Kathy Griffin Explains Everything That Can Happen When the Federal Government Targets a Comic
Since Donald Trump's election, conservatives have been scraping harder and harder to find new outrages. When he took office, the Republicans controlled the White House, all of Congress, a conservative-leaning (now fully tilted) Supreme Court, and the majority of state governors. But according to them, they were the real victims at the hands of tyrannical mean lady comics.
Probably the most overblown and histrionic reactions were directed at Kathy Griffin, who posed for a photo with a bloody, rubber mock-up of Trump's head. The blow back—from losing work to being investigated by the Secret Service to getting death threats to ending up on the no fly list—all, as she told Stephen Colbert on Friday, "changed my life irrevocably."
Despite so many people the U.S. reaching for their smelling salts, Griffin managed to spin the controversy to keep getting work overseas. She started the "Kathy Griffin Laugh Your Head Off Tour," which she says sold out the Sydney Opera House and the London Palladium. And despite being mostly "blacklisted," as she puts it, in Hollywood, she recently managed to sell out Carnegie Hall in less than two hours.
The moral of the story isn't Griffin's resilience. Her joke may not have been funny—prop comedy rarely is. But it was also clearly not "conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States," nor did it warrant a two month investigation by the Assistant U.S. Attorney to determine that. Regardless, the president chose to single her out to drum up support among his base and demand sympathy in the media, targeting her in his tweets and trying to drag his children into the debacle. It was a textbook example of Republican values: free speech for them, servile "civility" for everyone else. And liberals largely fell for it.
