Of course, I’m hardly Rosie’s daily television show target demographic.  I work for a living instead of sitting at home staring slack-jawed at the succession of Sham-Wow commercials and ads for shyster lawyers promising big payouts for the imaginary injuries of their deadbeat clients that fill the time between inane segments of mindless yak.  And while the social parasite demographic seems to grow larger after every freebie, hand-out and pay-off the Administration and its Congressional flunkies issue in favor of their employment-averse constituents, Rosie O’Donnell still seems like a bad economic bet.

This is no longer the same country as it was back in 1999 when Rosie was honchoing her first daytime gabfest and hassling Tom Selleck over his support for the Second Amendment of the Constitution.  It’s not even the same country as it was in May 2007, when the former “Queen of Nice’s” anti-conservative bile culminated in her slandering American fighting men and women as terrorists on The View:

ROSIE O‘DONNELL, HOST, “THE VIEW”:  655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead.  Who are the terrorists?

ELISABETH HASSELBECK, “VIEW” CO-HOST:  Who are the terrorists?

O‘DONNELL:  655 Iraqis—I‘m saying you have to look—we invaded…

HASSELBECK:  Wait, who are you calling terrorists? 

O‘DONNELL:  I‘m saying that, if you were in Iraq, and another country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?

She also takes particular pleasure in attacking the Catholic Church and seems to consider anyone not buying wholesale into her radical agenda against traditional marriage and adoption as a contemptible bigot.  And let’s not forget her equally insightful foray into that moronic twilight zone known as 9/11 trutherism; it completes her personal trifecta of idiocy.  

Rosie’s backers for the new show seem excited at the chance to pick up Oprah’s viewers, whose departure will apparently leave them without a reason to live.  “Those 4, 5, 6 ratings points have to go somewhere,” one told Variety. “Something’s going to come in and fill that vacuum.”

But with the President’s approval ratings in freefall, and with Congress envying the polling numbers achieved by such public favorites as Kim Jong-Il, Vanilla Ice and syphilis, it is a new world.  Rosie’s kind of aggressive, grating, in-your-face liberal stupidity may well serve to alienate a substantial part of today’s potential audience.  Her partners seem to know it too, assuring Variety that:

“If Rosie wanted to just have a platform for her causes, she would go get a show on cable news . . . .  She’s a comedian, not a political pundit.”

Except no one is laughing – her Rosie Live! variety show was cancelled the first night after scoring an anemic 5.25 million viewers, though the presence of such hip, relevant and cutting edge guest artists as Alanis Morrissette and someone/something called “Ne-Yo” probably didn’t help. 

The fact is that Rosie O’Donnell is an unpleasant, smug and actively dumb woman who is unlikely to garner anything like the following she once had before embracing her personal jihad against the most deeply held and sincere beliefs of a significant majority of the country.  The stay at-home mommies I know are too busy to sit and watch television without a very good reason, and being bitched at by a sanctimonious harpy isn’t one of them.  Oprah likes Barack Obama, but (I assume) she doesn’t spend an hour a day telling her audience that they are the scum of the Earth for not agreeing with her.  Rosie probably couldn’t resist – and watching her show would probably make the Bataan Death March look like a week at Club Med.   

So, there are two possible reasons behind the resurrection of Rosie as a daytime talk show hostess.  The first is that the producers think they can make some money by harnessing what they believe to be her undeniable audience appeal.  Perhaps that’s true, but that seems like a triumph of hope over recent experience considering the unbroken track record of audience alienation and failure that has haunted her since she left her original talk show back in 2002 as well as the increasing polarization of the American public into liberal and conservative camps.  Does it seem smart to invest in a show that at the threshold flips the bird to at least 50% of the people who might be enticed to watch it?

The other possibility is that Rosie’s aggressive lefty political stance is a net positive for her backers, and that they believe she would provide a valuable, if only intermittently coherent, liberal voice in the vast wasteland that is daytime television.  And they may be willing to suck up the potential losses in order to let that obnoxious voice be heard.

The truth is probably somewhere in between.  It’s not unknown for Hollywood to try to mix business with leftism (*cough* The Green Zone *cough*).  Of course, that doesn’t always work real well. (*cough* The Green Zone *cough*). 

Will Rosie O’Donnell succeed with her career resurrection?  No one can know for sure, but just in case, I’m keeping a crucifix and some garlic handy.

