump can erase decades of his own Russia infatuation within a few days?)

Stelter and Setrakian somehow kept straight faces while Scahill suggested that Zakaria wanted to make sweet love to the missile strike, but that’s not all Scahill had to say. He also called out MSNBC’s Brian Williams for evoking Leonard Cohen lyrics while commenting upon the “beauty of our weapons.”



Scahill thinks these two examples perfectly represent the weird polarization of the Syrian Civil War as covered by the press. He believes some outlets are “fetishizing” the country’s plight while many are content to ignore it all. Scahill goes further to suggest that retired military generals and colonels should be pulled off the air as media analysts of these strikes, and he’d like to know “the extent to which these people have benefited in the private sector from these wars.”

Here’s the longer clip of Scahill’s discussion with Stelter and Setrakian. It’s truly something to behold.