[quote] He leans in, big warm smile, not wanting to correct me, but needing to: "Sorbette," he says, like a news anchor. "It’s pronounced sorbette."
[quote] "Sorbette," I repeat, shaky. I smile, not quite understanding the joke.
[quote] "Sorbette," he says with the confidence of a man who informs hundreds of thousands of Americans each night about what is happening across this land as well as many others. "It’s pronounced sorbette." Sorbette! Could he be right? I’ve been saying it like a French word for years, like a complete asshole. Have I, a native English speaker, a graduate of a four-year college, a frequent eater of frozen desserts, been mispronouncing it all this time?
[quote] Or we can leave room for the possibility that he is just plain wrong. This is Don Lemon, after all...
[quote] He is focused when we talk, never strays for a minute; once, when I pivot away from a topic, he suggests that I might have ADD. This affable bluntness might help explain why he is so ascendant at CNN.
[quote] he played a clip of that bastion of modernity and multicultural wisdom, Bill O’Reilly, explaining everything that’s wrong in the black community. This was shortly after the George Zimmerman trial, and rather than lash out at O’Reilly, Lemon claimed that he hadn’t gone far enough. He then addressed "black people" with his own list of solutions: (5) Pull up your pants. (4) Stop using the N-word. (3) Stop littering. ("I’ve lived in several predominantly white neighborhoods in my life. I rarely, if ever, witness people littering.") (2) Finish school. ("Stop telling kids they’re acting white because they go to school or they speak proper English.") (1) "Just because you can have a baby, it doesn’t mean you should."
[quote] He claims not to have a political affiliation—he voted for Barack Obama in the past two elections, but in college he was a Republican and he voted for Reagan once, before Reagan’s treatment of the AIDS crisis disenchanted him. But that doesn’t make him a Democrat. "People expect me to be liberal because I’m gay," he says. "And I’m not liberal." But over lunch, when I describe his values as conservative, he objects to that, too. "You keep saying I have conservative values. I don’t."