DISTRACTING FROM THE REAL ISSUES

I understand most of my friends appreciation for and defending of Michelle Wolf's comments about Trump's Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the White House Correspondents gig by pointing out how much Sanders and the administration she was representing on the dais that night deserve to be called out for her/their lies etc...

...yet listening that night in real time I was happy Wolf called out the media for creating and profiting on Trump's candidacy and presidency, but when she said about Sanders that "she burns facts" my old post-op brain heard "fat" and then when she very poetically said Sanders uses "the ash" to create "smokey eyes" again my old post-op brain thought she was just doing what so many memes I see on the Internet have been doing since Sanders moved into her job, i.e. making fun of her looks...

Wolf made so many good political points that when I heard the Sanders remark my lifetime of political experience immediately registered that all those great points she made would now be ignored, or diminished to footnotes, while the media—and thus most folks—focused on what sounded like personal insults about a woman's appearance...

...I know I know what Wolf did was much more than that, and some would say not that at all, but Wolf is too smart to not know she was riffing on "burning fat" and cleverly replacing "fat" with "facts" to not realize that that would be the focus of the media covering the event and reacting to it in the days afterward...

...if I were someone working to create even more division on the anti-Trump side, and bolster the pro-Trump side even more, I would create a distraction from the real issues (i.e. the actions this administration is taking to create mistrust and confusion about our democratic institutions and to undo the checks and balances on executive power and any progress made in the last hundred years by the non-wealthy), I would have had Wolf make those comments....

...because now once again social and other media are focusing on the distraction of a comic writer's comments and not on the issues she otherwise raised, like the media's complicity in creating and sustaining the autocrat unraveling our democracy...