With pay? Without pay? Who cares? ABC finally decided to do something about Whoopi Goldberg and her embarrassingly idiotic take on the Holocaust and the Nazis. They sent her off for two weeks to stew about it, and perhaps see if the whole mess blows over in the meantime:

Whoopi Goldberg, the comedian and actress who is also a co-host of the ABC talk show “The View,” will be suspended for two weeks, the network announced Tuesday night, after she said repeatedly during an episode of the show that aired on Monday that the Holocaust was not about race, comments that come at a time of rising antisemitism globally. She later apologized. …

In a statement on Tuesday night, Kim Godwin, president of ABC News, said that Ms. Goldberg would be suspended for “her wrong and hurtful comments.”

“While Whoopi has apologized, I’ve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments,” she said. “The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities.”

Suspended for what? Being an idiot? They’ve kept Goldberg on the air for almost 15 years on The View despite the general idiocy and mean-girl aesthetic that permeates the show. (They don’t have a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of progressives to conservatives for nothing, after all.) It’s been a toxic stew since its conception, with original host Rosie O’Donnell sharing her insane “scientific” opinion on 9/11 and steel structures (for which she got fired). Practically everything that falls out of Joy Behar’s mouth is an absurdity, and the other co-hosts mostly declare whatever position is in progressive vogue at the moment. The environment is so demeaning to any heterodox position that the producers are finally having trouble finding a conservative woman willing to play the role of Christian in the Colosseum. If this show ever had a valid and uplifting purpose, it has long since dissipated.

However, that’s almost a separate issue. Goldberg gets paid to offer her opinions, and idiocy hasn’t been a bar to it up until now. This smells like cancel culture, punishing an opinionator for opining. If not that, it’s at least a kind of moral cowardice among ABC network execs who were willing to turn a blind eye to the bullying and vacuousness at The View until they themselves were personally offended by it. Now, suddenly, Goldberg has to get punished for stupidity, mainly because either (a) she pissed off the executives at the network personally, or (b) she’s being offered as a kind of sacrifice to deflect attention from the utter moral failure of The View. There’s no real option (c) here.

And now, of course, Goldberg will have her two weeks off the air, which even without pay will have nearly zero impact on her financially. The suspension will give ABC cover to proclaim that they Took This Very Seriously, and also that We Do Not Associate Ourselves With Her Views on, er, their own The View. They could have done that without the suspension, however. They could have just issued a statement slamming Goldberg for her ignorance, just like practically everyone else did, and the point would have been made just as well without the cancel-culture hypocrisy of a window-dressing “suspension.”

The real question here is why people bother to watch this toxic stew at all. Perhaps this spectacular intellectual and moral implosion will remind many of them that there are better ways to spend an hour. Just staring out the window at the weather for an hour would be less dangerous to the intellect. If there’s any canceling to take place here, let the viewers and the market do the canceling.