by Gary Bauer
A few weeks ago, Barbara Streisand fired off a memo to Senator Tom Daschle
with marching orders for congressional Democrats. She instructed Daschle
to fight harder to stop a war with Iraq.
Today, another Hollywood celebrity has offered his unsolicited advice.
Actor Sean Penn spent $56,000 to take out a full-page ad reprinting an
“open letter” to President Bush in the Washington Post. In it, Penn
berates Bush and writes, “Many of your actions to date and those proposed
seem to violate every defining principle of this country over which your
preside.” Penn warns the President to change course “before yours is a
legacy of shame and horror.”
A few days ago another Hollywood “artist,” Woody Harrelson, wrote an op-ed
for the left-wing Guardian in the United Kingdom entitled, “I'm an
American Tired of American Lies.” In it, the excitable Harrelson swallows
“hook, line, and sinker” Saddam Hussein's propaganda, charging that we
have killed a million Iraqis by denying Iraq humanitarian aid.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, the Streisands, Penns and
Harrelsons were uncharacteristically quiet. Perhaps they were restrained
by the photos of office workers leaping to their deaths, the corpses of
our fellow citizens being pulled from the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, the non-stop funerals, or the news of the heroic battle on the
plane in the sky over Pennsylvania.
But now they are in full throat again with the same pacifistic, defeatist
dribble and left-wing ranting that marks so much of the thinking and
speeches of our cultural “elites.” These people can never find a tyrant
in the world worthy of their scorn, except for the one they imagine in the
Oval Office.
They side with Iraq, where freedom of speech is non-existent, over America,
where they enjoy unlimited artistic freedom. They embrace socialism,
while growing rich beyond their dreams in capitalist America. They
lecture their President because he dared to use the word “evil” to
describe our enemies who seek to murder even more our countrymen. Yet
they and their ilk routinely use the tag “evil” to describe their own
country, our military and our history.
Every time one of our Hollywood celebrities speaks, it becomes clearer and
clearer that they do not represent America; that they share little – if
anything – in common with the “average” American. Ignore them! They are,
ultimately, “entertainers” with an overblown estimation of their own self-
importance. But, the really disturbing thing to remember is that our last
president actually listened to these people!
(This article courtesy of the Campaign for Working Families.)
