The Roseanne Deal

The swiftness of Roseanne’s public execution following her incendiary tweet most likely elicited feelings of relief rather than regret on the part of anyone involved with the production: an excuse to kill the golden goose handed to ABC on a silver platter.

The show had become the proverbial bone in the throat of reflexively resistant show business, perceived as a corrective to the industry’s progressivism and justification for the existence of the stereotypical Trump voter as Hollywood sees them.  Instead, everyone involved with the project now will earn brownie points for any and all mea culpas, and will all move on with their Hollywood lives (except for maybe Sara Gilbert, who might pay with her career for conceiving the reboot in the first place).

Meanwhile, the inevitable pile-ons and whataboutisms have ensued from all corners.   Overparsing the tweet in question, some defend Roseanne’s ape analog as about appearance and not race, as pictures of Trump juxtaposed with an orangutan are; some have claimed that this was about her, and not the show itself. But to paraphrase Larry Summers: Roseanne’s tweet was racist in effect even if not intent; and the fact that the show was “Roseanne” indicates, as Ben Shapiro has pointed out, that the star was the product.

However, as one can perform all sorts of contortions to try give Roseanne the benefit of the doubt, one can imply even more mentally acrobatically impressive feats of contortion to make this into something resembling another BLM or #MeToo.  Conservatives should actually be as relieved as Roseanne’s production team: they now can point to Roseanne’s execution and demand parallel ones for offenses from the Left—a “Roseanne Deal”—even if trenchant cultural double standards make that a pipe dream;  those to the right of the far left can be forgiven for using Roseanne as a whataboutist cudgel against progressivism.

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In any case, common sense would look like Bret Stephens’ musings about taboos, that some should be inviolate while some remain permitted precisely to keep the truly incendiary out of public fora.  (Mr. Stephens errs when he deems Ms. Jarret to be less than public a figure and therefore not deserving of withering criticism like the President, and either way that status is irrelevant to the nature of Roseanne’s offense.  But it doesn’t detract from his point about taboos.)

Instead we have Trevor Noah, whose history of antisemitic tweeting rivals Roseanne’s own Twitter ouvre, and who should have himself fired from Comedy Central and run offscreen if he has a shred of intellectual integrity.

Instead we have Lindsey West, who has had a personal axe to grind with Roseanne for years.  As part of that spat—which was ostensibly about defending comics who cracked rape jokes—Ms. West herself delineated that certain rape jokes were not necessarily out of bounds, allowing for gradations of offense worth comic risk.  Not anymore: post-Roseanne, West now insists on PC as a matter of faith, particularly when equating the NFL’s new flag policy with a hypothetical racist ABC that still runs Roseanne. 

West makes as compelling a #resistance revolutionary as Rachel Dolezal.

In fact, considering that one can credibly assume that Ms. West considers herself bound by the tenets of intersectional theory and would happily subscribe to the double standards of meting out offenses that its adherents demand—would she be as up in arms about Linda Sarsour’s tweets as she is about Roseanne’s?—one might find that her revolutionary fervor is even less Rachel Dolezal and more Torrance Shipman:

“This isn’t a democracy, this is a cheerocracy.”

McKaepernism

If the NFL's "flag crisis" is the result of the President's using it as a whipping post to fan (pun intended) his base--and I wrote in the wake of Charlottesville that at the time his standing to invoke patriotism was tenuous--then the entire "backbone" of the "protests" are at least equally fruit of the poisonous tree, the result of a player in decline using intersectionality for PR points after prodding from his "woke" then-new terrorsplainer girlfriend.  (Raised by a middle class family and having absolutely no political conscience prior, where the hell else did he get it?)  

Also, for once, I'll give Roger Goodell credit because he was in an impossible position [a lot of it of his own making, of course, because he's trying to be Bud Selig and he never will], but right now, this was the best the NFL could do (again, because they stepped in it by not doing what the NBA has done for decades).  The fact that no one is happy (the President being less unhappy than most, which is unusual enough) should be one indication that, for now, this was the least bad option. 

"It would be better that they did nothing and kept the status quo"?  The furor did die down as the season went on, and the claims of correlation between viewership decline and the perceived intersectionalization of the league were most likely exaggerated; but after the public layout for ostensibly progressive causes, management had not only the right but the duty to retake control of its product and its presentation.  Argue all you want about the league commodifying patriotism by making deals with the DOD; that just makes them smarter than the other leagues that might not have.  (And the DOD approached them.  Maybe there is something to this "American Football" thing.)

Finally, the "solution" here is actually the simplest one--because the players who might want to protest on company time can do it; it just might be more financially risky.  They are legally free to do so--and free to pay the consequences.  (The few conservatives who’ve defended kneeling and said “you can’t force patriotism” are off the mark: this is about enforcing a workplace policy.  It bears no resemblance to Pledge-in-classroom issues; the NFL is not a public good.)   I suspect that a kneeling player will be fined between 10-50K, and his team(s) will be forced to fork over between 100-250K.  Token pocket-change fines would make this policy completely meaningless; however, don't underestimate the ability of the league to permanently blackball and/or damage the career of a player who gives it a PR shiner, even if it does so selectively.   

(While I've practically advocated that Tom Brady should be made the football equivalent of Barry Bonds because of Deflategate, even Bonds' excommunication didn't occur until after his retirement.  Kaep and Eric Reid will be as perpetually radioactive as Ray Rice because their sins were in public view.  Hard to tell if a ball is slightly deflated unless it's being dribbled.  Hence, the notion that the punishments are disproportionate and/or racially motivated don't hold water.)

