Which they should. Because it is. Kathy Griffin has never been funny to begin with, but I guess being paired with Anderson Cooper on New Years Eve gives her a modicum of credibility for reasons entirely unknown to me. For the most part, Griffins entire schtick has always been to simply be so annoying that you cant ignore her no matter how desperately you want to.
And it doesnt get much more annoying than this.
Unfunny? Obviously. Beyond every conceivable boundary of decency?
Unfunny? Obviously. Beyond every conceivable boundary of decency? Needless to say. Impossible to rationalize even for the most partisan among us?
Well hold on there. For a pure partisan, theres always something you can say. Theres always some way to turn it around on the other side, no matter how disingenuous. If youre totally sold out to tribalism, you can never conceded that your side has gone too far and you can never concede that the other side has a point.
Scan social media today and youll see lots of liberal references to scattered incidents like this one:
There wasnt any short of gallows humour while Mr Obama was in office. A quick Google search for Obama noose, for instance, brings up results for Wisconsin football fans bringing a mask of Mr Obama with a noose around his neck to a game. Those fans generated a considerable amount of criticism for their demonstration, which many noted was explicitly racist.
The liberal argument is that the right didnt condemn the Obama noose incidents, and therefore has no moral standing to condemn what Griffin did here. Kathy Griffin is not some random doofus. She is a celebrity, given prominent airtime on major networks, and treated as a person with credibility
Heres the problem with that: The occasional random chucklehead making an Obama-in-a-noose image doesnt deserve the attention youd have to give him in order to condemn him. Hes an idiot, and not even a prominent one. There certainly were people on the right who condemned the idea of violence against Obama. We did so here. But if there was no widespread condemnation of individual incidents, it was because the doofuses behind them would have only been rewarded with fame they didnt deserve if high-profile conservatives went to the trouble of condemning them.
Kathy Griffin is not some random doofus. She is a celebrity, given prominent airtime on major networks, and treated as a person with credibility. When she produced this video and sent it to TMZ, they immediately published it. They would not have done that had a random no-name produced a video of himself or herself beheading Donald Trump. They did it because it was a well-known person, and the well-known web site that is TMZ thought it was worthy of being published.
In order to have actual equivalency here, youd need a conservative entertainer like Jon Voight, or Tim Allen, or Dennis Miller making a video of themselves putting a noose around Obamas neck, then sending the video to The Drudge Report, which would publish it.
Had anything like that happened, you would have heard not only widespread bipartisan condemnation, but days of media coverage about how this proves conservatives are racist. But nothing like that ever did happen, because, thank God, we have no conservative equivalents of Kathy Griffin.
And by all means, lets keep it that way.
Free Republics rules on what can an can not be posted in full
Thank you very much for this approach. If Sean_Anthony doesn't make a full posting of the article, and it's not one of the sites that restrict such full posting, then, by all means, post it in full yourself and eliminate the linkage worries.
Again, thank you ...