Roseanne Barr, on Twitter, compared Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett to an ape. Given the long history of racists in this country comparing black people to apes, claiming Roseanne's remark was not racist is something the fringe might debate, but decent people agree on. The remark was racist and she was fired.
No television network has ever cancelled the number one network television show in America over a star's behavior until this happened. Roseanne Barr has a history of making awful comments. She said people who eat at Chick-Fil-A should get cancer. She believed 9/11 conspiracy theories. She ran for President as a far left candidate for office. By the end of last week, the very same people who had been defending the honor of the MS-13 gang were attacking the honor of all Trump voters everywhere as if they were just as bad as Roseanne.
Only a few days later on TBS, a woman named Samantha Bee, who some people seem to think is funny, called Ivanka Trump a "feckless c***" for having the audacity of putting a picture of herself with her toddler on social media. Many of the people who rushed to demand ABC fire Roseanne Barr suddenly rushed in the opposite direction to defend Samantha Bee.
Certainly one involved race and the other only involved gender, but only a few years ago TBS sister company CNN went wall to wall with coverage of a congressional staffer no one had heard of who had criticized the Obama girls on her private Facebook page. CNN did not stop covering the story until the congressional staffer was fired. The media's standards are increasingly, obviously, in favor of progressives behaving badly while censuring others.
It is worth noting that Roseanne Barr's racist rambling was a tweet. Samantha Bee's was a scripted monologue prepared by a team of writers and aired on television before a live audience. One was random and the other pre-meditated, but the pre-meditated one gets a pass.
Many of the people arguing "false equivalence" in comparing Roseanne's antics to Samantha Bee's would be up in arms if Bee had targeted someone not named Trump. If the President or his supporters start referring to Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Chelsea Clinton, Elizabeth Warren or any other prominent Democrat by the same phrase Samantha Bee used, there would be blood-curdling screams of sexism and outrage for days.
Samantha Bee gets a pass and Roseanne does not because Bee is on the right team. In the same way, MSNBC's Joy Reid wrote a series of posts on her personal website about gay rights and gay marriage that enraged gay activists. But Reid claimed a hacker had hacked her blog. The left rallied to Joy Reid because she is on their side now. Instead of being honest that her views had evolved, they were willing to go with the "my computer got hacked" excuse.
As ABC was firing Roseanne Barr, they were rehiring Keith Olbermann. He is notorious for saying outrageously offensive and demeaning things as well as treating people terribly. Saturday Night Live gives Alec Baldwin airtime. Baldwin once got caught calling his then eleven year old a "rude thoughtless pig" and that was one of the mildest things he has ever been caught saying. But Baldwin hates all the right people.
Monique Judge of the website The Root referred to Dr. Ben Carson as a "monkey of the porch variety." Various leftwing commentators frequently referred to Condoleezza Rica and Colin Powell as Uncle Toms or, in the case of Rice, "Aunt Jemima." The media, though, was far more concerned about an unknown congressional staffer criticizing President Obama's daughter on her private Facebook page.
I abhor the idea of firing people for things they say. While I think people should be decent and not call people "feckless c***" or compare people to apes, I think businesses also have the right to set standards of behavior for their employees. But I also think it is very obvious that the media and news networks in America give far more latitude to offensive progressives than to any other group. There is a double standard.
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