The beard is back. Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson, whose controversial comments about homosexuality gave way to a national uproar far out of proportion with the actual popularity of his television show, is coming back on the air.

A&E announced on Friday that Robertson would be reinstated. His suspension resulted from comments made in an interview with GQ in which Robertson let his homophobic imagination run wild, infamously saying: "Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men," among other equally offensive and logically questionable comments.

Shortly after the anti-gay comments made waves, reporters started actually reading the GQ interview and realized that Robertson's statements on race were, if anything, even more offensive. The Atlantic highlighted this choice quote as an example:

"I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash. We're going across the field ... They're singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, 'I tell you what: These doggone white people' -- not a word! ... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues."

That's right. Phil Robertson literally thinks that no black people in the Jim Crow south sang the blues.

Advocacy groups like GLAAD were predictably outraged (or at least pretend-outraged) and conservative groups and pundits were equally predictably outraged (or at least pretend-outraged) at the outrage (or pretend outrage). It's confusing to sort out the genuine hurt from the grandstanding, but in the end the money won out.

As the LA Times reports, ""Duck Dynasty" is a pivotal piece in the A&E business machine." For example, the show's fourth season premiere "attracted almost 12 million viewers ... making it the most-watched nonfiction broadcast ever on cable TV."

And so the spectacle around the spectacle goes on, churning through controversy and giving us a corporate wrist-slap heard 'round the world.

If there's one thing we can learn from this, it's the power of a well-controlled media-storm. Duck Dynasty is back and more visible than ever. Robertson has become a household name and Duck Dynasty got millions of dollars of free publicity.