“She refuses to talk about the photos, except to take back the apology she didn’t mean…”
Kathy Griffin is back in the news. Back in May she received the first headlines of her sorry career for taking pictures holding Trump’s severed head as a prop. They were grotesque and not funny, but like I said back then, they propelled this D-list star into the headlines of every major news outlet.
She lost her job at CNN (that few knew she had in the first place), and I argued that she would use her new anti-Trump street cred and claims of victimhood to propel her career in the long term. Now she is doing interviews for her new overseas tour, and she is referring to her publicity stunt to get back in the news and propel her career.
In comments during the interview, she took back her apology and blamed it on the angry anti-Trump supporters. It’s true, and very sad, that there are lots of angry people out there, and Griffin likely received her share of the messages. But the angry Trump supporter is a tired argument that has been overplayed by liberals.
They love to claim that Trump supporters are scary alt right folks and white supremacists, but most Trump supporters are just sick of being attacked and blamed by arrogant liberals who generally preach to the country as though they know best. On top of that, the best way to get sympathy is to claim that you are being bullied. More often than not, that word is used to evoke sympathy and has no relationship to actual bullying. This is one of those cases.
Lots of people at the time pointed to Griffin’s consequences to suggest that she did not mean to cause offense and that her apologies were real. She claims to have lost friends, and it’s true that she lost jobs, but her current retraction and incredible defensiveness suggest otherwise.
She refuses to talk about the photos, except to take back the apology she didn’t mean and to transition into an attack on Trump and his supporters. And this only happens right when she is starting a new tour. It’s as though she is trying to recapture the outrage in order to gain the free publicity.
Ironically, that is a tactic that Trump uses, as he often takes an extreme and attention-grabbing initial position in order to negotiate from strength.
Overall, I think Americans in general need to calm down. We live in a great country where everybody from Kathy Griffin to white nationalists has the right to free speech. In particular, anger often clouds the real discussions that need to happen, and in this case, anger gives the person the publicity they desire.
If you really don’t like Kathy Griffin, just ignore her.
