Popular NYC Sports Writer Attacks ‘Phony’ & ‘Dull’ Eric Cantor for Criticizing Protesters

One of the original "ESPN: The Sports Reporters," and synonymous enough with New York to get a name-drop on Seinfeld, Mike Lupica has been a columnist and sports reporter for the New York Daily News since 1977. Lupica is known for his wacky sense of humor on display during his daily radio show on 1050 ESPN Radio, and has caught the attention of The Blaze before when mixing his admiration of left-wing politics with sports coverage. And now he's a it again.

Lupica opened up his Monday column, entitled "Phony Eric Cantor Praises Tea Party Movement, But Criticizes Occupy Wall Street Protesters," with this gem:

"Here is a phony named Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, a dull young congressman clearly aspiring to be an even duller presidential candidate someday, calling the Occupy Wall Street people a 'mob.'"

For the rest of the column, Lupica repeats ad nauseaum the same argument, worded one way or another, that Rep. Cantor is wrong to condemn the Occupy Wall Street movement but support the Tea Party:

"So if you're mad at Washington in general and the Obama administration in particular, that is healthy dissent and democracy in action and God bless America, at least according to young gun Eric Cantor. But if you are angry and loud and broke and yelling about Wall Street and living in a park across from the World Trade Center, yelling about the 1% in this country who have theirs and screw the other 99%, then you are a threat to everything good and decent in America."

Lupica defends his assertion that Cantor is wrong for calling the disorderly crowd of people a "mob" by citing a single interview with a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran who occupied the Brooklyn Bridge last weekend. The vet claims the group has a clear message that is in the form of that question "Where are the jobs?"

Instead of questioning the veteran on why he blames Wall Street for low job creation, or why he thinks occupying the Brooklyn Bridge will help answer this problem, Lupica closes his article with:

"Eric Cantor's such a great American, he should go looking for the old guy in the tweed cap out of 111 Corps and tell him he's with the mob now. Herman Cain, another rough, tough Republican who says these demonstrators are 'anti-American?' He should go looking for Johnson, too."

Taking the Paul Krugman route, Lupica leaves no space for comments, but allows readers to express their opinion through a poll on the article page at the Daily News website:

The feedback from Lupica's own readers based on poll results at about 11:00 a.m. speaks for itself:

We all witnessed how ESPN reacted to Hank Williams Jr. expressing his political opinions in a public forum. Considering Lupica's comments, you have to wonder if the network might reprimand him, too.