Clooney: Hollywood Liberals Should Shut Up Already
Irish Examiner – Ocean’s Eleven star George Clooney is urging his fellow Hollywood stars to keep quiet when it comes to politics, because he fears celebrity endorsements could wreck their favourite candidates’ chances of victory.
Democrat Clooney and a number of screen stars have recently come under attack for voicing their political views.
And the actor, whose father Nick Clooney was recently defeated in his bid to be elected the congressional representative for Kentucky, has now vowed to be a lot more politically low-key.
He says: “My father ran for congress last year. I couldn’t campaign for him and I knew I couldn’t, because I’d hurt him. They tried to get me to get on the John Kerry train and I said: ‘We’ll hurt him. They’ll use us as ‘liberal’.’
You’d think that some of these celebrities would get the hint when every candidate they try to endorse is largely hurt by said endorsement. There’s a reason why the majority of Americans don’t like Hollywood-types weighing in on politics.. Its because Hollywood politicos are, largely, out of touch with reality and on the extreme fringe of politics. They seldom have anything of substance to say on an issue and seem interested in donning the mantel of “interested participant” more for the sake of looking intelligent than anything else.
A prime example of that is this quote from Clooney himself:
“Now, I would argue that (throughout) American history, it’s pretty hard to find a time when liberals were on the wrong side of an issue. We thought that the conservative view was: ‘Witches should be burned at the stake.’ Moderate view was: ‘Well, just in case,’ and the liberal view was: ‘There’s no such thing as witches.’
“We thought women should be able to vote and blacks should be allowed to sit at the front of the bus and Vietnam was wrong. We haven’t really been on a lot of wrong sides for us to be sort of used as this bad word.”
Of course, Clooney is forgetting that Abraham Lincoln (the father of the GOP himself) was the great emancipator who freed the slaves. He’s forgetting that Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was the first President to entertain both a black man (Booker T. Washington) and a black woman (the wife of some federal appointee who’s name I’m forgetting) at the White House. He’s forgetting that it was Republicans who pushed through the Civil Rights act in the face of filibustering Democrats (among them Al Gore’s father).
Which isn’t to say that the Republicans haven’t had their fair share of idiots among their ranks, but that Clooney would make such an idiotic and naive statement proves the point: Hollywood liberals just don’t know what they’re talking about.
