Warning: Explicit language below, based on quotes from protesters. After five excruciating hours Saturday night into early Sunday of CNN Tonight hack Don Lemon, Sunday night featured three hours of Prime Time host Chris “Fredo” Cuomo.  Like some of his colleagues, Cuomo offered brief, dull excuses for those rioting to supposedly honor the late George Floyd while, in the same vein, serving up more emphatic defenses of those carrying out violence. For good measure, Cuomo continued to falsely claim CNN and the media aren’t a part of the story and the President was to blame for fomenting hate. (Video forthcoming) In the first hour, he went to break by promising to “give you the facts as we understand them” after excusing the riots by talking about a Tupac meme calling for such destruction in order to enact change. Cuomo dismissed this behavior as a series of “judgments” and then blamed Trump for the lack of change in criminal justice: “This administration has done no favors to this cause by harnessing anger. There’s plenty of anger in America and when you play with it, you play with fire.” In the third hour, Cuomo doubled down by blaming Trump for “saying incendiary things, certainly if you've been listening with any kind of open mindedness, certainly not helpful things.” Throughout the night, he reiterated a lie he peddled Friday night that “the media is not the story,” aren’t “be[ing] victimized,” so there was that on top of the all this. If the sniveling Daniel Dale were legit, he’d fact-check that nonsense, starting with the fact that it took well under 24 hours for CNN to begin bragging in promos about how one of their reporters was (wrongfully) arrested. While not anything close to Lemon’s nearly 11-minute-long meltdown, Cuomo had a few brief fits. Here were two of them, including snippets of offering implicit endorsements for the rioting (click “expand,” emphasis mine): Who is speaking to this country and telling them, telling these people that you're seeing on your screen that there is an answer to this? That there is something other than outrage and the language of pain to process in this situation? Our best answer can't be police marching down a street in a major city chasing back citizens of this country. We have to be able to do better. You shouldn't have to rely on a CNN correspondent to speak to the truth and pain of what is hitting an entire part of this coy. It's not [Sara Sidner’s] job. It's not my job. It's not the job of these police, to make this stop. Where are our leaders? If you want to say, well, these people need to go home, that's what stops it, personal responsibility, we would have never been having this conversation if you didn't have people take to the streets. If there were another way for this to have been done, we wouldn't be here. We wouldn't keep coming back to this place. (....) You're watching this all over the country whether it's the nation's capital or New York or Atlanta or San Francisco or Long Beach and of course all emanating out of Minnesota, remember people will not like what they see. That is almost always the case when people take to the streets to fight against a system that they believe is doing things that are not American. It's hard to please that same system. I mean, think about it. We don't like that they're not listening to the law and not following the curfew. Well, their issue is that following the curfew, following the rules, does not work both ways in their communities. Or there are people who believe that that is true about minority communities. Yes, they're members of the majority, but they believe that America should treat everybody the same way. So, you're not going to have a protest of the system that the system likes....But the appetite, the hunger for people to understand that somebody gets it and sees it for what it is and says that it's wrong is that strong.  Sounds about right for an outspoken Antifa supporter. After a Long Beach, California protester claimed that “nobody gives a fuck about” African-Americans “unless we get violent” and people only “care about the shit getting burned down,” Cuomo empathized by trotting out the absurd, liberal media-wide narrative the rioting seen was similar to the Boston Tea Party. Past midnight, he misled viewers by twisting the words of former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who had vehemently denounced the destruction and looting but also said that the peaceful protesters of the Civil Rights Movement allowed him to have the kind of life that he was able to have. Instead of leaving it there, Fredo shrugged off the violence because, “if it hadn't been protests that got ugly and violent in the '60s, he wouldn't be where he was.” In what served as an early, unofficial “Closing Argument” commentary, the stupid flew off the rails and on a collision course with Mars. Cuomo began by falsely claiming that he’s “not one of those people who's like going out of my way to drag politics into a situation,” you knew it wouldn’t be good.  Along with hypocritically claiming the media report the facts, he also attacked Trump as the person in this country causing widespread hatred (click “expand,” emphasis mine): This is about politics, okay? Politics is going to decide what the tone, the tenor, the laws, the policy, the culture of criminal justice and administration of justice is about in this country and you need leadership. And I have to say the President of the United States tonight as I'm looking at his Twitter feed, okay, and that is his main mechanism, the idea of his leading Twitter --- he's not leading Twitter. “LAW AND ORDER!” Five hours ago. “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.” If he's speaking to the fact that you’re having agitator groups that enter in here that are not up to good, that are malefactors, he's right, there are offshoots of people who identify with that group. They're part of it. There are a lot of others too. Interesting he only mentions that one. “FAKE NEWS!” It’s a country desperate for understanding. Desperate for leadership that there could be better things. He doesn't like that you're seeing this and hearing it. He thinks it's bad for him. What does that tell you? Then his last one; “The Lamestream Media is doing everything within their power to foment hatred and anarchy.” As we go to break, just think about this. You know what our job is. It’s to show you what's going on, give you context when it counts, and help you understand the story so you can make your own decisions. You elect people to lead, to do a job for you.  What is that job in the situation right now? What does this country need right now? Now, whatever you think that is, you tell me how attacking the free press, which gives us an ability to see it because they're not showing you the body cam footage, they're not showing you the body camera footage in Minnesota. They have laws. They have reasons. All you get is what we can show in these situations and you too with your cellphone video. Otherwise who knows what would have happened in Minnesota. Who knows what would have happened in so many other cases? Even the Ahmaud Arbery case, even though the guy who wound up taking the video is now part of the group being prosecuted. What do we need from leadership right now? At a minimum, do we really need any energy spent on finding another reason to keep us apart?