Usually, Hollywood stars are better not seen or heard at all outside of their movies. I don’t care to hear my plumber tell me how Dubya Chimpy BusHitlerHalliburton fucked up the war, and I don’t care to hear some air-headed Hollywood starlet expound on the economy.
So, to be consistent, whether they support the war or deplore it in the most ignorant and irrational form.
However, it is refreshing to see and hear someone buck the trite and true trend of kissing the Hollywood establishment liberal asses of Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks and Steven Schpielberg.
Its happening with frightful rapidity lately, with playwrights and screenwriters David Mamet explaining why he is no longer a brain-dead liberal.
And there’s Tom Stoppard, repulsed as children of privilege piss all over the country that gave them freedom to be assholes, as the newest apostates against the loony left.
These brave souls join such stalwarts as Dennis Miller, Roger Simon and Ron Silver (I’m not claiming Steven Baldwin, busying himself with trying to restrict pr0n, sorry Steve, you’re on your own.)
When we last heard from Angelina, she was yammering about how much the Iraqi Freedom effort cost, and irrelevantly yakkin’ about what else the cost of the war would buy:
Hollywood star Angelina Jolie called for the world to get its “priorities in order” Wednesday, saying that the amount of money spent in Iraq in just a few hours could educate thousands of children.
“To put things into perspective and maybe help to understand why we maybe need to adjust the way we’re doing things in the world, the conflict in Iraq has displaced over four million people,” Jolie told reporters in New York.
She said an appeal by UNICEF, the UN’s fund for children, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to address the educational needs of many of those children was dwarfed by the cost of US military spending in Iraq.
“The entire appeal equals about eight hours of current spending in Iraq. So just a few hours would send 150,000 children to school,” she said.
“Nothing wins more hearts and minds and nothing gives more freedom than education and nothing is a better deterrent for conflict than an educated child,” she added, urging the world to get its “priorities in order.”
Well, Jolie seems to have gotten her priorities in order, much to the chagrin of the leftwingnuts:
Actress and humanitarian activist Angelina Jolie said Thursday that the reinforcement of U.S. troops in Iraq has created an opportunity for humanitarian programs to boost assistance for Iraqi refugees.
In an op-ed piece published by the Washington Post, titled “A Reason to Stay in Iraq,” Jolie details the plight of refugees and says their conditions have not improved since she visited the country last August to urge governments to provide more support.
Related StoriesJolie, who has been a U.N. goodwill ambassador since 2001, was in Baghdad earlier this month to again highlight the refugee problem. She talked with Gen. David Petraeus, the American military commander in Iraq, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the U.S. Embassy said.
Petraeus “told me he would support new efforts to address the humanitarian crisis” as much as possible, “which leaves me hopeful that more progress can be made,” the actress wrote.
She said she stressed to Iraqi officials there must be a coherent plan for helping some 2 million Iraqis who are taking advantage of the downturn in violence to begin trickling back to abandoned homes from havens elsewhere in the country. A similar number fled Iraq to escape the bloodshed.
“It will be quite a while before Iraq is ready to absorb more than 4 million refugees and displaced people,” Jolie wrote. “But it is not too early to start working on solutions.”
The actress, who works on behalf of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, urged America’s presidential candidates and congressional leaders to step up financing for aid to displaced Iraqis. UNHCR has asked for $261 million this year “less than the U.S. spends each day to fight the war in Iraq,” she wrote.
Addressing the question of whether the “troop surge” has worked, Jolie said that “I can only state what I witnessed.”
“When I asked the troops if they wanted to go home as soon as possible, they said that they miss home but feel invested in Iraq,” she wrote. “They have lost many friends and want to be a part of the humanitarian progress they now feel is possible.”
And of course since anyone who would dare defend the President or the War for Iraqi Freedom must be mentally insane, ABC balances this with a hit piece on Jolie:
There have been many smear campaigns since the news media first got wind that the Bush administration was contemplating an invasion of Iraq. But I never thought I would see an American news organization stoop this low to go after an American who had gained worldwide respect for humanitarian work.
The ABC News smear is so cowardly and creepy it’s as if they turned to their network’s soap opera, Desperate Housewives, for tactical guidance on mounting this hit job:
“Is Angelina Driven to Be a Compulsive Mother? Need for Babies Can Signal Depression or Even Manipulation, Experts Say”
ABC was not content to insinuate that Jolie was mentally unstable; they also tossed in mention of every lurid detail from her past they could think of.
The report did mention in passing that Jolie “has been universally hailed for her humanitarian work” — although it studiously avoided noting that she is a Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
ABC also neglected to mention that they knew Jolie had written an editorial for The Washington Post in which she advised against the US abandoning Iraq — and that given her standing at the United Nations, her opinion would be seriously considered at the UN, and in Washington and other world capitals.
The ABC report also neglected to mention something else: They’d known since at least as early as the CNN February 7 interview with Jolie that her latest fact-finding trip to Iraq included talking with US officials about the need to provide enough security to help Iraq’s 2.2 million internally displaced persons resettle in their homeland.
In other words, ABC had plenty of time to cook up a hit. Then they waited to see how far Jolie could take her plea; when they learned it was taken to one of the most influential newspapers in the world they threw shit at her, and without explaining to their audience why they did it.
I don’t want to hear that ABC was only doing a tabloid piece, on the argument that the report came out the day before the Post published Jolie’s editorial. ABC would have known from their contacts at the Post about the editorial.
Like blacks, women, gays, minorities in general, any celebutard who dares to break ranks and challenge liberal leftist orthodoxy will be smeared and marginalized.
David Mamet is probably in for the same treatment due to his op-ed this week detailing the vapidity, emptiness and general uselessness of the leftist America-hating ideology.
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.”
This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.
But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.
And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
Dave, Angie, get ready to join the ranks of Ron Silver, Dennis Miller as outcasts and pariahs, the same as Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne were in their day.
Either yer with ’em or your agin them, and if yer agin ’em, yer not only wrong, you’re insane and an evil person.
More of what Angie does best:
