Comedian crossed line with her Trump attack

Our warning during last year’s presidential campaign about the coarsening of politics in this country is vividly illustrated with the recent disgusting attack on President Donald J. Trump by a fading comedian.

Kathy Griffin, whose claim to fame these days is as co-host of a New Year’s Eve television show, went too far – as she now admits – in posing with a fake bloody mask designed to look like the head of President Trump.

To be sure, Griffin was exercising her constitutional right as an American citizen to express herself freely, but Trump, members of his family and his supporters are also within their rights to verbally take her to task.

Indeed, Griffin is feeling the economic impact of her stupidity.

Several shows of “Kathy Griffin’s Celebrity Run-In” comedy tour have been scratched as venues across the country are distancing themselves from her, including New Jersey, New York, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.

The Community Arts Theater in Williamsport, Pa., announced that Griffin’s scheduled show had been canceled, while Squatty Potty said it was dropping her from its ad campaign.

But the crippling blow to her diminishing career was delivered by CNN when it fired her from its annual New Year’s Eve program. She had co-hosted the show with television newsman Anderson Cooper for a decade.

Griffin has only herself to blame for what she acknowledged last week could be the end of her career.

“I am going to be honest, he broke me,” the comedian said of Trump during a news conference with lawyer Lisa Bloom. “He broke me. And then I felt, ‘This isn’t right.’ This is not right. And I apologized because that was the right thing to do and I meant it.”

But she also sounded defiant in the face of the widespread criticism from even critics of the president:

“I’m not laying down for this guy.”

Photo shoot

She contended that the photo shoot was meant as a parody of Trump’s comments last summer about then Fox News host Megyn Kelly. Referring to his clash with Kelly during one of the presidential debates, he said, “ … blood was coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of wherever.”

But that comment was mild compared with the other incendiary statements candidate Trump made during last year’s campaign. He hurled insults at women, minorities, gays and even the disabled, and at campaign rallies encouraged supporters to confront his critics and reporters.

During the general election campaign, GOP presidential nominee Trump appeared to advocate violence against his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton. Here’s what he said: “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know. But, but I’ll tell you what. That will be a horrible day – if, if Hillary gets to put her judges in.”

That blast at Clinton brought to mind a similar statement from singer and conservative political activist Ted Nugent in August 2007 about Clinton and then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

According to published reports, Nugent, dressed in full-on camouflage hunting gear and wielding two machine guns, raged, “Obama, he’s a piece of [expletive]. I told him to suck on my machine gun. Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless [expletive].”

Nugent summed up his speech by screaming “Freedom!”

While candidate Trump’s win-at-all-costs campaign last year does not justify what comedian Griffin did, we do believe the president bears responsibility for the coarsening of politics in this country.

Remember the harsh comments he made about the appearance of Carly Fiorina, one of the candidates for the GOP nomination for president?

“Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?” he asked in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

In responding to comedian Griffin’s stunt, the president said members of his family, especially his 11-year-old son, were very upset. They had every reason to be – as did the families of all those he insulted last year.