HEY! Let’s see how many people are actually reading this site!
Every Wednesday, Samantha Bee has her TBS show, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee (‘like The Daily Show, only meaner’) and this week’s episode, she singled out “the second most oblivious tweet we’ve seen this week” where Ivanka Trump posed for a picture with her child. Bee complemented Ivanka on capturing a beautiful moment, but then said, “do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless c*nt. He listens to you! Put on something tight and low-cut, and tell your father to f***ing stop it.” This was setting up a broader segment investigating the Trump Administration’s recent decision to separate migrant children from their parents at the border, specifically targeting illegal and mostly non-white immigrants in order to discourage them from coming.
The thing is, TBS is basic cable, so the actual word would have been bleeped out. Of course, that doesn’t mean a whole lot these days, especially when people can get transcripts. It just goes to show that TV Standards & Practices is just a tiny fig leaf that fails to obscure what most of us can guess, all for the sake of protecting the delicate little flowers in this country from bad words.
But nevertheless, Sarah Sanders, the most delicate of all the flowers, felt the need to make an issue of this, telling a White House press briefing on Thursday: “”The collective silence by the left and its media allies is appalling. (Bee’s) disgusting comments and show are not fit for broadcast, and executives at Time Warner and TBS must demonstrate that such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned on its network.”
Shortly thereafter, Bee went on Twitter and said, “I would like to sincerely apologize to Ivanka Trump and to my viewers for using an expletive on my show to describe her last night. It was inappropriate and inexcusable. I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it.” In an official statement, TBS said, “Those words should not have been aired. It was our mistake, too, and we regret it.” Well, it was their mistake, insofar as Bee’s show isn’t a live broadcast.
The problem, in my opinion, is not the word. It’s the fact that Bee and her network (not necessarily in that order) backed down. But they sort of brought it on themselves.
For one thing, Samantha Bee is from Canada, and I don’t know how it works over there, but in America, that word is really vulgar. It’s not like in the UK or Australia where guys will just call each other “cunts” back and forth whilst watching football on the telly. Here, though, it’s a very low term, and it was so even before the whole #metoo moment started.
And on that score, the c-word is so grossly sexist that if Sarah Sanders, Donald Trump, and their “Why don’t we have a WHITE History Month” pity party hadn’t gotten their undies in a wad complaining about this, I’m sure the PC Left would have.
But given that you’re really putting yourself out on a limb with that insult, the very fact that you’re willing to go so far implies that you’re not that sorry, and you intended to say exactly that, since you could have used other language.
That’s why Trump NEVER APOLOGIZES. EVER.
Learn from him, liberals. Maybe then you’ll get the White House back some time this century.
Because Trump is a bully, and that’s what bullies do. They game the social order by making everybody else obey the rules so that they don’t have to. This punk baits people with any sleazy insult he can think of, (like saying Nancy Pelosi ‘loves’ MS-13) and his pack of cultists brays and cheers. But you slap him back, and he screams like a prison bitch. A metaphor we may want to check back on in a few years.
As I said, when one party gets sucker punched and can only fight with one hand tied behind their back, who wins and who loses on that standard of “fairness”?
Now, I am not saying that the anti-Trump majority should have no standards. I am saying that standards have to be more robust than mere decorum. One should be able to stand by one’s rhetoric, which means one must be able to justify it. If Bee needed to retract, she could have told people: “I said something I shouldn’t have said. But I was genuinely outraged. The contrast between Ivanka sharing a loving moment with her child as her father’s administration enforced a deliberate policy to separate migrant children from their parents ought to be sickening to anybody. And I just couldn’t think of a better phrase to sum it up. Because whatever you may think of me or my language, that issue would still be more offensive, whether I said those things or not.”
See, here’s my take. In the ancient history of the United States, actually one year ago this week, comedian Kathy Griffin decided to do a publicity picture holding an obviously fake severed head of Donald Trump, in the manner of prisoners executed by Islamic terrorists. As she tells it now, taking a Trump Halloween mask and layering ketchup all over it was supposed to be a commentary on Trump’s infamous insult of Megyn Kelly as having “blood coming out of her wherever.” The resulting blowback almost destroyed her career. For one thing, it made Trump a sympathetic figure, which is the last thing you want to do. He said that his 11-year old son was not able to deal with it. The first reaction of a lot of people, including me, was that Griffin had gone too far. But not only did this stunt kill Griffin’s long established relationship with CNN (and Anderson Cooper), after Trump reacted, she started getting death threats. She had to cancel most of the dates on her planned tour because of bomb threats to the venues. As TMZ took up the cause by posting her show cancellations in real time, Griffin says it “led to the perception that there was a movement against me, not just of Trump supporters but that everyone was against me. People don’t take the time, and I don’t blame them, to learn and realize my show cancellations were because of organized/fake bomb threats.”
But another dimension of this was that it was easier to see Griffin as the aggressor because Trump had not completely exhausted the benefit of the doubt. Since then, it’s become that much more obvious that Trump obstructed justice in the Russia investigation, that whether he actually gained opposition research on the Clinton campaign from Russia, he has an ulterior motive to appease Russia to the utmost (evidenced by the fact that despite the Congress passing veto-proof sanctions resolutions, Trump refuses to enforce them), that both he and his satraps see the government as a means of living high off the hog at taxpayer expense, that he continues to degrade John McCain, who stayed in Vietnam while Trump dodged both the draft and syphilis, and that he seeks to pit the public against the country’s national security institutions, mainly the FBI, because they are investigating that alleged association with Russia, as is their job, and because they will not dissolve their purpose into his cult of personality as the Republican Party already has.
In the face of that, whatever I think of Kathy Griffin, or Samantha Bee, is not the point.
Serious question: Is there anything a private citizen could do with their free speech that is more offensive, or more of an actual threat to human beings, than what the Trump Administration is doing right now?
When I say, “never apologize for calling someone else a cunt,” I am not saying never apologize, period. Nor do I say it is always a good idea to call someone a cunt. I don’t think so. If I were Bee, I don’t think I’d call Ivanka Trump a “cunt” because that word just doesn’t seem to fit. I’d call her “collaborator.” Because that is a more precise complaint, and it is a dirtier c-word, in my opinion.
What I’m saying is, if you’re willing to go to that level of language, you’re going to own it, whether you apologize or not. So own it. If you do think that your target actually deserves that insult, then I say, hold out that cunt and wave it high and proud, for all the world to see.