BOZELL & GRAHAM: Roseanne's Spontaneous Combustion

[Ubiquitous]

Who knew we would look back at Roseanne Barr's crotch-grabbing massacre
of the national anthem in 1990 and see a mere flesh wound on her
career? She embarrassed herself, mocking America in front of America,
but her hit show rolled along.

But one egregiously racist tweet destroyed the "Roseanne" reboot of
2018 in a Hollywood minute. Tweeting that former Barack Obama top aide
Valerie Jarrett is a mixture of the Muslim Brotherhood and "Planet of
the Apes" put an abrupt end to the top broadcast television program of
the year.

ABC made the right decision — and the obvious business decision. You
cannot compare blacks to monkeys. That is an old, dehumanizing trope.
It is viciously mean-spirited to compare President Donald Trump to an
orangutan, as many leftists have. But that is a mockery of one man's
hair and intelligence, not the rhetorical equivalent of a burning
cross.

In retrospect, everyone said ABC should have known this was going to
happen. Barr has always been a loose cannon, and her politics have
zigzagged from running on the presidential ticket of the nutty-left
Green Party all the way over to backing Trump. But the network thrived
with the original formula of "Roseanne," and it saw a win-win with a
reboot: The show's old audience would tune in, and ABC could sell
itself as reaching out to the red states after mysteriously dumping Tim
Allen's hit show. The ratings were terrific. Then Roseanne drove the
reboot over a cliff.

Dehumanizing tropes about black people don't always destroy careers ...
when the black is a Republican. For example, Pat Oliphant didn't stop
being the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in the world
after he drew then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a parrot with
large lips sitting on then-President George W. Bush's hand in 2008.

This was a trend. Christian Science Monitor cartoonist Jeff Danziger
drew a barefoot Rice in a rocking chair saying, "I knows all about
aluminum tubes! (Correction) I don't know nuthin' about aluminum tubes
..." In the radical fever swamps, cartoonist Ted Rall drew one with
Rice saying, "I was Bush's beard! His house n——!" And a black male
character replies, "Now hand over your hair straightener." He is
wearing a T-shirt that says, "You're not white, stupid."

Even as "Roseanne" is canceled, let's not congratulate Disney CEO Bob
Iger as the King of Televised Civility. This is the same company that
dragged its feet for weeks after ABC co-host Joy Behar insulted
millions on "The View" when she cracked that Christians like Vice
President Mike Pence who act like "Jesus talks to you" have a "mental
illness." We protested until Behar apologized on air, and she has since
compared Trump to an orangutan, because it's just another day in the
Resistance.

Days before the Barr debacle, Disney-owned ESPN rehired Keith
Olbermann, fresh off a series of unhinged Trump-hating videos for GQ
magazine and a book titled "Trump Is F—-ing Crazy (This Is Not a
Joke)." He's also vicious on Twitter, like this tweet to the president
and former Sheriff Joe Arpaio: "You and @Potus can go f—- yourselves,
you racist Nazi f—-s!" In another tweet, he lectured Republicans with
emphasis: "This is the creature you have unleashed on us. GET THIS SON
OF A B—— THE F—- OUT OF HERE."

With Olbermann, no one inside the liberal-media bubble is yet preparing
a spin for the next inflammatory incident: "Disney should have known
what it was doing when it rebooted this unstable character for another
run."

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Dems & the media want Trump to be more like Obama, but then he'd
have to audit liberals & wire tap reporters' phones.