ROGER KIMBALL: The staggering stupidity of Don Lemón.

Responding to Rick Santorum’s appearance last night on Chris ‘Fredo’ Cuomo’s show, Lemón went on a tear about Santorum’s defense of his remarks about American Indian culture, remarks that had the moist PC-crowd in a tizzy. ‘There isn’t much Native American culture in American culture,’ Santorum said in a speech last month.

He neglected to make the obligatory obeisances about European ‘genocide’, etc. and even had the temerity to allude to ‘Christian settlers’ without disparagement.

All that sent Lemón off the deep end. Santorum’s speech was ‘horrible’, he said. Moreover, he shouted, ‘Europeans did not found this country. It was here, the Native Americans had this country before the Europeans came.’

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Indians roamed the continent. But the space between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans wasn’t yet a country. It was inhabited territory. It became a colony, or series of colonies, from the 16th through the mid-18th century thanks to European settlers, most of whom, as Rick Santorum noted, were Christians. Then there was something called the American Revolution. That began in 1776 and ended in 1783. It was prosecuted overwhelming by the European colonists, with a little help (and a little hinderance) from the Indians, and at the end a lot of help from the French. There were articles of confederation that outlined a country, but the Constitution — this country’s founding document — was framed at the Philadelphia Convention from May 25 to September 17, 1787. It was signed on September 17, 1787. It was ratified by the necessary nine states the following year, in 1788.

You might think that a prominent commentator from a major, if fading, network would know these things. But Don Lemón™ is too busy feeling slighted and calling other people racist to bother with such niceties as facts. It’s also true that Santorum is a, if not the, token conservative voice on CNN. Perhaps that helps explain Lemon’s particular determination to make him persona non grata.

I blame Flight 370 for the founding of America.