Kanye West versus Pete Davidson: Who Wins the Battle?

I wonder how America feels about Pete Davidson’s Kanye West rant during Saturday Night Live this past weekend?  I’m a strong proponent in that everyone has the right to their own opinions.  The rest of the world doesn’t have to agree with them.  In this case, I don’t necessarily agree with what Kanye said or did the previous week on SNL, but does that give Davidson the right to call him out the way he did?  I think the answer to that is yes.  Why?  That’s what a healthy political spectrum looks like.  What this is going to do is help drum up votes.  Maybe it’s too late to register to vote where you live, but the fact that two celebrities are battling it out in the public eye is only good for politics.

It’s just like when two rappers challenge each other to see who will have the best album sales.  What does that do for both their albums?  Usually, it boosts them, regardless.  Because fans will back their favorite celebrity.  And I think that happens in this case as well.  The difference is that it’s hard to draw a straight line down the middle.  Can you support a celebrity if you don’t believe in what they’re saying?

Let’s get back to the Kanye/Davidson beef for a moment.  During this past weekend’s edition of “Weekend Update”, Pete Davidson was brought out to talk about Kanye West.  Davidson indicated that he felt someone should have bullied West into not wearing the hat.  In a self-deprecating move, he indicated that he wished someone had bullied him into not wearing a purple bucket hat that he was photographed in with Ariana Grande.  But he didn’t stop there.

“What Kanye said after we went off the air last week was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen while working here.  You know how wrong about politics you have to be for me to notice?”

Where he might have started to cross the line is when he started attacking West for his mental health issues – suggesting that West should get back onto his medicine.  “Being mentally ill is not an excuse to act like a jack***. I’m quoting my therapist, my mom, and my mailman.”  Again, this is self-deprecating, but it does seem like a low blow.  If the shoe was on the other foot, we wouldn’t see someone mocking a Democratic supporter for their mental health issues. At the end of his rant, he put a red hat on that said: “Make Kanye 2006 Again”.

But as I said earlier, this livens up the political arena and it honestly helps other people to see your side on the issues.  Am I saying that Democrats are right all of the time?  Absolutely not.  They seem to be the lesser of the two evils at the moment.  I took a course in college on electoral forecasting.  My professor used to always say the phrase “the devil you know”.  Meaning, you’re more likely to pick a returning candidate, even if they’re bad.  Why?  Because at least you know what you’re going to get.  When it comes to a new candidate, there’s no way of really knowing what they will be like.  That’s what we have with Donald Trump.  We don’t really know what he’s doing or what he’s going to do.. so, going back to comfortable isn’t a bad idea.

That said, we are knee deep into these television beefs and they’re only going to heat up the closer that we get to the mid-term elections.  Depending on how that turns out, it could get better or it could get worse.  I think celebrity feuds (in this sense) makes things more interesting, to say the least.