I couldn’t help but remember a favorite story that my wife and I tell on each other from time to time. Years ago, we were going through some counseling about our relationship (we’re totally cured now, of course. Just ask my wife). We had two counselors who were partners, one of whom focused on us, but both of whom knew our story.  After a considerable number of sessions had come and gone with no tangible improvement, one day my wife stormed into their office in an obvious fury to see our guy. His colleague, a wonderfully grumpy man, glanced up at her and offhandedly said, “What’s your problem?”

“My husband’s an a**hole.”

He responded flatly, “Maybe you’re the a**hole.”

We’ve laughed about this many times over the years, but it was a strange little turning point for us.  We remember  it often to remind each other always to make sure our side of the street is clean before we start complaining about the other side.

But in Maher’s case, there is just no “maybe” about it.

When I read his column, I realized something about Maher that I also realized about Obama a couple months ago, when he so badly botched the Gates affair in Cambridge: To them, it’s all about race.  Obama admitted that he didn’t know the facts of the case when he decreed that the police acted stupidly, but he knew the only facts that mattered to him.  Gates was black.  The officer was white.  Case closed.  Let’s have a beer.

In his column, Maher is either willfully lying or he is, to use one of his favorite projections, stupid.  He claims that Obama fired Van Jones because Glenn Beck told him to, which would mark the first time in history that Barack Obama ever listened to someone who disagreed with him, and then multiplies the dumbness by claiming that the reason Beck told him to was because he called Republicans “a**holes.”

Everyone from Charles Krauthammer to Beck himself said that Jones’s “Republicans are a**holes” comment didn’t bother them at all, Krauthammer famously stating that he’d called members of his own family that and worse.  Krauthammer even went on to say that Van Jones’s describing himself as an “avowed Communist” didn’t matter, since we’ve had a few Communists in our government before (see Maxine Waters).

No, Bill, it was Van Jones signing on as a “truther” that scuttled him.  You see, in the Obama Administration, you can call the opposition names (Obama does it himself), you can advocate the destruction of free-market capitalism (see previous parenthetical), you can accuse white people of intentionally poisoning minorities who work in their agricultural industries, and you’ll still be a remarkable addition to the team.  But even Obama can’t have a lunatic around who agrees with idiots like Charlie Sheen and Rosie O’Donnell that President George W. Bush, the stupidest man who ever lived in their eyes, somehow pulled off the greatest crime and cover-up in history, by orchestrating the murder of 2,996 Americans and blaming it on Islamic terrorists, all so he could go into Iraq and avenge the attempt on his Daddy’s life made by Saddam Hussein. (Jonah Goldberg has a great takedown of this lunacy here.)

Maher loves to call people stupid as much as he loves to call people racists, as he made clear during his appearance on the Conan O’Brian show, where he said that Obama should just drag health care over the finish line with or without the support of the American people, because they are stupid.  Maher, like most self-righteous liberals,  pines for a nice a**hole dictator who would just ram whatever he wanted down the stupid peoples’ throats (assuming, of course, that said dictator is someone Bill Maher thinks is smart, like, say, Joe Biden).   To a third-grade mentality like Maher, Bush is stupid, Palin is stupid, Reagan was stupid, all the Tea Party protesters are stupid — everyone who doesn’t agree with Bill Maher is stupid.

I know you are, Bill, but what am I?

And in fact, Maher is provably so stupid that he wouldn’t know a truly ignorant, plagiarizing, buffoonish dolt if one bit him in the a** and then got his vote for Vice President. (Hey, wait a minute!)

But the racist label that Maher throws around is the true projection.  To him, Van Jones got fired because he became the “Scary Negro of the week on Fox News,”   and had nothing to do with his radical policies.

But the truth is that conservatives, independents, disaffected Democrats, and unlabelled Americans who disagree with the President do so on the basis of his policies and his philosophy. We look at the people he surrounds himself with and has throughout his life, and we listen to his stated opinions and intentions, and make a judgment based on them. Many of us who are old enough opposed Bill and Hillary Clinton’s health care plan back in 1994 in the same way we oppose it now.   It wasn’t racism then, and it isn’t now.

But the racist Bill Maher looks at Van Jones and Obama and only sees the color of their skin.  His recent disgusting skit based around the Drudge Report abbreviating Negatives to Negs featured racist jokes that we haven’t seen the likes of since Al Jolson sang “Going to Heaven on a Mule“  — or at least since Ted Danson wore blackface to impress Whoopi.

