Wild Celebrity and Pundit Rants: Why Some Get Spanked and Others Get A Pass
By Mysterious Q
I remember hearing someone ask Alice Cooper a political question several years ago. I just happened to be listening to a radio show at the time and recall that his answer was something like: Celebrities, especially rock stars, should be seen and not heard. He expressed the feeling that rockers and other celebs have nothing meaningful to bring to political arguments and that no one should really listen to or care what they think or say about a particular politician or issue.
I just wonder if rocker Ted Nugent wishes he had followed Cooper's advice while he was being questioned by the Secret Service recently? Nugent is a legendary musician, radio personality, hunting advocate and has been described as a 'staunch conservative' who is well known for his wild rants for or against anything he feels passionate about at any give moment. In recent days his passion has been for Mitt Romney and against all things Obama.
Ted was speaking at the 2012 National Rifle Association convention in St Louis when he told his followers and other interested parties that conservatives should "chop their heads off" when referring to President Obama and members of his Administration. This is not his first verbal zinger and probably will not be his last. He has described Senator Barbara Boxer and Senator Harry Reid as part of the "lunatic fringe" and made many other disparaging remarks about liberal politicians at various times.
Nugent says that he never meant to issue a threat or encourage violence against the President of the United States or any member of the Obama Administration. Ted insists that he was just speaking figuratively about defeating Democrats in the 2012 Presidential Election when he spoke about chopping off their heads. While I doubt that any charges will come out of his interview with the Secret Service, it's fascinating to watch celebrities like Nugent target and go off on people and issues. It's even more interesting to discover which celebs will be made to pay for their remarks and which will get a pass.
I would say that someone like Ted Nugent will get a pass and is likely to benefit more from his taunts on liberals than be called on the carpet for them. His supporters expect and enjoy his wild rants while most others dismiss Ted as a conservative ideologue just as they tend to dismiss comedian Bill Maher as a liberal ideologue. It didn't surprise anyone when Maher recently took on the issue of 'stay at home' moms after hearing statements made by Democratic Strategist Hilary Rosen.
While appearing on CNN, Rosen indicated that Mitt Romney's statement that his wife had recently communicated to him the economic concerns of American wives was ridiculous and that her opinion was disingenuous. Rosen's argument was that Ann Romney had "never worked a day in her life" and could not possibly offer a valid opinion on how working women and wives might feel about the current economic situation.
No one except the media was surprised when Bill Maher told his viewers and the live audience of his HBO show that ""What she (Rosen) meant to say, I think, was that Ann Romney has never gotten her ass out of the house to work." As was the case with Ted Nugent, all those comments did was to get Maher's name out in the news and provide some excellent free advertising for those that might be attracted to his HBO gig. The news media benefitted by feeding the public's appetite for yet another story about yet another celebrity zinger.
Politics are one thing, but religion is another. Just ask any of the surviving members of The Beatles. Once Known as the Fab Four, the 'four lads from Liverpool' belonged to one of the most successful rock and roll boy bands of all time. Paul McCartney, the late John Lennon, the late George Harrison and Ringo Starr were The Beatles and they took the musical world by storm in the 1960s. Band member John Lennon easily fell right into the eye of that storm when he almost managed to single handedly destroy the band's popularity by making these comments to a reporter for the London Evening Standard:
"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."
Lennon's rant was picked up by every news gathering and reporting agency that existed at that time and reported worldwide. He was quickly condemned by just about anyone and everyone with a public platform and The Beatles became victims of guilt by association. A number of U.S. radio stations stopped playing recordings by The Beatles and there were more than a few bonfire gatherings where people brought their personal copies of the band's records and threw them on the piles of singles and albums to be burned.
John Lennon later apologized and the world moved on after a while thanks to the liberal, revolutionary and rebellious mood of the time. There were bigger issues and fish to fry back then. The Beatles paid the price for Lennon's rant with empty seats and protesters at some concerts and a temporary downtrend in record sales, but they recovered and many fans forgave them. Will that be the case with Mel Gibson?
Hollywood actor, mover, shaker and sharp-tongued celeb Mel Gibson has become as popular with the tabloids and entertainment reporters as he once was with movie audiences. The star of a number of successful films including Braveheart and the iconic 'Lethal Weapon' series seems to have been born with his foot in his mouth. Mel's recorded rants against gal pal Oksana Grigorieva have become as legendary as his opinions about religion. A somewhat fanatical follower of Catholocism, news reports say that he may have had his own church and some kind of a miniature monastery in his back yard.
While the Catholics might be feeling the love from Mel Gibson, Jews are not. A number of people have accused the actor and successful movie maker of being an anti-Semite. These accusations go back several years to when Gibson was allegedly heard making disparaging remarks about Jews during a drunken tirade. Gibson's reputation as having nothing but contempt for Jews came back to haunt him recently when Joe Eszterhas made new claims against him. Eszterhas is a well-known and respected Hollywood screenwriter who has worked on sixteen films that have grossed over a billion box office dollars.
