The World Cup is the most prestigious soccer competition on Earth, and it should be considered an honor to host it.
But when you're one of the few remaining MAGA conservatives still clinging to the far-right train for dear life, you have to find a way to turn absolutely everything into a grievance.
Enter MAGA commentator Mark Halperin, one of a litany of conservatives who used to be a normal journalist but have staked all their hopes on doing the MAGA shuck-and-jive till the wheels come off, no matter how low the President's approval rating sinks.
And Halperin has a bee in his bonnet that countries he's never heard of are allowed to compete in the World Cup.
Halperin testily tweeted:
"Shouldn't one of the requirements for a country to qualify to play in the World Cup that it be a country that people have heard of?"
Who's "people" exactly, Mark?
Because given the timing of the tweet, Halperin seemed to have been referencing the country of Curaçao, the Caribbean island nation that faced off against Germany the day of Halperin's tweet.
And according to the country's tourism board, it plays host to some 1.7 million tourists per year, aside from being the namesake of a the popular liqueur Blue Curaçao.
Not exactly some obscure backwater. But even if it were, it's called the "World" Cup. The only qualification is, uh, being part of the world.
So what we have here, it seems, is a classic self-own, because all Halperin really said with his tweet, aside from revealing what a jerk he is, is that he doesn't have any idea where Curaçao is.
Pretty embarrassing for a Harvard-educated "journalist," Mark! And even more embarrassing, as someone on X pointed out, given that Halperin is a huge baseball fan.
Curaçao has produced the highest number of major league baseball players per capita in the world, roughly 1 per 10,000 people. This has been reported on for years by the sports press.
Of course, Halperin surely knows all of this stuff—he's just doing what MAGA acolytes do, rage-baiting for clicks. And it definitely worked. Just not likely in the way he intended.
Because instead of the chest-beating MAGA xenophobia he was likely going for, what he got was the whole internet dunking on him.
Remember the good old days when "one of the requirements" for being a journalist was not being a slavering ignoramus and having a sense of shame? Ah, halcyon days.
Anyway, as for the country of Curaçao, their first foray into the World Cup didn't go exactly as planned, with the country losing to Germany 7 to 1.
But they did set a world record as the smallest country to ever play in the tournament, and there's no other way to construe a first-time World Cup appearance as a major milestone in a team career that is definitely on the up-and-up.
Meanwhile, 14 years after the film version of his book about the 2008 election Game Change won a Peabody Award, one of the most prestigious awards in media, Halperin's now doing self-own MAGA rage-bait on Twitter.
You know what they say about throwing stones in glass houses, Mark!














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