Hollywood Hypocrites: The Devastating Truth About Obama’s
Backers
By Jason Mattera
(Simon & Schuster/Threshold Editions, 272 pages,
$25)
Barack Obama refuses to return Bill Maher’s “c-nt” money.
The HBO host, who has called Sarah Palin a “c-nt” and a “dumb
twat,” donated a million dollars to an Obama super PAC. The
president, after telephonically checking on the well-being of a
Georgetown law student who had been the subject of unchivalrous
remarks from Rush Limbaugh, artfully dodged questions at a press
conference last week about misogynist speech directed by his
supporters toward conservative women. “I’m going to
try to lead by example in this situation, as opposed to commenting
on every single comment that’s made by either politicians or
pundits,” the president explained. “I would be very busy. I would
not have time to do my job.”
And without Maher’s million, the president reasons, he
might be out of a job.
One could fill a book with such double standards, and
indeed Jason Mattera has done just that in
Hollywood Hypocrites: The Devastating Truth About Obama’s
Backers, a catalog of the Left-Coast Left’s
do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do modus operandi.
Bruce Springsteen has the number one album in America. But
even the Boss Obama-backer who crusades against the top 1 percent
dodging their fair share doesn’t like paying taxes. By
reclassifying hundreds of acres on his residence as farmland, the
liberal rocker avoids hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual
payments to his local government. “By being a fake farmer,” Mattera
explains, “the working-class zero Springsteen is making a mint by
robbing New Jersey of the antipoverty program funds he says they
desperately need.”
An Inconvenient Truth producer
Laurie David’s “Martha’s Vineyard mansion has been cited as a
serial violator of Massachusetts’s Wetlands Protections Act,”
Hollywood Hypocrites shows. Mattera explains how David
valued the construction of tennis courts, a barbeque pit, and
swimming pools over protecting the environment on her property. If
she can’t keep her own environmental house in order, why does she
dub SUV drivers “terrorist enablers” and lecture ordinary Americans
about the evils of sipping from styrofoam cups?
David’s musings on the eco-unfriendly habits of the
American people are found at the Huffington Post, a
revolution in media in that its profits derive in large part from
not paying its writers. The Robespierre of this revolt of the media
haves against the media have-nots is Arianna Huffington. After
rolling husband Michael Huffington for millions in a divorce
settlement, the California cultist rolled progressives into
providing free content to a site that pads her pockets — even as
she derides capitalism in books and articles. “She pretended to be
a conservative who supported capitalism, then pretended to be a
progressive who hated capitalism, then proved to be a master of
capitalism who laughed all the way to the bank,” reads
Hollywood Hypocrites. The slave-labor suckers who built
her media empire didn’t share in the profits of the $315 million
sale of the Huffington Post. Socialism is for Huffington’s
books, not her business.
The author sees Hollywood as a major reason for the
success of the Democratic Party. He suggests that “introducing
wedge issues that pit Democratic voters against their Hollywood
hypocrite heroes on the one hand, and the progressive values they
claim to champion on the other, explodes leftist lies and flips the
celebrity’s star power on its head; what was once a positive
quickly becomes a negative.”
This appears to be what Friend of Arianna Bill Maher is
experiencing over the blowback concerning his Tourette’s-like
reaction to conservative women. While Obama grasps his “c-nt” money
tightly, his strategist David Axelrod canceled an appearance on
Real Time with Bill Maher and the Alabama Democratic Party
scrubbed its website of any reference to its “Evening with Bill
Maher” fundraiser. Maher derides Republicans as “the kings of false
equivalencies” and finds the comparison of his comments with the
talk radio king’s “ridiculous.” But condemning Limbaugh while
caressing Maher just smacks of bad faith.
In Mattera’s view such ambidextrous principles make
Cameron Diaz a “liberal idiot,” Bruce Springsteen a “total fraud,”
and Sting a “mega-wealthy nitwit.” La Rochefoucauld saw it
differently. “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays virtue,” the
French aphorist thought.
From this perspective, Bono sheltering his money from
taxation, Rosie seeking bodyguards to protect her family with
firearms, and Madonna leaving Godzilla’s carbon footprint serve as
welcome reinforcement of conservatism from some of its most
high-profile critics. Celebrities privately reject the liberal
rhetoric that they publicly espouse. When your life can’t possibly
match your principles, keep your life and question your
principles.
It pays to appear liberal in Hollywood. But in Hollywood, like
everywhere else, it doesn’t really pay to practice liberalism.