The NFL also need not overthink the possibility of sustained mass protest as a reflexive response to the new policy.  First: if the kneeling resumes to any major degree and a new ringleader can be identified--a Kaep will be put in the ass of that player's NFL career.   Second (and this is the other reason Goodell's move is the least bad of all the moves): the "protests", should they occur, might happen early in the season but then will die down as the season goes on and either fines accrue; after Mohammed Abdul-Rauf was fined by the NBA in 1995 and started to then show up for the anthem, he stated that he acquiesced in standing by reexamining his position and finding in Islam that he could do so, indicating that punshined participants will find a similar way to rationalize backtracking.  Moreover, if team dissension starts costing games and/or playoff spots, the protesters will further eat themselves.  If that happens, it might even make the NFL more fun to watch both on and off the field. 

In the meantime, as much as the Trump-base types hare ostensibly unwilling to brook dissension, those rallying around the Kaep because epater le Trumpois have demonstrated as much inflexible fealty to the tenets of hard left intersectionality, as evidenced by Linda Sarsour tying the NFL's deKaepitation to "right wing Zionism", and Marshawn Lynch's Viva Mexico helmet dance.  (Or maybe it was a rally Kaep.)

Call it McKaepernism.

JCPOS

When the premise is faulty, everything that follows is fruit of the poisonous tree.

Following up on the frenzied efforts of former SOS John Kerry to save the JCPOA while flouting the Logan Act, former President Obama released a three-page statement attempting a bullet-pointed (as opposed to missile-pointed, one supposes) rebuttal to the policy implications of President Trump’s withdrawal from the “Iran Deal”.

Whether Obama’s long-winded protest was a) “burial in paperwork” or b) an informed argument remains irrelevant.  Rather, it was another attempt to obfuscate the unsupported premise of the JCPOA: specifically, it never was the mechanism for ensuring that Iran never gets possession of a nuclear weapon as presented by its creators and cheerleaders.

In fact, the JCPOA was crafted in such a way to give all the advantage and rewards to the Iranians for a promise that could never be enforced.  Furthermore, both the crafters of the deal and its supporters are on record about the actual ultimate purpose of the JCPOA, and a lot of room has been left to interpret that its ultimate aims are even more nefarious than they let on.

Consider the statement from Julia Frifield, Obama’s assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, in 2015:  “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and it is not a signed document.”  Ostensibly well-meaning literati argue as if the JCPOA should or ought to be binding, rather than whether or not it actually is; pace Bret Stephens, who’s less charitable toward the deal and its crafters, “It’s questionable whether the deal has any legal force at all.”  

Consider the New York Times, champion of both Obama and the JCPOA, lamenting the cancellation of “the lifeline offered by the 2015 nuclear deal, which was supposed to alleviate pressure on Iran’s economy and crack open the barriers to the West”, indicating that the ostensible corrective purpose of the JCPOA—keeping Iran from going militarily nuclear—was always tangential at best; the primary driver of the JCPOA was to rehabilitate the Islamic Republic whether or not its behavior changed.  

(Or, in classic Obamanian terms, the Hope that it would Change.)

Consider how Obama and JCPOA cheerleaders have lamented that “no one will take America and its commitments at their word”, when he and then Secretary of State Clinton unilaterally cancelled a 2004 written understanding between President George W. Bush and Israel PM Ariel Sharon vis a vis settlements and the territories.

Consider how many times Obama felt compelled to mention the 1953 CIA backed coup in Iran that reinstalled the Shah.  In his 2009 Grovel in Cairo, Obama felt compelled to mention Iran’s “democratically elected government” (an arguable assertion, but one can also consider that Hitler and Hamas were also democratically elected), and that “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons…any nation – including Iran – should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power.”  In July 2015, as part of the sales push for the JCPOA, Obama sat down with NYT eminence Thomas Friedman and repeated the self-flagellating litany.  

While Obama considered the US responsible for the Islamization of Iran and therefore in debt enough to them to at least allow for the opportunity to nuclearize “peacefully”, if not militarily, as penance for 1953, it didn’t go unnoticed that Obama's apologies were directed to the theofascist rulers of the Islamic Republic rather than the Iranian people.

In fact the Iranians had a short-lived attempt at a post-coup liberal democracy which was killed by the Ayatollah and his minions in a takeover that mirrored Bolshevism. This should cancel out any American responsibility for Iran’s political self-destruction, as well as indicate how thin any line is between “civilian” and “military” in that country, particularly as long as the current regime runs the Islamic Republic.

Therefore, for at least as long as the regime hasn’t changed, why should Iran be allowed any nuclear materials at all, even one centrifuge, no matter how slow and outdated?  One Congressional Democrat pooh-poohed concerned about cheating by claiming “they can’t remove the trail” of removed illicit material—but why wouldn’t the Iranians claim that the “trail” was left from the “permitted” radioactive material?  To paraphrase Yasser Arafat, what makes one think that Iranians wouldn’t lie for a cause they would kill for?  Considering the zeal with which the Obama/Kerry cabal pursued this deal at the cost of “letting Hezbollah off the hook” and suppressing our own pursuit of drug traffickers—what makes one think they wouldn’t cover up for Iranian lies as well as their own? 

One should only conclude that the entire premise of the JCPOA was to provide political cover for the Obama/Kerry cabal and its cheerleaders for what they considered Iran’s inevitable if not entitled nuclearization.

In a classic sketch lampooning the 1938 Munich agreement, John Cleese (as PM Chamberlain) holds the infamous “piece of paper”, annnouncing as the wind blows it away “I have in my hand a piece of…Shit!"  

The JCPOS wasn’t worth even that much.