As we noted on Tuesday, Chelsea Handler has metamorphosed from clown into political pundit. Well, actually, she has become a political pundit while remaining every bit a clown. October saw the end of her snooze-worthy series, Chelsea, in which she conducted endless wonky interviews with the scintillating likes of David Axelrod and Gavin Newsome. That show was a deadly dull exercise in political shop talk, but after it was canceled, Chelsea, instead of trying to find her funny bone again, announced that she would be setting her show business career aside for the nonce and instead focus on political activism. “Like so many across the country,” she tweeted, “the past presidential election and the countless events that have unfolded since have galvanized me.”
Only days later, she showed just how knowledgeable she was about politics with a tweet about Dana Rohrabacher, a member of Congress whose district centers on Huntington Beach, California. “So, Republican rep. Dana Rohrabacher from California is was the original person who received info from Russia, because she works w/ them,” wrote Chelsea. Savvy! Just one problem: Dana Rohrabacher, as tens of millions of Americans know, is not a “she” but a “he.” “Her stupidity knows no bounds,” marveled one fellow denizen of the Twitterverse.
This was far from Chelsea’s first show of idiocy since her foray into politics. In the last weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, she sent out several tweets mocking Melania Trump’s English. On October 28: “Trump said Melania will give two or three more speeches….Hopefully an interpreter will be present.” November 5: “Tim Kaine delivered a speech entirely in Spanish. Still easier to understand than Melania.” After Trump’s election, Chelsea said she wouldn’t invite the First Lady on her show for an interview because “she can barely speak English.” As many observers noted at the time, Mrs. Trump speaks five languages; Chelsea, in her previous incarnation as a comedian, admitted more than once to being monolingual.
Even the left is embarrassed by her. On August 11, the Daily Beast ran a piece headlined “Chelsea Handler’s Twitter Feed Has Officially Gone Off the Rails.” In it, Matt Wilstein cited a couple of Chelsea’s recent tweets. In one, she called for a U.S. military coup (“To all the generals surrounding our idiot-in-chief…the longer U wait to remove him, the longer UR name will appear negatively in history”); in another, she called for limits on the First Amendment (“2 Chinese guys were arrested in Berlin for making nazi salutes. Wouldn’t it be nice 2 have laws here for people who think racism is funny?”). As one person tweeted in response to her attack on free speech: “If we start arresting people for disgusting opinions you better call your lawyer.”
In other tweets, she’s blamed the GOP for California’s rampant wildfires and for last November’s church massacre in Sutherland Springs, Texas. (Of course, California wildfires and church shootings took place under Obama, too.) Despite her proclaimed feminism, she’s repeatedly made fun of the physical appearance of White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders. And notwithstanding her boasts of being pro-gay, she hasn’t been above “accusing” political opponents of homosexuality. Earlier this month, when she was displeased by a certain senator’s comments at a White House meeting, Chelsea wrote an obscene tweet suggesting that the only reason he could be so civil to President Trump must be that somebody in the Executive Branch has a gay porn video of him. The tweet, founded on a widespread rumor that the senator in question is gay, occasioned widespread criticism. “Keep being a voice for the Democrats while you use homosexuality as an insult,” one reader commented. Another wrote: “If a Republican said something like this, they’d be burning down the RNC.”
Chelsea Handler is an idiot, but for the far left, she’s a highly useful idiot, with 8.5 million Twitter followers who’ve hung in there with her despite the disastrous failure of her Netflix show. Let’s hope, for the sake of comedy and the Republic, that she gets tired of politics ASAP and returns to making people laugh on purpose.