Comedienne Kathy Griffin gave a once-in-a-lifetime (one hopes) performance in a tear-filled press conference on Friday that was part-defiant, part-contrite, and entirely pathetic. The now-former CNN New Year’s Eve co-host rolled out every tried and true leftist victimhood line in the book, portraying herself as the victim of sexism, bigotry, racism (well, sort of), and bullying from the enemy of all that’s good: “old white guys.” And not just any old white guy, the oldest and whitest of old white guys: President Donald Trump himself, along with his bullying family (which apparently includes his 11-year-old son).
“I’m not afraid of Donald Trump,” said Griffin, who claimed that the president is “trying to ruin my life forever,” after she culturally appropriated radical Islamic beheadings by posing with the likeness of Trump’s bloodied, severed head. “He’s a bully,” she said. “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 a woman thing.”
So, how did Griffin’s “Trump broke me” presser go over? Not well. In fact, it was so bad that even the Associated Press couldn’t bring themselves to drum up any sympathy for Griffin’s bizarre, “rambling” press conference:
At a rambling press conference Friday, Griffin tearfully predicted her career is over and said Trump “broke me.” Since the video was posted Tuesday, she has lost her job co-hosting CNN’s New Year’s Eve special and had five comedy shows canceled. Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have publicly criticized the video. …
Griffin appeared surprised at the number of cameras and reporters in a packed conference room at her lawyer’s office, her hands shaking at one point when she took a sip of water. She switched between contriteness to combativeness during the press conference, during which she attempted several nervous jokes that drew laughs mostly from her attorney, Lisa Bloom.
In response to her erratic presser, AP quotes Republican Party spokesman Mike Reed, who rightly slammed it as a “desperate attempt” to shift the focus to the Left’s go-to enemy, Trump.
“Kathy Griffin’s career was over long before she attempted to make a disgusting joke about decapitating the President,” said Reed. “What she did was wrong and President Trump and his family have every right to condemn it.”
The fact that Trump didn’t even weigh in on Griffin’s disgusting severed head stunt until hours after she’d already been roundly condemned by people on both sides of the ideological spectrum, including her employers — and that when Trump finally did respond, all he did was post a tweet saying she should be “ashamed of herself” and that his son was “having a hard time with this” — was somehow lost in Griffin’s wild presser.
Griffin and her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, also tried to use the Left’s standard strawman argument that she has a “right to parody the president.”
“Whether or not you get, or like, her artistic expression, in America, Kathy has the right to parody the president,” said Bloom, adding that she “never imagined it would be misinterpreted as a threat of violence” against the president.
Of course, no one is seriously arguing that she doesn’t have the “right” to do something disgusting. The issue that CNN, Anderson Cooper, Chelsea Clinton, Al Franken, and everyone else has is that it was a tasteless, violent, and gross “joke” that only makes political discourse in the country worse. As for the Secret Service potentially investigating what could be perceived as a threat to the president: that’s what they are required to do of all perceived threats.
In another particularly awful moment from the presser, Bloom suggested that reports that 11-year-old Barron, believing for a moment that the image was real, “panicked and screamed” was exaggerated, dissmissively saying he was “allegedly” traumatized.
As the Daily Mail points out, Griffin joked(?) in an interview with Vulture back in December that she planned on targeting Trump’s young son. “Now more than ever we must absolutely go for all the absurdities,” she said. “For me, that’s Trump and all things Trump. It’s not about trying to be an equal-opportunity offender anymore because Hillary got such a beat down. It’s his turn. So I’m happy to deliver beat down to Donald Trump — and also to Barron. You know a lot of comics are going to go hard for Donald, my edge is that I’ll go direct for Barron. I’m going to get in ahead of the game.”
Yikes. But, remember, she’s the victim here. Yeah, no one else is buying that either.
Partial transcript via Robert Kraychik, AP.