The Press Is Using Sarah Huckabee Sanders As a Prop

Comedienne Michelle Wolf at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. This image was taken via a screenshot.

On Sunday, April 29, 2018, comedian Michelle Wolf received a backlash for her set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner the previous night. During a nearly 20-minute set, Wolf took aim at the Washington, D.C. crowd, which included politicians and the establishment press. Most of the complaints focused on what Wolf said about White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but that was a cover — and a lot of conservatives are going along with it because they want to score political points.

Let’s be honest here. Michelle Wolf went after a lot of people in her 19-minute set, including herself. All told, this is who she went after:

• Donald Trump and his campaign
• Hilton (“It’s not nice”)
• C-SPAN (“No one watches that”)
• The White House Correspondents’ Association (“The mung fish was fine”)
• Congress
• Roy Moore
• Reince Priebus
• Jake Tapper
• Hillary Clinton’s campaign
• Men who don’t pull out
• Harvey Weinstein
• Trump’s grown children (except Tiffany)
• Teachers
• Mike Pence
• Anderson Cooper
• Anti-abortionists
• Bear Stearns
• Al Franken
• Ted Kennedy
• Starbucks
• Mitch McConnell
• Paul Ryan
• Chris Christie
• The Republicans
• The Democrats
• Kellyanne Conway
• Scott Pruitt
• Anne Coulter
• CNN
• Fox News
• Sean Hannity
• MSNBC
• Rachel Maddow
• The press collectively
• The anti-immigrant crowd
• Flint, Michigan

Yet we are talking about one person and projecting things onto that comedy set. It says more about us and the press that’s pushing this narrative.

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The Joy Reid Controversy

April 2018 has been a busy month for news. There was a joint U.S.-U.K.-French strike on Syrian targets earlier in April, Sean Hannity was exposed, Bill Cosby got a rape conviction, the Democratic National Committee sued the Russian government (among others), and North Korea and South Korea announced that they were working on a peace deal. These are some stories I would like to visit, but today I would like to talk about something that, in the scheme of things, seems less significant: the Joy Reid controversy. However, there is an underlying theme here that is important.

Joy Ann Reid got called out for old blog posts she wrote in the past decade. Reid is currently in hot water because the homophobic posts she wrote in the early 2000s resurfaced a few months ago — but her charge about hackers has drawn more unwanted scrutiny and skepticism.

I Would Like to Have a Word with Fareed Zakaria

By World Economic Forum from Cologny, Switzerland [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Over the weekend, I came across a tweet from CNN. The tweet in question contains a video from Fareed Zakaria’s show.

"Liberals think they are tolerant, but often, they aren't," argues @FareedZakaria https://t.co/0urfK127Z3

— CNN (@CNN) May 28, 2017

Zakaria was criticized on Twitter, and rightfully so.

While Zakaria raised a few valid points, he ultimately discredited his own message.