In Defense of Joy Behar, Part I

In Trumplandia these days it’s starting to look more and more like Open Mic Nite meets “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Apparently when funny ladies give Trump any kind of scathing critiques with their jokes, it bothers him. A lot. It hurts The Great Leader’s feelings. It also makes him angry enough to retaliate, big time.

In other words, he tries to get his fem-enemies fired — but not in the face-to-face way he did on “The Apprentice.” Remember, this isn’t TV, this is real life. With feisty funny ladies, he has to outsource his termination trolls. He has to rely on the Boys with Bucks in the Backroom — like CEO’s at NBC or ABC or CNN — to unemploy women who keep exercising their First Amendment Rights.

In Trumplandia, only The Great Leader can use any kind of “humor” to ridicule or criticize. And yet, ironically, he himself can’t “take a joke” of any kind if it’s directed towards him or his job performance. But never mind. He doesn’t understand irony, he only understands payback. Fem-enemies, beware!

The POTUS #45 Patrol is on high-alert.

Women who make any kind of Trump jokes that sting will soon find themselves facing unemployment. They’ll also face life-changing upheavals that accompany it. Loss of seniority, status, reputation. Loss of wages, pensions, healthcare, other perks and benefits. Even if they don’t get fired right away, they’ll still have to sweat out the uncertainty of job loss. Or demotion. Or suspension. Or the stigma of crossing the tacit line that Trump and his minions have arbitrarily decided to enforce.

This opinion piece is about Joy Behar, but she wasn’t the first woman to suffer from UN-democratic reprisals.

FIRST FEMALE CASUALTY IN THIS COMIC-OPPRESSED STATE: Katie Rich, that writer from “Saturday Night Live.” Remember her? She made the big mistake last year of tweeting that (then)10-year old Barron Trump “will be this country’s first homeschool shooter.”

Not very funny. Certainly not a nice joke to make about the President’s son or any child. Certainly an unkind, tasteless, hurtful — even cruel — remark. No doubt Rich’s tweet turned out to be a bona fide gaffe. No doubt she made a big error and not a funny quip.

But did Katie Rich really deserve the kind of wrathful retribution that was leveled against her?

After all, she wasn’t tweeting as an NBC or SNL employee, or communicating in any official business capacity. She was making her own personal tweets on her own Twitter. She wasn’t using official company e-mail. She wasn’t acting on official business for her employer. In fact, two or three hours after she learned her remark had become severely problematic, she deleted the tweet. Then she blocked public view of anything she tweeted — or would tweet — by making her Twitter account private.

But she got suspended from her job at SNL anyway.

Rich eventually did get her job back, but not before enduring more public castigation, not before she had to profusely apologize, over and over, for her quip. Oh, so much more irony!

Trump embraces a mantra of “Never apologize,” yet continually demands egregious groveling and profuse apologies from any woman who makes any jokes about him (and anything that somehow relates to him.) He’ll never say “I’m sorry” for whatever he said or did. But he sure expects a lot of mea culpas from his fem-enemies.

This brings us to the SECOND FEMALE CASUALTY IN THIS COMIC-OPPRESSED STATE: Stand-up Comic/Actress Kathy Griffin. Remember her? She made the mistake of doing an anti-fascist photo shoot last year with a controversial prop. But when so many of her Twitter followers misunderstood her intentions, she removed the video of the photo shoot from her Twitter account. Like Katie Rich, she also offered sincere and profuse apologies for any misunderstandings she caused.

But no apologies could help her, either. No apologies could help her from being publicly denounced and losing gigs left and right. No apologies could help her Twitter images from being reproduced and immortalized online forever by the POTUS #45 Patrol. Trump’s trolls succeeded in vilifying her as some mad prima donna from a theater-in-the-round production of “Salome,” complete with Trump’s bloody, severed head. Only there was no blood, there was no head, there was no severed head. There was only out-of-control B.S. brimming with inaccuracies from Trump’s supporters — and the media! Trump remains very much alive and ready to launch vendettas.

