WARNING: This story contains graphic language. Donald Trump bragged about trying to have sex with a married woman and being able to grope women in previously unaired footage from 2005.
Klamath Falls, OR—Hannity "doth protest too much, methinks". Liberals need not apologize for anything as there is no comparison as to what conservatives have done.
Every one of Fox News’ primetime shows on Wednesday night did segments on Roseanne Barr and ABC’s cancellation of Roseanne.
And every one of them — Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity, and The Ingraham Angle — tried to build a pro-Roseanne case.
What they all dwelled on, at length, was the party line you can see now taking root on Fox News and in conservative media, which boils down to this: What about Bill Clinton/Hillary Clinton/Obama/Jimmy Kimmel/Keith Olbermann/Joy Behar/Alec Baldwin/pick-your-least-favorite-liberal? Sean Hannity even attacked Wanda Sykes, a consulting producer for Roseanne and one of the first people to quit the show after Barr’s tweets.
Fascist. Communist. Socialist. Racist. These are just a few of the things President Obama has been called by conservatives since he took office in 2008. It's curious how he survived eight years of this, and history isn't going to forget it.
The argument laid out by Tucker Carlson, Hannity, and Laura Ingraham is that the real reason Roseanne got canned was that she was conservative — why else, they assert, do Kimmel, Behar, and Baldwin still have employment with ABC? But what are Behar’s and Baldwin’s sins that are comparable to Roseanne’s, you may ask? Easy, according to the nodding-head trio of Fox primetime hosts: Behar, Kimmel, Baldwin, and other celebrities disagree with Trump’s policies, intensely. That’s essentially it: Fox News equates expressions of racism and anti-Semitism with instances of other celebrities being critical or mean about the president.
This is standard Fox News debate rhetoric: militant what-about-ism whenever anything negative is said about Trump, and it was used repeatedly on Wednesday night. What about Bill Clinton’s female accusers? What about Hillary Clinton’s missing emails? What about Obama’s friendship with Bill Ayers? It’s all about deflection, never sticking to the subject. Which plays nicely into the defense Roseanne Barr is starting to mount for herself. Earlier in the day on Wednesday, she started tweeting that she feels railroaded, that she’s going to “fight back.” And she’s finding a very receptive audience in Fox’s hosts because her sin coincides with two of their obsessions: race and racism. None of the three Fox hosts, each of whom is white, can stand to have anyone suggest that there is a hefty amount of racism in America. This was the entire thrust of Carlson’s opening segment. As usual these days, the snowflakes fall most heavily inside Fox News studios.
The White House insisted on it was not defending Roseanne Barr for the racist tweet that ultimately led to her sitcom's cancellation on ABC.
But Trump and his press secretary Sarah Sanders insisted they were also owed an apology from ABC for airing derogatory comments about the administration.
It was an expansive answer on a topic Sanders had said just a day before was not on Trump's radar. It reflected the President's deeply felt resentment at his portrayal in the media and his long list of grievances at perceived slights over the past year.
"The President is pointing to the hypocrisy in the media saying the most horrible things about this President and nobody addresses it," Sanders told reporters at Wednesday's press briefing. You know who else all this helps? Trump, who loves nothing more than a nice, distracting culture war to take the spotlight off whatever he’s up to. Fox News is well aware of this and feels the same way: If the network can use up entire segments of its shows airing Roseanne’s grievances and taking pokes at its oldest enemies (here’s another punch, Hillary!), this frees it from doing what the rest of the news media is doing — covering domestic and foreign news in which the president may not seem all that effective a leader. Trump wins culture wars like this; Roseanne Barr may end up winning hers in some way we cannot yet foresee.
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