5 Other Times Hollywood Let Right-Wingers Feel Funny

It’s Not Just Spicer at the Emmy’s, folks

The pagan fall equinox festival of self aggrandizement known as the Emmys happened last night and people are mad. No, not because your nerdy friend is unnecessarily angry that “Westworld and Stranger Things Lost Big.” Not because Difficult People didn’t win all the awards, which is the real reason why people should be rioting in the streets, because that show is fucking great.

No, we had a capital P Political moment at this year’s Emmys when Sean Spicer, now ex-press secretary for Donald Trump, came out as a goof on his notoriously prickly demeanor during press conferences. What comedy. Part of me thinks that people were disappointed Melissa McCarthy didn’t come out, as that’s the enjoyable version of Spicer.

The indiscriminately useless Chris Cillizza, who must see the writing on the wall, came out hard against the bit, saying “Hollywood enabled Sean Spicer and it’s not funny.” Apparently to media establishment figures like Cillizza, whose old masthead at The Fix for the Washington Post was essentially a celebrity gossip magazine for people who know what CBO scoring is, embracing a figure like Spicer is the point at which he can say enough is enough.

Hilariously, Cillizza is fixated on the “first lie” of Spicer’s, that the crowd at the Trump inauguration was “the biggest crowd for an inauguration ever.” To Cillizza, this was Spicer and Trump betraying the trust of reporters and citizens. Nevermind the mountain of lies that happened in the run up to the Iraq war said by not just Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer, but also from figures like Colin Powell and Dubya himself. To Cillizza, this is the original sin of our era.

For now, we’ll let bygones be bygones. This revelation from Cillizza follows a common pattern in Trump’s America. Due to abject horror of neo-nationalist conservatism, commentators and citizens alike are becoming aware, slowly but surely, of the insidious nature of right-wing politicos in media and culture. I, for one, welcome their awakening, late or not.