This Is Newsworthy…How, Exactly?
So, during the election campaign Hollywood liberals liked Obama and donated some money to his campaign. A year later several of those Hollywood liberals, who combined donated a whopping $34,000 to Obama, sign a letter demanding the release of Roman Polanski by the Swiss government (a release that the Obama administration has shown no signs of supporting). The implication here is supposed to be….well, I’m not sure what, but clearly Obama must be totally okay with child rape if he accepted donations from Hollywood liberals who, a year later, would publicly support and apologize for Roman Polanski.
Look, the actions of Weinstein, et al in the last few weeks are unconscionable, but to suggest that those actions have anything whatsoever to do with the Obama campaign’s acceptance of $34,000 in donations from them a year ago is preposterous and irresponsible in, well, I can’t count how many ways. Seriously, WTF?
Yeah, the FOX News crowd is desperately trying to find a political angle of this. (I consider POLITICO an adjunct of FOX/Drudge/Limbaugh, which it is for all intents and purposes.) So far as I can tell, it’s merely in-group solidarity and classism.
And can we dispense with the notion that Hollywood is liberal? They might say it, they might vote that way, but the product coming out of there shows no evidence of it. No Hollywood romantic film in memory has had a white/black pairing. Every year the list of Best Actress nominees is stacked with performances from tiny indies and foreign films. Hollywood sure doesn’t seem interested in actually producing product that shows nuanced portrayals of minorities and women–the former of which was memorably skewered by the film Bamboozled, which wasn’t the greatest movie but had some great insights into this subject.
And, as a liberal myself, I respect the rule of law and I would never consider letting a child rapist go for any reason other than that his guilt couldn’t be demonstrated. Most all other liberals I know feel roughly the same.Report
Lev:
I didn’t intend to get into the whole “is Hollywood liberal” issue here, since it’s an issue that I tend to find uninteresting and unimportant….whatever the political leanings of its stars, execs, and directors, ultimately it’s an industry just like any other. My point with the reference to “Hollywood liberals” was just to note that there are a lot of self-identified liberals in Hollywood who have a long history of supporting Democratic candidates that makes their support of Obama hardly newsworthy under any circumstances.Report
So what you’re really saying is that you’re an apologist for Roman Polanski, too, and his Muslim Socialist backer Obama.Report
Totally.Report
Well, it appears that campaign contributions are ALWAYS a story. last year, Jewcy and a Texas newspaper made headlines by revealing that Ron Paul accepted about $500 from a white power dude.
http://www.jewcy.com/cabal/ron_pauls_jewish_problem
Yglesias called this “a solid story.”
I thought it wasn’t really a solid story, and was instead kind of crappy guilt-by-association rambling. I still think it was. And is, in the more recent case. Still, people love reading it. Journalists love writing it. (You have to get SOMETHING out of all that data that’s available, and it’s a great way to get invited onto cable news shows.) So I suspect it will continue.Report
Yeah, that was a tempest in a teapot, and I thought so at the time (although I still thought he should have returned the donation just as a political PR move)(the newsletters were an altogether different story, though). Still, this is far more absurd since it’s an attempt to link Obama to behavior of some donors that occurred almost a year after the election and the donations, and which had absolutely nothing to do with their political views. At least the Paul tempest in a teapot occured during the campaign and involved a donation from a man known at the time to be a virulent white supremacist.Report
What’s-his-name supported Ron Paul, remember.Report
Aw, man, Sam covered this.Report
Let’s see if I have this correct. Satan’s third testicle, Hollywood, gave a few thousand dollars to the Obama campaign and thus this brands Obama as being in bed with those speaking up for Polanski. By extension does Politico include all those who donated to Obama as speaking up for Polanski?
Here is a list of those top donors that support child rape,
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?id=N00009638&cycle=2008Report