On Friday, Kathy Griffin, who doused her career in gasoline and set it aflame on Tuesday, did a press conference in which she took the flaming ash of her career and proceeded to place it in a garbage compactor with a metric ton of elephant crap. Griffin, who apologized earlier this week for releasing a video of herself holding a fake head of President Trump, bloody and apparently decapitated, now walked back her apology.
Why?
She was a victim!
According to Griffin, she was victimized by a set of nefarious forces out to ruin her already-tanking future. She was victimized by Trump, “his grown children, and the first lady,” who were all “personally trying to ruin my life forever,” she stated.
She complained about receiving death threats — after essentially broadcasting a death threat directed at the president, taken seriously enough by Secret Service to require follow-up.
She portrayed herself as a victim of sexism: “I’ve dealt with older white guys trying to keep me down my whole life, my whole career. I’m a woman in a very male-dominated field. …There’s a bunch of old white guys trying to silence me. And I’m just here to say that’s wrong. …This wouldn’t be happening to a guy.”
This is glorious.
It’s glorious because Griffin obviously brought the blowback on herself. She made a conscious decision to do something outrageous — not outrageous enough, she believed, to damage herself (after all, nobody at the Hollywood cocktail parties thought it was that bad), but outrageous enough to make headlines. The blowback was natural. She tried to double down. She got crushed by the media that had elevated her. Then she tried to back off.
And when all else failed, she cried victim.
This is embarrassing for the Left. It’s embarrassing mostly because it demonstrates the idiocy of the stock leftist position that anyone who cries victim is a victim, not a cynical manipulator. The Left believes, particularly on campus, that if you claim you’ve been a victim of racism, sexism, or bigotry, we have to take your word for it: nobody would ever claim otherwise. But for Griffin, such claims are transparent attempts to avoid responsibility. In citing sexism or Trump brutality as reasons for her downfall, all Griffin does is undercut the value of the slur itself.
Which is great, since it would be nice if people had to provide some proof of victimization before immediately receiving appointment to the Victimhood Hall of Fame.
Now the Left has two choices. They can either buy her victim narrative, undercutting their own credibility, or they can excise her, slamming her for appropriating the victimhood narrative. Either way, they’re stuck.
Good. They should be. Griffin is of the Left. She’s been doing her routine for years. And the Left has been promulgating victim narratives without evidence for years, too. Let them own their own.