Two things can be true at once. Roseanne’s now infamous Valerie Jarrett joke was in poor taste, mean, and unfunny — hence her immediate and repeated apologies. Also, the popular furor to fire her along with the hundreds of crewmembers, actors, directors, and producers who worked for her is mostly motivated by the Left’s hysterical contempt for anyone even vaguely supportive of President Trump. How else to explain the sudden cancellation of Tim Allen’s hit, conservative show Last Man Standing or MSNBC’s continued employment of Joy Reid, who used her blog to spread offensive accusations about whole groups of people, including the smear that gay men categorically prey on young teenage boys?
I tweeted this simple observation in the wake of Roseann’e firing, which was too much for some conservatives. They warned me that anything but a loud and uniform condemnation of Roseanne Barr would give Democrats the opportunity to call conservatives racist — as if Democrat activists haven’t already belched that smear at every Republican candidate in modern political history.
But I don’t judge people categorically for their race, and I don’t advocate discrimination against anyone categorically for their race. If you can say the same, then congratulations: you’re not a racist. So who cares how Democrats try unjustly to discredit you? Democrats — the party of slavery, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, black disarmament, among myriad other anti-black policies — have precisely zero moral credibility on racial issues against Republicans, whose party was founded explicitly to free the Democrats’ slaves. Planned Parenthood as credibly accuses Santa Claus of child abuse as Democrats accuse Republicans of racism.
Roseanne deserves to be chided for her bad joke, and she was right to apologize. But which is more likely: the eccentric, admittedly mentally unstable pop culture figure we’ve all known for decades told a crude, rude, unfunny joke; or that Roseanne Barr is suddenly a white supremacist? No conservative needs to defend Roseanne; she’s a thick-skinned showbiz veteran who can defend herself. But neither should conservatives rush to condemn her in the pathetic, grandiose, desperate hope of winning the radical Left’s approval.
The economy is booming, the bureaucracy is poised to shrink, federal judges are respecting our laws and Constitution, illegal aliens are being denied entry into the United States, President Trump is resisting extralegal attempts to overturn the 2016 election, and so Democrats are furious. The only tool they have left is to feign hysterical indignation over tweets on news cycle after news cycle. Conservatives shouldn’t take the bait. We owe the party of slavery no explanation, and we shouldn’t covet its partisans’ approval.