That's not a rhetorical offer, by the way, but a sincere one. I don't give a shit if the Hitler Channel wants to run Roseanne's Heil Hitler Racist Comedy Hour, where its sponsors and supporters can be noted and shunned, so long as ordinary citizens can flip off Trump and put it on Twitter without getting fired for it.
But they can't. So fuck her.
Even the usual suspects have, for the most part, looked at the facts and decided this was not the fake free speech hill they wanted to lie on. Rod Dreher, as you might expect, runs with the pack but can't even do that right:
“But,” you say, “that’s all the NFL owners are doing with the mandatory National Anthem rule: protecting their business interests.” You have something of a point, but the comparison is faulty. A quiet political protest is not the same thing as calling a black person an ape. Colin Kaepernick’s pig socks are in that ballpark, certainly, but the NFL kneelers on the whole aren’t wearing pig socks.Like Moses, Kaepernick is denied entry to Dreher's promised land because of his pig socks.
It is a sign of civic health that someone who is making a fortune for a TV network can still lose her position when she indulges in disgusting rhetoric like that. Some things you can’t say in public without consequence. Where we draw that line will always be under contention, but we ought to all agree that Roseanne Barr crossed it.I'll bet Dreher thinks the Beatles should have been driven from our shores after John Lennon said they were more popular than Jesus.
Others among the brethren find new ways to embarrass themselves -- Anthony Scaramucci, the erstwhile Trump mouthpiece who encourages people to call him "The Mooch," complained of being discriminated against as an Italian-American ("When I was called a human pinkie ring and a goombah while in the @Whitehouse that was deemed acceptable comedy. Double standard"). That's even better than when mobster Joe Colombo's Italian-American Anti-Defamation League went after The Godfather.
And rightwing pencil-neck Roger Kimball does the ooh-such-po-li-ti-cal cor-rect-ness simper-strut at The Spectator:
Uh oh. Was the tweet in bad taste? Indubitably. Was it racist? Yep. Was it the worst thing ever in the history of civilization? According to ABC, which hosted her new, extremely popular show, the answer appears to be, Yes: nothing so awful has ever besmirched the escutcheon of humanity.You liberals act like racism is the very worst thing in the whole entire world but what about World War II, or that time a black guy glared at me?
Yes, it was in bad taste. So what? There was a time when bad taste was not a (professional) death sentence. Under the reign of political correctness, that time has passed.Does one of you have the patience to explain to Kimball for me the difference between, say, the race jokes in Blazing Saddles and calling a black lady a monkey?* Best part:
I do not watch television, so I never saw Roseanne Barr’s show. I understand, however, that it was a breath of fresh air, not so much conservative as simply independent.Percy Dovetonsils doesn't sully himself with idiot box emissions, but knows this show must be good because Trump likes it and the star is a racist.
UPDATE. *I thought everyone knew this, but apparently there are law professors who don't know, or affect not knowing, that calling black people monkeys is like Racism 101:
Yes, the problem of likening humans to apes, an interesting variation on the age-old resistance to the notion of evolution. We are primates, all of us, the same order as the apes. Bush was "Chimpy McHitler," and let's not forget that time Trump sued Bill Maher for joking that Trump was the son of an orangutan.Speaking of law perfessers: "ABC hands midterms to Trump, GOP," says Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. Maybe they can get Tim Allen to call Michelle Obama a coon and get fired -- that'll really excite the base! Then they can all tell us that lots of different people are compared to raccoons, isn't that what Michelle Wolf did to Sarah Huckabee, you're the real racists, etc.
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