I’ve been working on an article about her for a while, and the injustice of it all horrifies me. I still can’t believe how easy it is for the powers-that-be in the White House, Corporate America, and yes, even the media, to target an American citizen and destroy her life. (More on these outrageous tactics in another op-ed, coming soon to a PATCH near you.)

But now, here’s the year’s latest celebrity casualty: Stand-up comic/Writer/Humorist/former teacher/TV personality Joy Behar. A permanent fixture on ABC’s “The View” since it first aired in 1997, Behar has never shied away from sharing opinions or delivering wisecracks during any on-air discussions. But now she’s getting smeared with inaccurate information. Now the stories about her are devoid of background information that’s essential to understanding what really happened.

In order to fully comprehend what Trump Inc. and his supporters did to her, we’re going to have to go back to pre-Winter Olympic time.

Before the Olympic Games began, Vice President Mike Pence wanted to meet with figure skater Adam Rippon. Rippon, an openly Gay athlete, refused his invitation. Rippon declared he had no interest in meeting with anyone who disrespected Gays, opposed Gay rights, and believed in conversion therapy to “wipe the Gay away.” He also added he wanted to concentrate on skating for the upcoming competition, not on politics.

Pence should have dropped the matter, but he didn’t. As faithful disciple of Master Fibber Trump, he, along with his PR machine, came up with “alternative facts.” No, the VEEP didn’t support conversion therapy, and no, he never asked to meet with Rippon in the first place!

Not true, simply not true, according to Adam Rippon and his agent. Most people believed Rippon’s version of events, not Pence’s.

Behar was one of those people who believed Rippon.

Pence’s allegations triggered conversations all over the country, though, especially with the ladies of “The View.” Their on-air discussions weren’t about his faith as much as they were about how he tried to impose his religious beliefs and ideas on others. Pence’s assertions that J.C. and the Good Lord personally talked to him brought out skeptical amusement from Behar.

“It’s one thing to talk to Jesus,” she quipped. “It’s another thing when Jesus talks to you. That’s called mental illness, if I’m not correct — hearing voices.”

Well, yeah. Anyone who prays realizes that. Anyone who engages in spiritual communion with God (or whatever you call the Higher Power or Universal Forces you invoke) understands that concept. Talking with God isn’t the same as talking with another human being and actually hearing the response.

It’s not like you’re praying for a new job and God’s booming voice answers you with, “Hi, Marcie. This is God. Heard you’ve been out pounding the pavement again. Take it easy, there’s going to be a new opening next week after Doug has his gallbladder attack. Show up at the following address next Tuesday morning…”

And then, because Pence had also asserted he’d never meet with another woman unless his wife was in the room, Behar made another wisecrack: “My question is, can he talk to Mary Magdalene without his wife in the room?”

Her wry observation elicited laughter from both me and the studio audience. We “got it.” I was watching the show on February 13th and detected no outrage — or righteous indignation — from either the audience or the panel. I laughed that Tuesday morning, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only Christian who laughed, either.

So what’s the problem?

There was no real problem. There was only payback from Trump’s die-hard base and propaganda machine for inciting laughter at The Great Leader and his 2nd in Command. And probably a diversion from Pence’s pre-Olympic fibs, too.

Suddenly, Joy Behar was the Devil Woman du Jour. Suddenly she was guilty of slandering the faith of “tens of millions of Americans,” according to Pence. Suddenly, The Media Research Center’s campaign against Behar generated some 40,000 protest calls to ABC, as well as 9,000 to the advertisers of “The View”… Or so the President of the Center alleges…

Come on. We all know that a dozen disgruntled church ladies and a handful of computers can generate 100,000 such phone calls of “protest.” Still the wrath of the conservative right was enough to cause concerns at the shareholder’s meeting of the Disney Corp. — and enough to force Behar to apologize.

They made her apologize — OR ELSE.

(To Be Continued…Stay Tuned for Part-II, in an upcoming PATCH posting.)