Making a Big Whoop(i)

Speaking of Whoopi Goldberg, the AP reports that the "comedy queen" and diet-shake pitch gal is mad as hell at being dropped by Slim-Fast faster than unwanted pounds on a sensible diet regimen. But like any true patriot, her tears are shed not for herself but for her country:

"While I can appreciate what the Slim-Fast people need to do in order to protect their business, I must also do what I need to do as an artist, as a writer and as an American—not to mention as a comic," Goldberg said in a statement Thursday. "It's unfortunate that, in this country, the two cannot mesh."…

"America's heart and soul is freedom of expression without fear of reprisal," she added. "In a time when candidate bashing has become the norm, be it on television, in speeches or Sunday morning programs, I find all this feigned indignation about 'Bush bashing' quite disingenuous.

Various news accounts have made it clear that Whoopi's offending remark equated George Bush with Whoopi's own nether regions (btw, when is the anti-prez crowd going to embrace the obvious slogan: LICK BUSH, DICK CHENEY?).

But does anyone have the actual text–or better yet, film footage–of Whoopi's vagina monologue? Sounds like a job in particular for The Memory Hole, or some other Web site that traffics in verboten or semi-secret artifacts.

Indeed, if the tape of what sounds like one of the entertaining shows put on at Radio City Music Hall since the debut of the movie version of 1776 doesn't start circulating, we'll have to pronounce the Internet, what with all its gatekeeper-avoiding, routing-around-censorship, aggregating-knowledge hype, a total failure. It was one thing to keep Earl Butz's dirty jokes secret back during the Ford years, but as Paris Hilton, Jack Ryan, and any number of other folks could tell you, we're living in a different world these days.

This much seems certain: Whoopi will perservere (how you feel about that may well end up becoming part of the MMPI). Her career withstood a series of cinematic neutron bombs (e.g., Jumping Jack Flash, Burglar, and The Telephone) and, after taking over the center square in The Hollywood Squares, the inevitably invidious comparisons to Paul Lynde. Like some sort of Japanese-monster-movie monster (?), she even emerged stronger than ever from her last big public faux pas–a Friar's Club Roast that effectively turned Ted Danson into a minstrel version of Mr. Norman Maine.