HARRY STEIN: More Deplorable, Please:
All of which makes the new Roseanne, for all its apparent success, a major opportunity missed—the first and maybe only chance to tell the other side of the story on a major network, with laughs. Sure, for people like the Conners, the bread-and-butter issues are vital. But millions of us also care passionately about the Left’s unrelenting assault on the culture—its undermining of free speech and religious liberty, its poisonous identity and victimhood politics, its elite colleges that proselytize instead of educate, and all the rest, most of which, seen from the proper perspective, has always been laughable anyway. It shouldn’t be Jackie demanding “How could you?!” in reaction to Roseanne’s vote, but the other way around.
Roseanne Barr is surely the only showbiz Trump supporter who has that kind of clout, which is why it’s a shame to see it wasted on an enterprise that could have been so much more.
Republicans are forever starving for validation from celebrities. They get so little of it that when someone sympathetic to them in entertainment scores a major success, they rush in to bear-hug them. Hannity in particular has proved, per his treatment of Julian Assange, that there’s nothing he won’t forgive and forget about an influential person if that person can serve his current agenda. But before we crown Roseanne the new queen of conservatism because she voted for Trump and makes no bones about it, a gentle reminder: She’s a crank.
She ran for the Green Party nomination for president in 2012, touting herself as “a tireless advocate of Occupy Wall Street.” Now she’s a Trump booster. Odds are no worse than 50/50 that he’ll do something over the next two years that’ll alienate her and she’ll be backing the Socialist Party candidate in 2020. Proceed with caution in embracing her. That goes quadruple for POTUS.
