The Young and the Feckless

Sooooo…We all heard about or saw this tweet from Roseanne Barr the other day.

VJ is Valerie Jarrett, a black woman who worked as an advisor to President Obama.  I should not have to explain the deep history of racism ingrained with using the imagery of apes to dehumanize black people.  Frankly, this should not be weird to people, and yet white people rather ignorantly will claim no understanding of this.  They tend to underscore this by using instances where people compared white people to apes (this defense was used when Bush was mocked with Chimp pictures and with Trump being compared to an orangutang.

Again, I should not have to explain why this is different and NOT racism. But…here we go…Throughout American history, black people have been compared to apes in an attempt to make them appear subhuman and justify their oppression.  They are just animals. Now, idiots… sorry… that was rude. Dumbasses like Bill Mitchell said stuff like this:

So, first?  The Muslim Brotherhood was not really the part that bothered people Bill.  It was the “Planet of the Apes” part.  And the scientifically factual theory of evolution does not teach we descended from apes, but rather we share a common ancestry.

I know this is hard, but evolution does not somehow render a racist comment not racist of offensive. But the truth is, I suspect Bill knows this, and is just a willing idiot…sorry, again, that is rude. A willing jack ass.

Now, Roseanne apologized, and I kind of assumed she would not pay all that heavy of a price. But then Wanda Sykes left the show.  Now, I thought that would be the biggest fallout for Roseanne.  And then, a couple hours later, Bob Iger has called and apologized to Valerie Jarrett and ABC announced that they were canceling Roseanne.  This was, in fact a big deal. Conservatives, of course jumped on this to say it was liberal anti-Trump hate.  She was fired because she was a Trump Supporter.  Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous. Her support for Trump was, in fact, a selling point of her television revival used by Disney and ABC.  ABC had already ordered a second season.  That is what made the cancellation so shocking.

Trump, being the big old baby he is, took to Twitter.

To be frank…nobody owes Donald Trump an apology.  Sarah Huckabee Sanders took to the stage to air grievances for Trump.  Because this is what we have for a White House now.

And then…well..like less than a day later, late night host Samantha Bee did this:

That is right.  Samantha Bee, on her show Full Frontal called Ivanka Trump Feckless. That bitch.

Okay…”Feckless” was not the offending word.

The other day, Ivanka had posted a picture of her and her baby boy.  Bee pleaded with Ivanka to reach out to her dad to convince him of how awful a new policy that tears kids away from their immigrant parents. This policy is real, unfortunately Bee confused this new policy with old pre-Trump pictures of kids sleeping in cages. So, yeah, this new policy is awful, but Obama was pretty shitty on this issue as well.

But she called Ivanka a “feckless Cunt”.  She was upset with Ivanka for being in a role of advisor to her own father, the president…yet seeming to be unable to muster up the courage to challenge her father and a bad policy. That is not anything like Roseanne’s racist tweet.

But you know what? I think Bee was wrong to use that particular word.  I despise the word. It is a vicious word than reduces a woman. It is an attack that should be beneath us.  As of this time? Bee has not lost her job.  She issued a rather robotic apology.

I think her use of the word is wrong, and it is pretty absurd that TBS did not put the kibosh on it, rather, they aired it.  Please note, this is a taped show.  They could have removed it before it aired. They could of saved themselves a lot of grief.

Trump ran to Twitter:

And he is not alone. Conservatives took advantage of this to argue this is the hypocrisy of the Liberal Media.

But this is…well…this is not the damning argument and hypocrisy they think it is.  Part of the problem is that Conservatives think that the Liberal Media is a single monolithic hive mind.  Part of this is…well, their media (Fox News, Breitbart, etc) are pretty much a hive mind.

But ABC, the network that cancelled Roseanne, is owned by Disney. TBS, on the other hand is owned by Time Warner.  Quite honestly, I would bet that if Bee was on ABC? Her show would have been canceled by now. You may be upset with TBS, but this is not media hypocrisy. This is two different networks having made two different decisions when one of their on air talent did something pretty terrible.

I am not defending Bee (frankly, I never cared for her segments on the Daily Show, so I was not really interested in Full Frontal). Bee used a word that really sickens me (on the other hand? So does Donald Trump’s “take the kids away” policy). But how TBS handles this versus ABC is  not proof of a double standard.

I won’t lose sleep if TBS cancels Full Frontal. And honestly? It is annoying that this occurred, just because it totally feeds the victim complex of Conservatives. Thanks a lot, Sam.

However, Trump, Huckabee Sanders and the rest of the administration really need to shut up.  They should not be weighing in on whether people should be fired from television or not.