TBS’s resident radical leftist Samantha Bee made an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday to speak with her friend/host Jake Tapper about her “alternative” White House Correspondents Dinner.
During their discussion, Tapper dredged up a New York Times opinion piece from September 2016 warning Hillary Clinton of her “Samantha Bee problem.” The column noted that not only Bee is the problem but all stuck up liberals as well. Bee laughed and denied such a problem existed.
“Oh my God, my name was in an article. It’s me! It’s not racism, it’s just me,” she quipped, targeting President Trump’s base. “You know what? I’ll just wait—I’ll wait for all that evidence roll in and then I’ll— then I’ll make up my mind after that.”
After Bee and Tapper joked around about her negative influence, he asked: “Does he have a point about smug liberals? I'm not talking about you. But is there a smug liberal problem?” “I just can't take responsibility for the way the election turned out,” she responded before denying that such a problem played a role in 2016.
When it came to creating her show Full Frontal, she declared that:
I do the show for me and for people like me and I don't care how the rest of the world sees it quite frankly. That's great. We make a show for ourselves. We put it out to the world. We birth it and the world receives it how they want to receive it.
Tapper didn’t push back at all. His only response was: “fair enough.” This could possibly be explained as their friendship getting in the way. Bee did grace Tapper by bestowing upon him her “Thunder C**t” award during one Full Frontal episode. She even joked that the Democrats should run Tapper himself as their celebrity candidate in 2020. Tapper declined, citing a lack of celebrity.
Of course, Bee and the Democratic Party have a smug liberal problem and there's more than enough evidence just in Bee’s show that Tapper could have called her out on.
She once went on a long winded diatribe viciously attacking and smearing evangelicals and asserted that they thought “black people are icky.” “It was good old white nativism and antigovernment anger when the IRS challenged evangelicals’ God-given right to go to school without black people,” she also claimed in that episode.
In a more recent episode, she targeted and ridiculed a young conservative who was attending CPAC for having “Nazi hair.” It was not until after it was learned that the young man was suffering from stage four brain cancer did she apologize. She had also prayed to God that the NRA would be plagued with boils.
But remember, this is the same person who told Tapper that she aims to be funny and not an activist. “We always lean in the direction of funny,” she told Tapper during his show, “When you're doing topical comedy like this you really are walking a razor’s edge and you don't want to drop over into the activism side of things too often.”
The evidence of the “smug liberal problem” that Bee wanted to see has already been collected in the form of the 2016 election. By looking at how counties voted, we see that the largest concentrations of support for Clinton were in the liberal cities and other urban areas while the forgotten ‘fly-over country’ strongly supported Trump. This resulted in three so-called Democratic “stronghold” states going to Trump.
Transcript below:
CNN
State of the Union
April 30, 2017
9:20:30 AM EasternSAMANTHA BEE: We always lean-- we always lean in the direction of funny. You really are walking-- When you're doing topical comedy like this you really are walking a razor’s edge and you don't want to drop over into the activism side of things too often. You don't really want to do that at all. So we always err on the side of comedy and hope that everything works out.
JAKE TAPPER: Although you know and you commented on this last night obliquely, you have been cited as part of—not part of the reason why Hillary lost, but part of the problem. Part of the liberal America’s problem.
Ross Douthat wrote this column: “Hillary Clinton's Samantha Bee Problem”
BEE: No! So flattering.
TAPPER: I didn't know that there was a Samantha Bee problem, but let me read part of it to you. The Democratic Party’s problem in the age of Trump isn't Jimmy Fallon…” who you had criticized, and others have criticized for being too soft on Trump, “it's problem is Samantha Bee. Not Bee alone, of course, but the entire phenomenon that she embodies: the rapid colonization of new cultural territory by an ascendant social liberalism.”
First, what is your response? Second of all, how does it feel you know to be the face of the problem?
BEE: [Laughter] Oh my God, my name was in an article. It’s me! It’s not racism, it’s just me. You know what? I’ll just wait—I’ll wait for all that evidence roll in and then I’ll— then I’ll make up my mind after that.
…
TAPPER: Let me ask you a question. Does he have a large – and you have addressed this on your show. So remove yourself from it. Does he have a point about smug liberals? I'm not talking about you. But is there a smug liberal problem?
BEE: You know, that is something that I can't really – I mean, I just can't take responsibility for the way the election turned out. I just absolutely don't -- I can't. Is there a smug liberal problem?
TAPPER: You told her not to go to Wisconsin.
BEE: I guess I’m-- I don't think there is. I do the show for me and for people like me and I don't care how the rest of the world sees it quite frankly. That's great. We make a show for ourselves. We put it out to the world. We birth it and the world receives it how they want to receive it.
TAPPER: Fair enough.
