OPINION:
Mika Brzezinski of “Morning Joe” fame made a tasteless joke about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as possibly a “wanna dictator’s butt-boy” during an MSNBC segment with Sen. Dick Durbin.
And much as she apologized, fact is: If Brzezinski were named, say, Tucker Carlson, or Sean Hannity, or Laura Ingraham, today’s mainstream media would be filled with expressions of outrage.
David Hogg would be calling for boycotts and firings.
Joy Behar would be tit-tittering away and slamming the oh-so-despicable deplorables of Fox News.
But this is MSNBC and this is Brzezinski, and after all, she has apologized — so free pass it is. Right?
“I understand that Donald Trump doesn’t care,” Brzezinski said, during her televised reaction to Pompeo’s earlier interview on Fox & Friends about the France terror attack, the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi and other matters. “But why doesn’t Mike Pompeo care right now? Are the pathetic deflections that we just heard when we appeared on ’Fox & Friends,’ is that a patriot speaking, or a wannabe dictator’s butt-boy? I’m dead serious. I’m asking, are these the words of a patriot?”
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In any other world, that’d be called homophobic or, at the least, over-the-top disrespectful, uncalled for, crass. Brzezinski apologized on Twitter, saying she used a “SUPER BAD choice of words” and that she instead should have gone with “water boy” to describe Pompeo.
Well and good. She should apologize.
Richard Grenell, the openly gay U.S. ambassador to Germany, responded to her tweet with one of his own: “accepting apologies is important. We all fail. But I don’t see that you’ve actually apologized to gays? Your words demean, mock and therefore try to control whole groups by minimizing our humanity.”
If only Brzezinski were a conservative working for Fox and Grenell a liberal working for a Democratic administration.
Then maybe the left would know what to do.
As it is, the left’s silence — the fact that a David Hogg-type hasn’t surfaced to demand a boycott — only shows the left’s hypocrisy.
A Brzezinski by a different name, by a different political party, by a different cable employer, just wouldn’t be employed this morning.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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