I'm With Kathy Griffin on the Sarah Huckabee Sanders Issue Now?

I do not want to, but I must, because newsmakers spent all day tweeting about this, now ask:

What is the role of a comedian in this fraught political landscape?

Yuck, let’s get this over with because it’s a thing now:

At last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, hired roaster Michelle Wolf referenced Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s appearance in two comments designed to call out Sanders’s abuse of her post, which is to communicate information to the press rather than defend lies and slurs. Wolf called Sanders’s smokey eye shadow the product of “burned facts” and said “I love you as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid’s Tale”–a reference to a character who drills the propaganda of the new world order into her abductees. It’s not funny because Sanders and Aunt Lydia look similar (they don’t, really), but because Sanders also gaslights us through a living dystopian nightmare, in defending slurs as “not slurs” and making is sound as though Trump is helping Puerto Rico recover while people are still dying and using classic GOP misdirection on gun control and spinning Trump’s hatred of immigrants as concern for women.

A handful of White House correspondents concluded that Wolf was calling Sanders ugly, undermining the dignity of her post as White House roastmaster, a stance which feels like we’ve gone off the rails and all the way around the world and back again on this insane Trump train:

For sure, cheaper jokes have been made about Huckabee’s appearance by Saturday Night Live, constantly; Chelsea Handler’s writer Fortune Feimster; David Horsey of the Los Angeles Times; and Jim Carrey, arguably, but this was not that. Kathy Griffin weighed in with a lengthy thread, the gist of which was that 1) a comedian’s role is to take power to task, 2) Sanders was sitting at the dais in lieu of the President of the United States and 3) why are you guys looking over there when Trump has never apologized for all the pig-slut-vaginaface comments to which we are so accustomed?

More time and energy has been poured into this today than Trump calling Paralympians hard to watch yesterday, meaning that athletes such as veterans who’ve lost their limbs fighting our wars physically repulse him with their appearance.

And then Eric Trump either liked the Sanders remarks or fully misunderstands Twitter: