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Roseanne getting what she deserves
letter to editor
Good riddance to Roseanne and hurray for ABC.
If you had any remaining doubts that this woman doesn’t belong in our living rooms, check out her barrage of tweets on Wednesday. Having insulted Valerie Jarrett once, she did it again on Wednesday, retweeting photos of Jarrett side by side with an ape. She also claiming she thought Jarrett was white. How dumb does she think we are? Roseanne Barr is a liar in addition to a racist.
And then there was Barr’s retweet of a doctored picture of Whoopi Goldberg seeming to opening her jacket to reveal a T-shirt with a cartoon of President Donald Trump shooting himself. The woman who was fired for tweeting — and got an entire team of talented actors, writers and producers fired in the process — couldn’t resist doing it all again. And saying that Ambien made her do it? No. Ambien can interfere with your driving, sense of direction, energy and all kinds of activities of daily life. But Ambien doesn’t turn you into a racist.
Shut up, Roseanne. No one is going to hire you ever again. Frankly, there is no reason for anyone to care what you tweet anymore. Go back in the hole of obscurity, where you belong.
In response to the insults, Valerie Jarrett said we need to make this a “teaching moment.” She also said that the tone is set from the top (or as the Greek expression goes, the fish rots from the head), and that President Trump has set a terrible tone. He has. I am old enough to remember the days when liberal Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill and conservative President Ronald Reagan liked each other, spent time together, set a tone of civility in the face of real and serious differences. We Democrats would work all day to “win” and then would have drinks with our Republican friends at night. I loved politics. It was a fair fight that mattered, not a personal vendetta.
This president does not want us to get along. He thrives on dividing us, attacking those he disagrees with, and, yes, lying without compunction. It is simply not possible that a man as smart as Donald Trump actually believes everything he says. He obviously doesn’t care. Dividing and conquering is not only how he won the presidency but also how he has governed as president. The former might be tolerated as political strategy. The latter is a disservice to our democracy.
Presumably, Barr thought that if the president could play these games, she could, too. He got elected. She worked for ABC. And if she thought her ratings put her in a special stratosphere, she was wrong. As Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney, made clear, the decision to fire Barr, notwithstanding her ratings, was easy. There was nothing else to do.
Of course there should be room on television for shows that depict conservative families who support Donald Trump. Frankly, I think it is important for some of my liberal friends to see that not everyone who supports the president is a fool or a freak or a racist. Because they aren’t.
But Roseanne Barr is all those things.
Someone else, who is not a liar, not a racist, not a walking talking stream of nastiness, needs to take up that mantle. I’ll make room in my living room any day for a show that does not reflect my political views, so long as a racist fool is not at the helm. Conservatives deserve a better spokesperson.

As for Barr, she got what she richly deserves.