Names and faces
MSNBC’s Joy Reid, under fire for homophobic language in old blog posts, apologized Saturday for any past comments that belittled or mocked the LGBTQ community and says she hasn’t been able to verify her claim that her account was hacked. Reid opened her weekend show
AM Joy by acknowledging she has said “dumb” and “hurtful” things in the past.
“The person I am now is not the person
I was then,” she said. But she was unable to explain blog posts from a decade ago that mocked gay people and individuals who were allegedly gay. Reid has denied posting them but says security experts she hired who looked into whether she had been a hacking victim found no proof. The posts that came to light in December were written for “The Reid Report,” her blog when she was covering Florida politics a decade ago. In posts, she refers to then-Florida Gov. Charlie Crist as “Miss Charlie” and suggested he was “ogling the male waiters” on his honeymoon after marrying his wife, whom he has since divorced. She questioned whether the marriage was a sham by a gay man who thought it would help him politically. Reid apologized, saying her remarks were “insensitive, tone deaf and dumb.” On Saturday, she apologized also to Ann Coulter for using transgender stereotypes to describe the conservative commentator.
Comedian Michelle Wolf gave the audience plenty of reasons to squirm Saturday night at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association. “It’s 2018 and I’m a woman, so you cannot shut me up,” Wolf cracked, “unless you have Michael Cohen wire me $130,000.” The remark, about a payment that President Donald Trump’s lawyer made to an adult-film star, was part of an act that was unusually vulgar for the venue. After one crass joke drew groans in the Washington Hilton ballroom, she laughed and said, “Yeah, shoulda done more research before you got me to do this.” Wolf, the after-dinner entertainment for the White House press corps and their guests, left some in the audience laughing and others in stony silence. A slew of cutting comments about press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders came as Sanders sat just a few feet away. Wolf took aim at Democrats, too. “It is kinda crazy that the Trump campaign was in contact with Russia when the Hillary campaign wasn’t even in contact with Michigan,” she said of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. For the second year in a row, Trump skipped the event, instead holding a campaign-style rally in Michigan. Unlike last year, when Trump aides also declined to attend, the White House had a contingent, including presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.