And to complete the projection trifecta, Maher calls others liars, while lying himself.  He says that Obama should stand up for the “70% of Americans who aren’t crazy.”   Where does  that figure come from?  I haven’t seen 70% in any poll about anything.  Maybe Bill just pulled that out of –well, I’m sick of those asterisks — the place on his body that he wants President Obama to become.

You know what, Bill?  Maybe we’re not all stupid lying racists.  Maybe we just disagree.

And the time for asterisks has passed, Bill.

Maybe you’re the asshole.

Now that White House “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones has resigned, what’s next?

Inevitably, the American mainstream media – ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, et al – must be held to account for sitting on the sidelines as this major story kept building without them, went viral on YouTube, and then became so large that a key appointee of President Obama was forced to step down.

But with their decision to ignore the Jones story, they may have actually done Mr. Obama far more harm than good: Who vetted this guy? How did he get past the FBI? What did he say, and how did he answer the infamous seven-page questionnaire that all Obama appointees were required to fill out? Inquiring Freedom of Information Act minds want to know.

For most people in this country, the resignation was the first they had heard of Van Jones. For this sin of journalistic omission, there’s institutional media blame. Bias is too tame a word for the utter shamelessness on display: Only Republican scandals – real and imagined – matter.

And it’s not just those the Democratic-Media Complex dub as “mobs” or “tea baggers” that are taking notice. Diminishing audience and evaporating subscribership reflect widespread consumer dissatisfaction. Eventually, the money will run out.

But until then, the growing alternative media of Internet and talk radio and a burgeoning mass of justifiably angry Americans will make every effort to expose the sham that is mainstream journalism.

Obviously, it’s not that the Jones story wasn’t newsworthy. His racist rants, his radical background and his membership in a 9/11 “truther” group made for heavy-rotation YouTube viewing that would have immediately destroyed other mere mortals if the shoe were on the right – or white – foot.

Compounding the problem, the Jones narrative hurts Mr. Obama because it underlines how the mainstream media helped elect the president by glorifying him instead of vetting him.

Just as Mr. Obama was not even cursorily investigated, Van Jones, a fellow “community organizer,” was not given the slightest media attention when named as an unaccountable “czar” selected to oversee billions in taxpayer money for the ambiguous purpose of “green energy.” And that despite having a body of damning evidence that could be found with a single Google search by an ADHD-addled high-school journalism student.

You can read the column in full here.

Yep, according to the caller, “maybe she did something to Michael Jackson,” and “maybe she’s stepping down because something’s about to come out.”

Now, crazy people calling into radio shows isn’t anything special – I used to call Loveline ten to twenty times a night just to complain about the pixies living in my urinary tract. However, what’s hilarious, is Sharpton’s thoughtful response to the caller’s intriguing theory. He says, “All right, thank you for your call, Ashley. That’s interesting. I’ll put it out, we’ll see. I don’t know.”

“I’ll put it out. We’ll see. I don’t know.”

Nice.

Now, I said it’s hilarious, but it’s not surprising, for Sharpton has never met a conspiracy he didn’t embrace, and possibly grope. After all, he was the man who helped push the Tawana Brawley hoax – a fabricated tale of rape and feces perpetrated by a 15-year-old girl – used to racially bludgeon six white, innocent men.

But that was years ago, so who cares – right?

Any poopers – I love conspiracies because they are as inevitable as death. When an event occurs that can be easily explained (like, say, a reclusive pop star overdoses on pills), the demented emerge from the woodwork like lurid worms with complex explanations that defy logic and Pampers. Look at the Truthers, limping along under an impervious dome of self-inflicted idiocy, convinced that only they know the truth – when all they know really are twin beds, canned food purchased from the dented bin, and reusing their underwear on alternate days. You gotta love ‘em, for they’re pure comedy.

My last point: why is it that people who cling to conspiracies never put that much effort into the things that might benefit their actual lives? Like their schoolwork? Their jobs? Their hygiene?

I blame the Jews. Only they could create a complex framework that keeps so many destructive minds busy contemplating nothing.

TONIGHT‘S GUESTS ARE:

the wonderful Greg Proops

the delightful Remi Spencer

the intriguing Rick Folbaum!

the shocking Harold Ambler!

and PINCH AND ME, episode 2!

(Thank you Newsbusters for the tip on this story!)