Meet HuffPost’s New National Security Pundit

kjThe Huffington Post just raised some eyebrows in the journalism world last week by hiring an unusual political commentator to cover national security issues: ex-football player Donté Stallworth.

Stallworth, 33, played for the New Orleans Saints, Philadelphia Eagles, New England Patriots, Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Ravens, and Washington Redskins before being waived by the latter team a year ago (asked in an interview where he stood on the Redskins name controversy, Stallworth stalled for 330 words only to end up saying “I don’t know”). In 2009 he was charged with DUI manslaughter for striking a pedestrian with his Bentley Continental; he plea-bargained to a 30-day sentence, probation, and community service, and settled with the victim’s family out of court.

As for his transition from pro athlete to political pundit for the HuffPost, Stallworth, who describes himself on Twitter as a “Leonardo da Vinci wanna-be that reveres Frederick Douglass Love books, sports, history & politics Advocate for peace, truth & equality 10 year NFL vet,” became a political junkie after 9/11. In an interview with Mother Jones magazine, Stallworth said he set out to understand “why these people are terrorizing us, and who are they?”

He disagreed with Bush’s assessment that “they hate us because of our freedoms.” Stallworth didn’t elaborate in the interview on why he thinks the jihadists do hate us; he only stated that his attitude toward foreign policy sprang out of researching “9/11, the Patriot Act, the FISA/warrantless wiretapping, Gitmo, kidnapping, extrajudicial killings, all that… What other countries,” he wondered, “have the capability to do this? And what kind of precedent are we setting with other countries when they have the capabilities that we have?”

As he dug into all this, Stallworth developed a reputation as a 9/11 Truther. “I don’t know how to say this nicely,” a friend joked, “but everything’s a conspiracy to him,” as evidenced in assertions like this on Twitter, where Stallworth spends a lot of time issuing forth 140-character sports and political commentary to his 152,000 followers:

NO WAY 9/11 was carried out by ‘dying’ Bin Laden, 19 men who couldn’t fly a damn kite. STILL have NO EVIDENCE Osama was connected, like Iraq.

Gggrrrrrrrrrrrrr @ ppl who actually believe a plane hit the pentagon on 9/11… hole woulda been ASTRONOMICALLY bigger, God bless lost lives.

Asked about this, HuffPost’s Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim defended Stallworth:

“That doesn’t represent how he thinks today. You know, that was five years ago, and people say dumb things, but that shouldn’t define him.”

It needn’t define him, but it certainly should be taken into account if he’s expounding upon national security issues for a hugely popular website.

Politico points out that Stallworth apparently held forth on trutherism as recently as late last year, but recently he tried to quell that controversy by claiming that, like Obama on gay marriage, he has evolved:

“I no longer feel the way I did in that tweet 5 years ago… After a lot of reading and researching on it, my views changed… and that’s ok… Credit goes to James Bamford, whose great book disabused me of that stuff and showed what a disastrous intelligence failure 9/11 was.”

(He is probably referring to Bamford’s Bush-bashing A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies.) Just a couple of days ago, he tweeted,

“For the record & for the last time, I’m not a ‘9/11 truther.’ I believe the intel community failed us, as stated by respected media agencies.”

[His political awakening actually mirrors my own, which began with 9/11 and my subsequent research into the Islamic threat. But unlike Stallworth and probably everyone else at HuffPost, I recognized who the real enemy is and why, and that led to my transformation to conservative and my rejection of the party that always seeks to blame America first.]

Speaking of patriotism, Stallworth claims in the Mother Jones interview that he loves our country and its history so much that his friends always point out a U.S. flag to him whenever they see one. But “a lot of people are blinded by their love for this country,” he said (while many are blinded by their progressive hostility toward it, I might add). “My biggest thing is I want people to understand that when there are hostilities between nations there’s always two sides.” This reeks suspiciously of the kind of moral equivalence that progressives love; sure there are two sides, but that doesn’t mean they are equally valid and defensible. “So I think that we do have a great country,” he ended, “but there’s a lot of things that we’re not so great at. Unfortunately, education is one of them.”

And hiring qualified national security pundits seems to be another. How did Stallworth even show up on HuffPost’s radar to begin with? Grim said that the athlete’s “LGBT work brought him to our attention and impressed us.” Stallworth has been a passionate supporter, for example, of St. Louis Rams draftee Michael Sam, the NFL’s first openly gay player (who was recently cut from the team).

What else ultimately sold HuffPost on Stallworth? Grim said he “has a quick mind, an insatiable curiosity and a passion for politics — the necessary qualities of a great journalist.” He left out another necessary quality: an Old School commitment to reporting the truth as opposed to the new journalist activism.

I have no problem with former athletes reinventing themselves. Athletes, particularly football players, whose career lifespans tend to run very short, have pretty much no choice but to create new careers for themselves. I also reject the dumb jock stereotype. But with Donté Stallworth, Huffington Post seems to have opted for a controversial, popular personality – passionate though he may be about politics – over journalists trained in the critical arena of national security, who might actually have lent the site some experience and credibility.

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  • objectivefactsmatter

    A lot of “Hail Mary” kind of passes going on from the left.

  • Soxtory

    “The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius is limited!”
    —Albert Einstein

  • kasandra

    Yeah, they couldn’t find any people with advanced degrees or experience in national security subjects to hire.

  • Hard Little Machine

    This only makes him the 23rd most retarded insane loser at the top of the HuffPo food chain.

