The ABCs of racism

ABC’s inevitable comeuppance came too late, but it came. Last year, the network made the boneheaded mistake of hiring Roseanne Barr to reboot her hit sitcom. This is a woman who in 2013 had tweeted that Susan Rice, President Obama’s African-American national security adviser, was “a man with big swinging ape balls.”

Who had spread unhinged conspiracy theories about Obama’s place of birth, and a paranoid delusional fiction called Pizzagate, and the 2016 death of a Democratic National Committee staffer, and millions of illegal immigrants voting.

The network, owned by all-American Disney, took her on anyway — and rode a ratings wave, as “Roseanne” became its top-performing show.

Only finally to rediscover, as a football coach once put it, Barr is who we thought she was. Namely, an unstable racist.

Tuesday, Barr described Valerie Jarrett, another African-American aide to Barack Obama, as the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes” having a baby.

Then took the time to aim libelous, anti-Semitic smears at billionaire philanthropist George Soros, calling him “a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps.” That Barr herself is Jewish doesn’t forgive the vicious lies.

Just as the backlash got underway, ABC pulled the plug, rightly deeming Barr’s rhetoric “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent” with its values — all adjectives that applied when the network welcomed her back to their airwaves.

And so, “Roseanne” is no more. But Roseanne is still Roseanne — unfit for public consumption.