FUNNY BUSINESS?: Diane Sawyer hosts election night coverage on Tuesday with George Stephanopoulos. (ABC via Getty Images)
FUNNY BUSINESS?: Diane Sawyer hosts election night coverage on Tuesday with George Stephanopoulos. (
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Mitt Romney got crushed Tuesday night — but did Diane Sawyer get smashed?
A rambling Sawyer slurred and swayed her way through ABC’s election night coverage as her concerned co-anchor, George Stephanopoulos, painfully looked on.
The Internet lit up Wednesday morning with tweets and posts about the legendary anchorwoman and her condition during the long broadcast.
RELATED: WATCH THE VIDEO OF SAWYER IN ACTION
“Diane Sawyer is declaring the winner to be chardonnay!” tweeted one viewer.
“Republicans and Democrats can agree on one thing: Drunk Diane Sawyer is hilarious,” tweeted another.
Soon, Sawyer was trending on Twitter and a @DrnkDianeSawyer handle had more than 1,500 followers by midday.
Sawyer seemed to laugh it off yesterday, making it clear she would not seriously address what happened.
“Read your tweets the good, bad, and the funny. See you on @ABCWorldNews,” her tweet read.
Still, the 66-year-old newswoman was Topic A on the Web yesterday.
A YouTube video compilation of her election-night stumbles and stammers had more than 35,000 views as her performance went viral.
“OK,” she said at one point. “I wanna — can we have our music, because this is another big one here? Minnesota, we’re ready to project Minnesota, rrright now. . .
She even stumbled over the president’s name a few times.
A source who has observed Sawyer up close for a long time said she wasn’t smashed, just tired, and that she “spent a lot of time preparing and not enough time sleeping.”
Still, earlier in the day, she declared she was prepared for the grueling election-night marathon,
“Your tweets and extra coffee. Fuel for Election Day,” she tweeted 4:05 p.m. Tuesday, attaching a picture of a Diet Coke bottle, and two iced Starbucks coffee drinks.
ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider insisted that Sawyer was not anchoring while impaired.
“I’m sorry, Diane Sawyer is not drunk on the air, OK?” he said.
“There’s no world in which that happens. None. None. None,” Schneider said.
Meanwhile, in other TV election night news:
* David Letterman’s on-air feud with Mitt Romney over the GOP candidate’s refusal to come on “The Late Show” ended with an I-told-you-so tweet shortly before midnight on Tuesday.
Letterman’s executive producer, Rob Burnett, pretty much claimed credit for Romney’s defeat with the short Twitter post that read: “ Hate to say this, but Mitt should have done ‘The Late Show.’ ”
* The end of Romney also probably means the end of the “Saturday Night Live” regular, Jason Sudeikis, who plays him.
Sudeikis had said last summer he wasn’t sure he’d be coming back this season — then changed his mind.
But apparently, he only committed to half a season — through January.
So if the show doesn’t need Sudeikis anymore, speculation is now that he will make a midseason departure.
* Republican Congressman Sean Duffy — who appeared on MTV’s “The Real World: Boston” in the late ’90s — was re-elected to a second term on Tuesday.
Duffy, a former DA and working lumberjack, was swept in two years ago in the Tea Party insurgency and was considered vulnerable because his seat had been Democratic for so long.
But he beat his Democratic challenger by eight percentage points in a surprising turnaround.