When the only thing that mattered was money “cancelled”Whoopi Goldberg almost lost her career in 2004 when she made a joke about network TV and subscriptions to print magazines.
The onstage rant was about George W. Bush and was delivered at a New York City fundraiser to support John Kerry, the then-Democratic presidential hopeful. It was not transcribed, but the joke was. DescriptionIn the lead of a New York Post Article the next day
“Whoopi Goldberg delivered an X-rated rant full of sexual innuendoes against President Bush last night at a Radio City gala that raised $7.5 million for the newly minted Democratic ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards,” Write Deborah Orin. “Waving a bottle of wine, she fired off a stream of vulgar sexual wordplays on Bush’s name in a riff about female genitalia, and boasted that she’d refused to let Team Kerry clear her material.”
This was enough for the Early Aughts’ morality police.
According to The New York Times Magazine “Goldberg’s career went dark. SlimFast, the diet-in-a-can brand for whom Goldberg had been the spokeswoman, dropped her. Friends stopped associating with her in public. She was disinvited from the Democratic National Convention.”
And for the next 18 years, the actual contents of the joke would remain in the dark – until now. The research was done for a recent interview by Goldberg. The magazine obtained a transcript.
Here it is:
“When Bush comes to shove, don’t whine. Vote Kerry. And that’s why I’m here tonight. Because I love bush. But someone’s giving bush a bad name. Someone has tarnished the name of bush. Someone has waged war, someone has deliberately misled the country, someone has attempted to amend the Constitution, all in the name of bush. The bush I know and cherish would never do such things. My bush is smarter than that. And if my bush is smarter than that, you can understand just how dumb I think that other bush is. Vote your heart and mind, and keep bush where it belongs.”
Goldberg, who has experienced her fair share of controversy as a host “The View” – including a recent suspension from the ABC show for her comments about the Holocaust – and elsewhere, it was a vindicating find.
“You know why they couldn’t print what I said?”NYTM was informed by Goldberg “Because I didn’t say anything that was bad.”
Whoopi! Welcome to 2022. The names have not changed.
