Never let it be said that Democrats cannot be portrayed as
playthings of the wealthy when there's "soft money" on the line. Barbra
Streisand headlined a $6 million benefit on Sept. 29 for the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee, and Dick Gephardt was all smiles, even
though Barbra sent him a memo spelling his name "Gebhardt."
"Eat your heart out," glamour-stricken Gephardt said to
Republicans at the Hollywood gala. "I get faxes from Barbra Streisand. They
get faxes from Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson." The fax from the diva's
radical political guru, Marge Tabankin, complained that Democrats take too
much GOP criticism lying down. They composed the memo after getting "very
emotional" watching Tom Daschle's Senate floor brouhaha about Bush's
supposedly "outrageous" remarks allegedly about Democrats being soft on
national security.
Democratic resistance to war on Iraq is bringing back the party
to its natural Hollywood belief system: amorphously pacifist and uniformly
American-loathing. Back in the 1980s, Streisand and Tabankin were running
the Hollywood Women's Political Committee, whose statement of principles
called for "the immediate dismantling of the global nuclear war machine."
For them there was no moral difference between the United States and the
Soviet Union, except the Soviet Union wasn't accused of "dismantling the
social agenda."
In the eyes of radical leftists like Streisand, the focus on
Saddam Hussein is a transparent attempt to manipulate the elections: "I find
bringing the country to the brink of war unilaterally five weeks before an
election frightening." It's all a scam to enrich Republican donors, I
suppose. Worse, it's a prelude to Bush dictatorship.
Barbra told her audience: "Shortly after George W. Bush was
elected, sort of, I saw him on television say, 'If this were a dictatorship,
it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.' And
he laughed. You know, people never really joke. That was very revealing. A
taste of things to come."
Isn't it amazing that Democrats spent two years maligning George
W. Bush for having too little experience and too little intellect, and now
that he's president, congressional leaders are lauding their faxes from
"advisers" whose qualifications for office include starring in "Hello Dolly"
and "The Prince of Tides"? Al Gore can't give a speech on Iraq without his
camp actually boasting to reporters that among their advisors was Rob
Reiner, which launched Charles Krauthammer's priceless gibe that while Bush
was advised by Cheney, Powell, Rice and Rumsfeld, Gore was "huddling with
Meathead."
They ridiculed Ronald Reagan as nothing but an actor, but now
actors are at the top of their policy elite.
First, but as opposed to Ronald Reagan, these Hollywood stars
are often political dilettantes, embarrassing faux-intellectuals who aren't
fit to polish Dan Quayle's bookcases. Not only did Streisand misspell
Gephardt's name, she also fell victim to an Internet hoax, quoting a
hotheaded denunciation of dangerous wartime leaders as the work of William
Shakespeare, when a few minutes of checking might have prevented the gaffe.
Compared to these stars, the Democratic Party is conservative.
Ed Asner recently appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" to say Bush was
"desecrating" America and creating an "imperialist government." Just weeks
ago, Asner and other celebrities signed an ad in the New York Times calling
on people to "resist the war and repression that has been loosed on the
world by the Bush administration." The ad compared September 11 to "similar
scenes in Baghdad, Panama City, and a generation ago, Vietnam."
Back in the 1980s, Asner was calling on Congress to impeach
Reagan for resisting the charms of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Asner was
there for the "victory" party in 1990 and ended up "flabbergasted" when the
communist dictators were thrown out like trash. Somehow this again was all
America's fault: "The people of Nicaragua had a 600-pound gorilla on their
backs for 10 years, and they decided they didn't want a hernia."
They used to call them "Blame America First" liberals. But these
leftist celebrities are beyond that. They are America-haters. It was one
thing to resist America when America threatened their pals like Daniel
Ortega or Fidel Castro. But why would anyone calling themselves
"progressive" stand against the disarmament of Saddam Hussein? The only
reason is the compelling belief that America is not a force for good in the
world, not a noble actor, not a just enterprise. America is a ruthless
cowboy ruining the planet.
Republicans should be salivating, praying for evermore coverage
and more examples of the Hollywood left dragging the Democratic Party back
to its Reagan-era home, when every weapons system was a monstrosity, and
national defense was an industrial plot to prevent inner-city children from
getting fed. Barbra Streisand raised a cool million in 1984 for Walter
Mondale, too. Remember how much good that did?
