Okay, look, YES. Yesterday, Kathy Griffin posted a thing and it was a picture of her holding Trump’s bloody head in effigy and yes it was tasteless and not funny (although I might not be a great judge because she doesn’t often make me laugh) and the right collectively lost its shit-skittles … <deep breath> and before #covfefe it was the biggest thing on Twitter last night.
Most people, even on the left, were like “oh god too far.” And I tend to agree, though I wasn’t particularly horrified. (And I ALSO agree with this tweet from @owillis: “making vile imagery about a president hurts kathy griffiin’s bottom line. but it doesn’t hurt ted nugent’s. and that’s the difference.”)
Shortly after all this kerfuffle started, however, Griffin apologized. As a connoisseur of apologies, I will tell you it was pretty darn good. The only slight shortfall is that she didn’t specifically say what she did; however, I think that when you did something that makes all of social media gasp in unison, it’s safe to say we all know what we’re talking about. But she said the magic words “I am sorry” and even “I went way too far.” She also said she was going to ask the photographer to take down the image (but since the internet is the internet, I promise you can find it if you want). Here, check out her words for yourself:
https://twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/869703678550171648
Obviously none of the right-wing screamers were having any of it, but most everyone else seemed to respond to it like adults. That’s not what I want to talk about, though. What I want to talk about is that after ALLLLLLL this bullshit we’ve been dealing with since the election—months and months of it—the off-color joke from a comedian was what finally got the soulless Mitt Romney to pop up out of his little rat hole of unintegrity to spout some fake outrage. And thus we received this:
Our politics have become too base, too low, & too vulgar, but Kathy Griffin's post descends into an even more repugnant & vile territory.
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) May 30, 2017
Wait, what? This is what FINALLY gets you to crawl out of your happy little hole where you pretend you live in a sane country with sane leaders? Seriously, the man has tweeted something like 13 times since Trump took office, and two of those were suckup tweets: he thought both DeVos and Gorsuch were great choices. The other 11 or so were “look how awesome my life is” tweets. Vomit.
Mitt Romney. You disingenuous, feckless, gormless Boy Dunder. I could name 20 horrendous things this administration has done directly or supported in the past few weeks that blow Griffin’s little stunt right out of the water. But let’s just sniff some of the bigger piles of shit that have been festering in the sun for the last several months. See how many green bottle flies are buzzing around.
- Russia. RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA. We have a president who’s been under investigation for collusion by the FBI since last summer, and the evidence is mounting against him and all his flunkies. Putin fucked with our election, and there is every reason to believe Trump was in on it. (Although he was certainly not the mastermind; the man can’t even stand at attention for the national anthem without wiggling around like a three-year-old.)
- THE GODDAMN AHCA. This disaster of a health care bill that’s set to strip health care from 23 million, make being a woman a preexisting condition, and basically screw us all over HAS PASSED THE HOUSE. I mean, I know you don’t care, you rich asshole, but you could at least pretend.
- He’s alienating our allies—remember when he got all shouty with Australia? How quaint that seems now—and he is getting chummy with despots and dictators. And I’m not just talking about Putin. Just recently we found out that he praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for “cracking down” on the drug problem there. Said he did an “unbelievable job.” Well, yeah, when you gun down suspects in the streets, that’s going to have a dampening effect on the drug trade. But also on your citizens continuing to breathe and keep all their blood and organs on the inside.
I could go on. And on. We all know the horrible things this administration has done and supported. But you, sir, have not called them out on any of these efforts to turn America into a fascist dictatorship. No. Instead, you turned your (admittedly milquetoast) venom on a comedian engaging in some political satire that didn’t play as well as she’d hoped.
Romney. Mitt Romney. Your name is both uninspiringly tepid and quinine-bitter in the mouth. You are, like the rest of your party, a traitorous pox, and history will long remember that you chose to let the rot of fascism roll over this once-great country, smothering its people and the best parts of its culture in the putrefaction of oppression, rather than standing up for common decency.
What did you get for your soul, you wretched worm? Was it worth it? I hope not.
