If she’s guilty of anything, it’s of caring too much.

I joked yesterday that the defense of the “c*nt” jab at Ivanka Trump would end up mirroring that guy from “Forrest Gump”: “It’s just this war and that lying son of a bitch Johnson!” Well:

“You know, the thing is our show is steeped in passion,” Bee told the audience at the event, held at Neuehouse in Hollywood. “Every week I strive to show the world as I see it, unfiltered. Sometimes I should probably have a filter. I accept that. I take it seriously when I get it right and I do take responsibility when I get it wrong.”… “We spent the day wrestling with the repercussions of one bad word, when we all should have spent the day incensed that as a nation we are wrenching children from their parents and treating people legally seeking asylum as criminals,” she added. “If we are OK with that then really, who are we?” Bee continued by standing by the mission of her show: “I can tell you, as long as we have breath in our bodies and 21 minutes of airtime once a week, repeats on Saturdays, that we as a show will never stop shouting [about] the inhumanities of this world from the rooftops and striving to make it a better place. But in a comedy way.”

That would have been a better title for her show, or for any current late-night show: “Shouting About The Inhumanities Of The World, Plus Comedy.” She did apologize forthrightly on Twitter last night but the irony of her mea culpa, notes David Rutz, is that everything seems to have gone precisely according to plan during the show. There’s no reason to think Bee got caught up in the moment and went off-script; there’s certainly no reason to think her remark caught her audience off guard. In fact, he points out, TBS cut a separate 50-second clip of her spiel about Ivanka from her longer monologue and uploaded it to YouTube, just in case you didn’t want to sit through the seven minutes about separating illegal children from their parents that Bee claims to care so much about in order to get to “the good part.”

The show has since lost two advertisers, State Farm and Auto Trader, and TBS is scrambling to disappear all traces of the episode from the web:

TBS has taken down Wednesday’s “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” episode — yeah, the “feckless c–t” one — from both its homepage and YouTube. It is also no longer for sale on Amazon, iTunes or Vudu… When reached by TheWrap, a TBS rep told us that the March 30, 2018 episode will not be returning online in either an edited or unedited capacity. So, hope you DVR’d it!

Next week’s monologue will be savage, no doubt, minus any gratuitous C-bombs this time. The moral high ground, momentarily lost to the “deplorables,” must be reclaimed; the worldview of Bee and her audience depend on it. It’s a bad look for any woke warrior comic to show contrition towards the right, particularly towards Trump himself. I’m surprised she’s showed as much as she has already. Next week, in front of the crowd, she’ll make it up to them by doubling down on angry defiance. She has no choice now that Trump himself is dunking on her:

Why aren’t they firing no talent Samantha Bee for the horrible language used on her low ratings show? A total double standard but that’s O.K., we are Winning, and will be doing so for a long time to come! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 1, 2018

She’ll probably fire back next week with an extended tu quoque about the many crass things Trump or his buddies have said — there’s no shortage — but it’d be more edifying to explain why it’s terrible for the president to be leaning on private entities to fire employees who have displeased him. We’ll see if she goes for the low- or high-hanging fruit.