  • ObamaYoMoma

    He disagreed with Bush’s assessment that “they hate us because of our freedoms.”

    Nevertheless, Bush’s assessment is ludicrous to say the least. They hate us for the simple reason that we are infidels and because they are obligated to wage jihad against all infidels until Islam and its adherents have been made supreme throughout the world.

    Indeed, Bush was as mentally incompetent as Stallworth when it came to understanding Islam and jihad, which he ignorantly believed to be terrorism because Muslims primarily target and murder innocent civilian infidels in cold blood, which was a false analogy that led to very tragic results given the insanity of his so-called “war on terror” that was an atrocious inevitable failure ever before it was ever implemented.

    he only stated that his attitude toward foreign policy sprang out of researching “9/11, the Patriot Act, the FISA/warrantless wiretapping, Gitmo, kidnapping, extrajudicial killings, all that… What other countries,” he wondered, “have the capability to do this?

    Well damn, I don’t even know Stallworth’s overall views, but I have to say that I kind of agree with some of his assessments of all those things, with the exception, of course, of Gitmo, what he alleges to be kidnappings, and extrajudicial killings that is.

    As the answer for 9/11 wasn’t to grow the size, scope, and the power of the big federal government like stuffed Dhimmicrats on steroids, as big government is the problem, not the solution. Yet, that’s exactly what GWB and the Republicans in Congress did. They grew the size, scope, and power of the federal government like there were no tomorrows, and now they wonder why conservatives are leaving the Republican Party in droves today. Give me a freaking break.

    What would have been the logical response to 9/11? Simple, instead of lying to the American people by proclaiming Islam to be a so-called “religion of peace” and expanding government like Dhimmicrats on steroids, after being the victim of the greatest jihad attack in history, Bush and the Republican Party should have first outlawed the practice of Islam in America, since all the earlier issued verses of the Koran that once made Islam a religion have all been abrogated, per the doctrine of abrogation, by the latter issued infamous sword verses of the Koran that not only abrogates all of the earlier issued verses of the Koran they conflict with, but also obligates all Muslims to wage jihad against all infidels in the cause of Allah until such time as Islam and its followers have been made supreme throughout the world.

    Then Bush and the Republicans should have followed up that first response by banning and reversing mass Muslim immigration with all of its baggage, since it is obviously jihad that is intentionally non-violent for the strategic purposes of mass Muslim infiltration of our society and for eventual demographic conquest. Thus, with no Muslims living in America, there would be absolutely no violent and non-violent jihad manifesting in America like there is today despite the massive expansion of the federal government, and therefore the need for the creation of the Patriot Act, the FISA warrantless wiretapping, the massive Department of Homeland Insecurity, and the gargantuan National Intelligence Directorate would have been eliminated altogether. In other words, Bush should have exercised a little common sense and he would have had he not been a liberal in sheep’s clothing pretending to be a conservative.

    Not to mention that occupying two Islamic countries to do nation-building missions to lift up Muslims (who are our eternal mortal enemies) and to democratize the Islamic totalitarian world, (which is literally impossible), because in Bush’s view and the unhinged view of the State Department, “poverty and despair” are the “root causes” of terrorism, was about as idiotic and unhinged as it gets. Nevertheless, many Republicans to this day still admire Bush and believe he was a great President overall. Yeah right!

    Nevertheless, per the rest of your article, it is quite clear that Stallworth is an unhinged flake. Therefore, he is perfectly qualified to be the new national security pundit at Huffington Post, which I never waste time reading in any event.

  • UCSPanther

    9/11 “Truth” is so 2006…

  • Crassus

    What do you expect from a University of Tennessee graduate? Living in Knoxville for four years will warp anyone’s brain.

    • CapitalistPig

      Is that another knock on the south?

      • Crassus

        No, it’s a knock on the University of Tennessee.

  • celador2

    If Bush did 9/11 then Bin Laden and Al Qaeda did not. Who did Obama kill for 9/11? An innocent bystander? Maybe truthers should realize that Al Q had a group Al Q in Iraq that is now IS. Are they real? Even if he has evolved for years he stood by Al Q was innocent and Bush guilty. What a dud.

    • CapitalistPig

      Would be interested to ask a black man like Stallworth, who would be, presumably because he’s black & works for Huffn-Glue, a rabid Obama supporter “Are you telling me Obama killed the wrong man”?

  • De Doc

    Nothing PuffHo publishes or does shocks me anymore. Ariana Huffington has her head so far up her derrière that she would need a very talented GI surgeon to set things aright.

    • Pete

      Ariana does not care, she is laughed all the way to the bank and is sipping pina coladas.

      Now getting past the pearly gates is a different problem altogether.

    • CapitalistPig

      She sold that digital fish wrap to AOL a few years ago for over $300 million–never paid any of the contributors a nickle while writing columns about inequality, raising the minimum wage & bytchyn about :”the 1%ers”…….nice hustle there Zsa Zsa……….you almost have to admire the brazenness & gall of some liberals.
      She maintains a column & promotes the site as part of the sale to give the facade that she’s involved in it—but she has long since cashed out.

  • guystandard

    HuffPost is free to hire who they want. Although I disagree with Stallworth’s views.

  • CapitalistPig

    I’ve long referred to that liberal digital fish wrap as the “Huffin-Glue POS–t”

  • AbsolutelyRight

    I am surprised this no-good loser doesn’t have a show on MSNBC yet