After Attacking VP Pence, Olympian Rippon Snubs WH Visit for Worst Reason
He couldn’t merit more than a bronze in real competition, but when it comes to self-promoting hackery, Adam Rippon deserves the gold.
The showboating figure skater from Scranton, Pennsylvania, the one who desperately demanded the spotlight during the PyeongChang winter games, is back in the headlines again after turning down a visit to the White House on Friday.
That’s insulting enough, in a juvenile kind of way, but Ribbon’s next grab at the limelight was even worse.
In a Twitter posting announcing his decision to boycott Friday’s White House reception for U.S. Olympians (plenty of other athletes did attend), Rippon declared he was doing something else “in lieu of going to DC”: Donating to the nation’s largest killer of unborn children.
Planned Parenthood, the abortion mill that masquerades as a health service for the poor, is one of the beneficiaries of Rippon’s apparently endless thirst for publicity. Rippon also named a gay organization and the American Red Cross as charities he was donating to, but it was Planned Parenthood that really got attention.
“They provide many different affordable health care services and have helped so many different people,” Rippon wrote.
Oh please.
Since Rippon is famously homosexual, it’s a good bet he’ll never have to avail himself or a loved one of Planned Parenthood’s most lucrative “health care service,” the deliberate destruction of a human being in the mother’s womb.
But that doesn’t give him a pass on pretending that support for Planned Parenthood is in the service of some higher goal. It’s a publicity grab, the kind Rippon has become all too practiced in — with the willing help of reporters and executives in the profession that used to be called “journalism.”
The man has been basking in the unearned adulation of the mainstream media since his snot-nosed attacks on Vice President Mike Pence in the run-up to the games.
Rippon said Pence — well known for his Christian beliefs — had “no real concept of reality.” That got him a well-deserved pasting from President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., but it also got Rippon reams of free publicity from the anti-Trump media.
A Time magazine headline in February proclaimed that he “stole everyone’s hearts” (specifically mentioning his public spat with Pence).
After his bronze-medal winning performance, according to Reuters, Rippon himself told reporters “I am America’s sweetheart.” And reporters lapped it up.
Well, glad he thinks so.
Anyone who got disgusted with Rippon’s antics during the PyeongChang spectacle would not have been surprised by his decision to skip on the White House invite. He’d told the U.K. Daily Mail while the games were still in progress that he wouldn’t be attending any White House ceremony.
But using his announcement this week to shill for an organization that’s responsible for the deaths of more than 300,000 children every year is stomach-turning even by Rippon’s standards.
Whatever his sexual preferences, and putting aside a swollen ego, making a grab for headlines, internet clicks and retweets on the bodies of dismembered children is simply disgusting.
Why should Rippon care? He can only win a bronze in real competition, but for shameless self-promotion, he’s taking the gold — again.
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