And ABC is probably going to find that out now that they’ve cancelled Roseanne based on a fairly mild racist idiot tweet from Roseanne Barr that I won’t bother to repeat here. The article I read in the WSJ earlier today suggested that killing that production put hundreds of people out of work. And talk about a knee-jerk reaction. Would ABC have been so quick to kill a show that made fun of Donald Trump or one of his minions? I mean, NBC has never cancelled Saturday Night Live, and it’s been ragging on GOP presidents and other conservatives pretty much from day one. ESPN (a division of ABC/Disney) lost a huge number of viewers and billions of dollars over the anthem kneeling in the NFL, by all reports. But they never used their bully pulpit to tell the NFL to put a stop to it or they’d take them off the air.
Well, here’s what I think about Roseanne.
I think she actually may have some personal liking for Trump, possibly from back in his days as a TV celeb. She might even have voted for him. But she’s independent as hell, plus she’s a few bricks shy of a full load to begin with. It wasn’t the Ambien talking — just like booze, the Ambien simply loosened her tongue, and out poured the resident evil. If indeed it was Ambien at all, she’s said some pretty outré things in the past without any apparent need for chemical encouragement. When they said she’d come out as a conservative, I was honestly shocked, because I couldn’t stand her the first time around because she was such a damn liberal (as we called progressives back in the day).
A friend said he thought her conservatism was a sham, set up to give conservatives a black eye with this racist tweet and the resulting hooroar (as Pogo would have put it). I doubt that. The left is not generally smart enough to play the long game anymore. Their march through the institutions destroyed any chance of them bringing in a new generation of truly smart, well-educated leftists. Everything they’ve done lately has seemingly been for immediate gratification, and most of it has boomeranged on them. They’re scared to death of the Trump phenomenon, and it shows in their panic as the polls, which had them blue-waving in November, are inexorably turning against them.
Not that I trust the polls, but I find it interesting that Trump is polling as high as he is, and that the generic Congressional voter poll is in a statistical tie. Either the pollsters are trying to scare Democrat voters out of the woodwork and into the polling stations, or Trump’s numbers are really higher than the polls let on. Or both.
My guess is that Dem turnout in November will be down significantly, as many of them will be too depressed to cast a ballot. But the GOP needs to GOTV or it may be a wash regardless.