And now the right is supposedly outraged by David Cross' jokes about pooping on Trump
It’s Friday, which means we’re all amped for the weekend. But nobody is likely more excited than people who love to get up in arms about things they couldn’t give a shit about if the politics were reversed, because they get more excited than anyone, anywhere, about anything. Fire up the hypocritical outrage machine!
Obnoxious leftists and right-wingers have a tendency to pass this mantle back and forth, but the right has had it on lock lately, probably thanks to the faux-concern of a new pack of “think of the children!” frauds led by professional troll Mike Cernovich, whose resume barely qualifies him to host an InfoWars show, and who recently led the sadly victorious campaign to get James Gunn fired from Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 over some old tweets, less than a year after publicly saying no one should ever be fired for satirical tweets. (Subsequent embarrassing campaigns against Michael Ian Black, among others, met with far less success.) But today’s slice of pearl-clutching nonsense comes from Breitbart, which is ginning up outrage against comedian David Cross—not due to any old tweets or anything, but to his very current stand-up act, which features the comedian imagining a mock debate with Donald Trump that ends with Trump’s debate opponent urinating and shitting on him (after beating the crap out of him, of course).
The “we’ll pretend to care about anything for money, as long as it doesn’t better the lives of anyone!” site picked up on a story from The Salt Lake Tribune which had reviewed a stand-up set from Cross by saying, “His surprisingly long set—which ran just 10 minutes short of two hours—included humor about abortion, Nazis, the Holocaust, terrorist bombings, AIDS and beating President Donald Trump to a bloody pulp and then urinating and defecating on him.” Somehow, this was not taken with an “all in good fun” attitude, with the alt-right website instead claiming, “Violent rhetoric and fantasies about President Trump are becoming more common among celebrities,” and using Jim Carrey’s recent painting of Trump being burned at the stake as an example.
To absolutely no one’s surprise, the story of a comedian’s lampooning a public figure via an absurdist fantasy scenario has been met with very real threats of violence in the comments. In that regard, it’s not unlike the bomb threat called in to a newspaper Trump recently labeled the “enemy of the people,” an obvious lie that somehow none of the journalists affected by it responded to with the classic “he who smelt it, dealt it” defense. And while there’s plenty of reasonable debate to be had about what constitutes a threatening public statement to the president, one imagine a hypothetical debate in which Trump gets pee and poop in his mouth and nose would be hard-pressed to be called a threat.