Comical hypocrisy in Bee-Barr spat
Samantha Bee should issue a second apology.
This one can go something like this: “I want to apologize for my first apology that played right into Donald Trump’s tiny hands. I deeply regret giving him a chance to create a false equivalence between my vulgarity and Roseanne Barr’s racism.”
On Friday, while taking a break from brokering peace with North Korea and escalating a bonkers trade war with allies, Trump turned his attention deficit disorder toward the cultural uproar that ignited two days earlier when Bee foolishly called Ivanka, his daughter and White House adviser, a “feckless c--t.”
“Why aren’t they firing no talent Samantha Bee for the horrible language used on her low ratings show?” asked the feckless president with the low approval rating. “A total double standard but that’s O.K., we are Winning, and will be doing so for a long time to come!”
I will give Trump this: given his own history of schoolyard taunts, misogynistic slurs, name calling and “locker room” talk, it takes real balls to call out Bee.
I’m not saying two wrongs equals a right. But it’s as if Drake were to suddenly condemn rap feuds or Justin Trudeau tabled a law against fancy socks. The hypocrisy is comical.
Shouldn’t Bee lose her job for saying a bad word, wonders Trump, a man who once bragged about grabbing women “by the p---y?” How dare Bee denigrate and objectify Ivanka, wonders Trump, a guy who once told Howard Stern it was A-OK to call his daughter “a hot piece of ass.” Bee’s vile and disgusting humour has no place on TV, says the White House; but Ted Nugent, who once called Hillary Clinton a “toxic c--t,” is welcome anytime.
Please don’t misunderstand. I’d very much like for my kids to live in a world of kindness and civility, a place where nobody is ever called a c--t.
But the context here is critical.
Bee used the bleeped-out taboo term on a comedy show that is called Full Frontal. This isn’t Barney and Friends. The C-word is part of her shtick. Last year, she lobbed it with a historical flourish at Woodrow Wilson. In 2016, she created a satirical media award — “Thunder C--t” — inspired by an insult someone hurled at her.
“So Jake Tapper, for making cable news bearable, may I present you with our first and hopefully not last Full Frontal Thunder C--t Award!” said Bee, beaming as the show cut to a mock acceptance speech from the CNN star.
“Thank you so much, Sam,” said Tapper, inspecting his trophy, a black Thunder C--t T-shirt. “Although I can’t show it to my children.”
Nope. Newsflash: Sam Bee has a potty mouth. She swears as much as she blinks.
I recall interviewing her in 2004, when she was a correspondent on The Daily Show. At one point, she casually informed me, “Tucker Carlson is a dick.”
But to draw parallels between this week’s two TV scandals — the Bee brouhaha and Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet that led ABC to cancel her hit show — is to miss the point entirely. This isn’t a “double standard,” as Trump wrongly claimed on Friday.
It’s apples and oranges. It’s night and day. It’s cats and dogs and … monkey business.
Barr equated Valerie Jarrett, a former adviser to Barack Obama and an African American, to an ape. She did not make this “joke” on stage or in front of a camera. The tweet came from her heart, not a script. She wasn’t in character. She was just being herself. And it wasn’t the first time Barr denigrated a Black woman with an insult that has a wretched history. In 2013, she referred to former national security adviser Susan Rice as “a man with big swinging ape balls.”
By sharp contrast, Bee ended a segment on Trump’s immigration policies — and, specifically, the reports of 1,500 migrant children who have gone missing after they were separated from their parents at the border — by imploring Ivanka Trump to do something. In this sense, “feckless c--t” amplified her exasperation and moral indignation. It was a profane clarion call, “from one mother to another.” This wasn’t sexism. It was tough love. The real outrage is not that Bee said something offensive. The real outrage is that young kids are getting ripped from their parents. They are getting locked in cages like unwanted animals. They are getting sent off to live with strangers. They are getting lost in a labyrinthine system of unbelievable cruelty.
On Tuesday, in a moment of grim irony, even Trump called his policy “horrible.”
But by apologizing, Bee shifted the focus away from the issue and gave Trump a chance to once again showcase his mastery of deflection, projection and gaslighting.
It gave him a chance to equate Barr’s straight-up bigotry with Bee’s lazy vulgarity that, in context, was neither misogynistic nor completely unwarranted.
Donald Trump is right: separating children from their parents is horrible.
And anyone who says otherwise, man or woman, is a feckless runt.
To draw parallels between this week’s two TV scandals — the Bee brouhaha and Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet that led ABC to cancel her hit show — is to miss the point entirely