Earlier this month, Ellen DeGeneres attended a Dallas Cowboys game and made the mistake of being caught on camera looking not completely displeased to be seated next to George W. Bush. When the camera panned to the owner’s box, there she was, next to the former president, smiling and scrolling on her phone. Bush appears to have just made a joke. They could easily just be two strangers waiting for the bus together.
This being 2019, the age of abject insanity, it could not stand. She was immediately attacked on Twitter by the intolerant Left for her crime of proximity. Parker Molloy, an editor at Media Matters for America, highlighted their nearness and declared DeGeneres had made “a bold choice” to hang out with Bush, “a war criminal.”
The story might have ended there, but DeGeneres decided to do what few who face the Twitter mob can: stand up for herself. On her show, she looked into the camera and talked about how the kindness she preaches isn’t only for people who agree with her and that she has friends with whom she disagrees politically. The clip went viral on the Right because it was a beacon of sanity from the celebrity world that lacks it. The clip went viral on the Left because How. Dare. She.
What went unnoticed is that George W. Bush didn’t have to issue any statement about sitting next to DeGeneres. He’s allegedly the anti-gay hateful one, before the age of Mike Pence. Yet no conservative of any prominence had any issue with Bush palling around with a gay Hollywood liberal. It was only liberals who had a problem with the association and with her call for civility.
Actor David Cross, who acted opposite DeGeneres’ wife, Portia de Rossi, on the show Arrested Development, tweeted that the monologue was “weak, self-serving, dissmive [sic] and eye-opening.” Of these, “dismissive” makes most sense, as that’s the exact note to strike when you are berated for talking politely to the wrong person.
Ezra Marcus at Mic.com tied himself into knots going after DeGeneres in a piece headlined “Ellen DeGeneres’s friendship with George W. Bush is why people hate the rich.” That people hate the rich because they’re nice and polite was certainly news.
It’s not about Bush’s opinions, Marcus argued; it’s because of the actions he took as president. “DeGeneres framed her relationship with Bush around their ‘beliefs,’ but Bush isn’t unpopular because of his beliefs — he’s reviled because of the actions he took as the most powerful man in the world on the basis of those beliefs, like starting a war in Iraq over false premises that left a million people dead, covering up torture at the Abu Ghraib prison, mishandling Hurricane Katrina, and fighting against LGBTQ rights (including DeGeneres’ own right to marriage),” he said.
But then, Marcus notes he also had a problem with the way Donald Trump was treated like a regular person by Jimmy Fallon in the infamous hair-ruffling incident of 2016. Turns out it’s not actually about actions taken as president — Trump had yet to be elected when he appeared on Fallon’s Tonight Show — but that some people must be treated as pariahs because they are on the opposite side politically.
Marcus ends up arguing that television should stop being a fun escape from the real world. As crazy as that sounds, Marcus isn’t the only one to go there.
In a piece for Vanity Fair about the Ellen-Bush fracas, Laura Bradley writes, “Ellen has been a towering presence on the talk show scene for a reason; for millions of viewers across America, DeGeneres and her show’s sparkling set represent a sunny alternate reality — one in which everyone is fun and nice and happy to dance and play games. It’s a simulated apolitical utopia, one that seems to reflect DeGeneres’s belief that kindness is the most important virtue of all — one that should trump all else.”
Sounds horrible. A place that’s fun and everyone is kind is so out of step with our current political moment. We blame Trump for our fractious climate, but apparently the Left likes it this way. Time to take down the “No place for hate” signs because, well, there’s always for hating the right kind of people. A conservative friend from my hyperliberal neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, told me whenever she sees the “No place for hate” sign, she wants to Sharpie beneath it “(except Donald Trump)”.
But the Left keeps expanding the exception list. Trump’s red-hat-wearing supporters are certainly on it. Also any Republican who has ever agreed with Trump on anything.
But the Ellen moment reminds us: Just any Republican ever, really.
“Trump is different,” we’re told constantly, and that’s why the hysteria on the Left is dialed up to 11. But anyone with a passing memory of the George W. Bush years knows the reaction from the Left to Trump isn’t vastly different from the way they reacted to Bush. The Bush years were a cacophony of rage. Plenty of friendships ended when one party dared support Bush. “Bush = Hitler” signs were standard at anti-war marches. When Kanye West looked into the camera and said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” he was heralded as a brave hero. But when he wore a red “Make America Great Again” hat, he was branded insane. There are acceptable public opinions and unacceptable public opinions, and the line is as bright as when you tried to sit at the cool kids table while wearing the wrong outfit in middle school.
It’s not the first time someone got in trouble for liking GWB. When Michelle Obama and Bush were nuzzling in public and giggling over candy, Eve Peyser at Vice issued a reprimand that the “former commander-in-chief shouldn’t be reduced to an endearing celebrity grandpa because he is, in fact, one of the worst presidents in American history.”
What’s disturbing to the Left is that people genuinely like George W. Bush. They like him because he’s affable, fun, and, yes, kind.
During the 2000 campaign, Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra produced a documentary about Bush called Journeys with George. She received unprecedented access to the then-candidate for president during the campaign. Most believed she would produce a hit piece. Instead, he charmed her, and she received a barrage of criticism for saying nice things about him in public.
When Frank Bruni’s coverage of the Bush 2000 campaign wasn’t sufficiently hateful, outlets such as Salon accused him of winning the election for Bush. Oliver Stone was turned down by investors for his film W. who complained the film “made him a human being.”
But Bush is a human being and, by all accounts, a good one. People can keep being surprised as their political allies make this discovery or get over it and accept that, yes, people with political opinions opposite yours can still be good people.
This rigidness of the Left, that you’re simply not allowed to like certain people, is an extension of their policing of language and jokes and keeping each other in line. Conformity is key to being part of this in-crowd, and if you’re not in, you’re out. Maybe DeGeneres’ bravery in standing up to the bullies will lead to more independent thought. Or she’ll be cast out and have to sit with the misfits under the “No place for hate” sign.
Karol Markowicz is a columnist for the New York Post.
