Monday on The View, hosts Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg defended and downplayed two left-wing comedians who got into hot water this past week. After Kathy Griffin posed in a photo with a bloodied, severed head of the president, and then later played the victim after being called out for the egregious display, HBO Real Time host Bill Maher caused outrage after using the “N-word” during an interview with Senator Ben Sasse on his Friday show. Despite both cases receiving bipartisan backlash, the radically liberal hosts on The View actually defended both comedians’ actions.
Adamantly anti-Trump host Joy Behar led the charge in defending Maher’s word choice on Monday’s show. Behar rationalized, Maher was “one of the good guys,” in fighting the president so he deserved a pass:
JOY BEHAR: But Bill Maher is one of the good guys in this fight against Trump right now. I believe that he is anyway, and I feel like, you know, not to deflect from what he said because he already apologized, but Donald Trump and his people that ran his real estate agent, they actually practiced racism.
SUNNY HOSTIN: Yes, they did.
BEHAR: They discriminated against black people in housing. To me, that is a much more egregious sin than saying any kind of word. You know. To me.
Behar went on to bring Griffin into the equation, lamenting about the recent “assault on comedians” as “overkill.” Despite Griffin’s non-apology last week, Behar touted Griffin saying “she’s sorry” as reason for her critics to “get over it.”
Let's not lose perspective about comedians and words and things that comedians are saying because there seems to be this assault on comedians, and in the Kathy Griffin case, which I think you’re going to bring up, there is a lot of overkill going on right now. Okay. She made a mistake, she did something stupid. She said she’s sorry. Now they’re piling on her like she’s Charles Manson. Get over it!
Fellow host Whoopi Goldberg also downplayed Maher’s word choice, but for an entirely different reason. Whoopi argued that people should stop getting offended by the word because that was giving it “power:”
You cannot continue to give the word the power because if you do, it means that every time you hear it, you stop and that's what you are dealing with….The word exists and it was put out there to make you feel like less. I’m saying, let’s detooth that, make someone work harder and figure out another word that might stop me.
As for Griffin, Behar was less defensive of her last week after the photo came out, but was still empathetic, saying:
So, you know, the fallout is continuing, unfortunately, over Kathy Griffin's photo shoot with a replica of Trump's severed head. It's still in the news because CNN fired her. She used to do every New year's Eve with Anderson Cooper. She’s also lost some standup gigs and has been dropped by some sponsors...It’s rough, it’s rough on her.
However, later on Behar took a tougher stance, conceding that there was “something sacred and very wrong” about making a death threat against a sitting president.
