"Vile" (to quote Chelsea Clinton) leftist comedienne Kathy Griffin is back, and she's not sorry for what she did.

Three months ago, Griffin posed for a photo holding what appeared to be the bloody severed head of President Donald Trump.  The photo went viral on May 30 via TMZ and caused a sensation.  The repulsive stunt was too much even for a lot of Griffin's left-wing fan base, which had become accustomed to and supportive of her long history of crude antics.  (On New Year's Eve 2012, for example, Griffin simulated performing oral sex on co-host Anderson Cooper during CNN's live Times Square ball-dropping coverage – video here.)

In June 2017, as a result of the Trump bloody severed head photo, Griffin was fired from her annual New Year's Eve co-hosting job at CNN, lost bookings for her live comedy act, was investigated by the Secret Service, and went from the belle of the ball to persona non grata – temporarily, as it turns out.

Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper, CNN, December 31, 2011.

A lot is at stake.  Griffin is reportedly one of America's most successful comics and recently paid $10.5 million for a 13,000-square-foot mansion in the elite Bel Air section of Los Angeles, next door to the property owned by Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.

After she tweeted a spontaneous tearful cell phone video apology the day after the bloody Trump photo went viral (the tweet and video were soon deleted), Griffin changed gears and, with the help of feminist lawyer Lisa Bloom, held a press conference attacking President Trump and playing the victim.  Since then, she has been keeping a low public profile.

Now, in a pitch for a full-blown second act, on the eve of a world tour (the "Laugh Your Head Off" tour), and with President Trump now perceived by her fan base as a Nazi sympathizer with declining popularity and mounting calls for his removal from office, Griffin, sensing vindication, is doubling down.  She's enlisted the help of magazine writer Yashar Ali to put her back into the marketable mainstream and the good graces of the American public.

Yashar Ali Hedayat.

Ali, in case anyone has forgotten, is the "journalist" whose 900-word article in the Huffington Post on August 4 – citing no sources and containing no quotes – managed to take down Fox News host Eric Bolling, based simply on vague allegations that Bolling had sexted a graphic photo of male genitalia to three female colleagues years earlier.  Four weeks later now, Bolling is still suspended from his FNC hosting duties and under internal investigation by a left-leaning law firm hired by Fox to investigate employees accused of sexual harassment.  Bolling's status in limbo was confirmed by a Fox News rep on August 25.  Odds are that he will never return to Fox News.  With Bolling's figurative scalp in his bag, Ali's role now appears to be a serious effort to resuscitate Griffin's career.

Kathy Griffin with Trump severed head.

Ali (full name Yashar Ali Hedayet) does his best in his 4,000-word NY Magazine article to represent Griffin's whining, I'm-a-victim point of view.  He claims that Griffin "reached out" to him long before the Trump photo controversy, looking for someone to discuss politics with.  (Ali uses the trendy term "reached out" six times in his article.)  Ali/Hedayet would know about leftist politics: not exactly an impartial journalist by trade, he has a background as a fundraiser and staffer for high-level Democrat politicians.  His article implies that he was present at Griffin's house one day before noon in "late June" (approximately June 21, according to my calculation), when she entered her home office still dressed in her pajamas after a late night and made a comment to Ali after reading several of President Trumps' recent tweets.

Why are people still expecting me to apologize and grovel to a man that tweets like this?" Griffin vented to me. "I'm a comedian; he's our [f------] president.

As of Wednesday, August 30, at 4 A.M. EDT, a search of "Kathy Griffin" using Google.com, with results limited to pages posted online during the previous 24 hours, returned more than 140 different news story references to Ali/Hedayat's NY Magazine article.

Peter Barry Chowka is a widely published author and journalist.  He writes most frequently these days for American Thinker.  His website is AltMedNews.net.  Follow Peter on Twitter.