Kathy Griffin hasn’t really been funny in a good decade or so, so it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that she did a deeply unfunny photo that has now become this whole Thing. The shoot was the work of photog Tyler Shields, and the most provocative image showed up on Twitter yesterday, via TMZ:
Everybody – right, left, and center, but especially right – immediately lost their shit, obviously, and after an afternoon of well-deserved dragging, Griffin tweeted an apology video:
And then our erstwhile President, finger ever on the pulse of the nation, chimed in on the whole thing eleven hours later:
The best thing about this tweet is how he uses the full, awkward “my 11 year old son, Barron,” like a bad improv sketch comic who’s struggling to convey information about the scene to his team partners.
Anyway, that’s basically over, though I’m sure the Tomi Lahrens of the world will get a few more days of “Intolerant Left!” traction out of it. But it’s an important indicator of the rules of behavior and punishment that we have agreed upon, across party lines, as a polite society. Why, it’s almost déjà vu; remember back in 2012, when Ted Nugent promised “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year,” and literally recommended beheading Democrats, telling the totally stable “Cat Scratch Fever” fans at an NRA convention, “We need to ride onto that battlefield and chop their heads off in November”? And then people of all political persuasion demanded an apology, which he delivered inside of a day, and the whole thing basically ended his public life?
Yeah, me neither.