Joe Eszterhas and Mel Gibson were working together on the development of a script for a movie project known as "The Maccabees." Industry gossip says that Gibson was supposed to play Judah Maccabee in the film. The project was about the famous revolt of the Maccabees and the Rebel Army they formed against the Seleucid Empire in the Second Century B.C. However, after reading a script submitted by Eszterhas sometime in February of 2012, news reports say that Warner Brothers shelved the project.
Eszterhas sent a scathing nine page letter to Gibson after finding out that the script he worked on for two years had been rejected by the studio. His initial complaint was that Mel failed to contact him for months after he submitted the script and that Eszterhas had to get the bad news second hand from Warner Brothers. The lengthy correspondence also let Gibson know that the screenwriter felt Mel had never actually planned to make the movie and simply used him in a disingenuous way to show the world that he really was not an anti-Semite.
Eszterhas also pointed out in his letter made public how that Gibson often acted "wild, crazed, and explosive" at various times during their collaboration. Joe summed up his feelings about Mel by writing "You hate Jews" and offered this zinger as proof in his lengthly correspondence to Gibson: "You continually called Jews 'Hebes' and 'oven-dodgers' and 'Jewboys.' It seemed that most times when we discussed someone, you asked 'He's a Hebe, isn't he?' You said most 'gatekeepers' of American companies were 'Hebes' who 'controlled their bosses.'"
Eszterhas has another card up his sleeve. It appears that the screenwriter somehow recorded a conversation that he had with Mel Gibson last December and now plans on releasing it to the press and public. That's bad news for Mel because Joe says that the recording is filled with anti-semitic remarks and wild statements. Media reports as of this writing say that Gibson is looking into suing the screenwriter if the recording is released.
As bad as it sounds for Gibson, Mel always seems to come out of situations like these somehow smelling like a sacred rose. Why? Because that's the nature of celebrity tongue slips: People expect them to say dumb things and are rarely disappointed. As with Lennon's unsolicited theological observations, Gibson will have to pay a price for his seemingly endless verbal indiscretion. Mel's remark's will probably cost him the starring role in some films and keep funding for his own pet projects from being approved, but he will likely be back to save the day in some flick in the not too distant future as long as he is worth something at the box office.
Pundits do not get the same 'star' treatment when they say things that others find offensive. That is because they comment on politics, sports and news for a living and are supposed to know better. When Rush Limbaugh called a student that wanted to be able to obtain birth control medication from her employer a "slut' because he allegedly indicated that she expected others to foot the bill for the consequences of her sexual encounters, all hell broke loose.
People went crazy over Limbaugh's comments and a number of companies that advertise on his radio show deserted him. However, it's fair to say that some of the outrage might have been a bit orchestrated. While it was not unexpected that liberals would jump at the chance to de-throne the kind of conservative radio, other forces may also have been at work behind the scenes. It turns out that just around the time of Limbaugh's verbal bombshell another national radio program geared toward conservatives was taking shape.
It is not hard to imagine that prominent conservatives who might have grown weary of Limbaugh's radio domination might have had ulterior motives in their condemnation of his remarks. It's entirely possible that this was their way of throwing support behind a radio show that was preparing to compete with Limbaugh's for affiliates, listeners, ratings and sponsors. Who knows? Either way, Rush got spanked pretty good and may think twice before letting loose with another big zinger like that one against women.
Targeting women is never a good idea in the Orwellian World of political correctness that we live, but targeting minorities is a worse one, especially when they do not deserve it or the comments made are stupid and erroneous. Such was the case when Dimetrios Georgios Synodinos (also known as 'Jimmy the Greek') gave this amazing observation to a reporter who was interviewing him at a Washington, D.C. restaurant in 1988:
"The black is a better athlete to begin with because he's been bred to be that way, because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back, and they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs and he's bred to be the better athlete because this goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trade'n the big . . . the owner . . . the slave owner would, would, would, would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have ah, ah big, ah big, ah big black kid see..."
Yeah, right! Well that little ditty cost Jimmy his football commentator gig at CBS Sports and rightfully so. It is one thing to speak your mind and another to speak without using one. Vice President Joe Biden offered evidence of that truth and slung out yet another one of his many amazing verbal cannonballs in August of 2011 by saying that Tea Party Republicans "acted like terrorists" when it came to negotiations with democrats over the raising of the national debt ceiling.
Biden was called on the carpet by just about everyone in the USA political arena, but still managed to survive yet another one of the greatest hits of his verbal blunders. Ever since national second fiddle Dan Quayle proved that he probably would not win a Spelling Bee or impressively pass an average intelligence test by telling a twelve year old student that Potato was spelled 'Potatoe' in 1992, Vice Presidents have been alloted a fairly large stupidity quota.
Although many believe Biden has long exceeded his, the fact that his wife and daughter died tragically in a 1972 auto accident that was not their fault probably gives him a kind of permanent pass. Other politicians and pundits should beware: Words hurt and can sometimes kill careers as Jimmy The Greek discovered. When it comes to most Celeb misstatements, they have the luxury of being considered either inconsequential or irrelevant as commentators on political matters. They should stick to what they are good at: acting, performing or raising money for their favorite charity.
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