Andrew Breitbart’s BigHollwood web site is a notoriously puerile destination for Tea Party true believers. It generally doesn’t warrant my attention, but as this is the bottom half of a lazy New Year’s weekend, and a slow news day, I thought I’d waste some time responding to a particularly dimwitted exercise in top ten listing: The Top 10 Repulsively Liberal Hollywood Moments of 2010.
The author is William J. Kelly, a D-list conservative radio host and a failed Republican candidate for comptroller in Illinois (losing the GOP primary by 37 points). His article illustrates why his lack of celebrity is so richly deserved.
Kelly is obviously an intellectual midget with aspirations to kneel before the altar of Limbaugh. It always amuses me to read conservatives like Kelly bashing liberals in Hollywood and the creative community while ignoring their own elbow-rubbing with celebrities. The ultra-rightist magazine Human Events even produced a list of the most irritating liberal celebrities. To which I responded with a list of the most irritating conservative celebrities. On the irritating scale the conservatives win by a landslide. Now they are vying for the “repulsive” title as well.
10. Smallville’s last season. Kelly complains that the program’s new villain is a “conservative radio talk show host taken over by the supernatural forces of hate and fear.” However, that description could fit any number of real conservative radio talk show hosts starting with Glenn Beck and ending with Kelly himself.
9. Kathy Griffin attacks Bristol Palin This entry raises an objection to criticism of the children of politicians. However, Bristol is an adult, and a public figure in her own right, who willingly became a contestant on Dancing With the Stars. It was Bristol’s role on DWTS that Griffin referenced in her comedy routine. Kelly seems to think that the offspring of politicians are off-limits in perpetuity. By his shallow logic we should have refrained from criticizing George W. Bush because his father was a politician.
8. Bristol’s “Dancing with the Stars” success equals Tea Party conspiracy? Anyone who still believes that Bristol’s “success” on DWTS was not the result of Tea Party vote-stuffing is terminally naive. Does Kelly really think that her dance skills were superior to the other contestants? She received amongst the lowest scores week after week. And what is with Kelly’s obsession with Bristol that she rates two items in this list?
7. Hollywood blames Christmas. Kelly says: “Hollywood took a hike on Christmas films in 2010 and the media tried to pin the blame on lack of audience interest.” Kelly just made this up. There is simply no basis for asserting that the media placed universal blame for the absence of holiday-themed films on the audience or anywhere else. To suggest that Hollywood is somehow averse to Christmas movies reveals an ignorance of Hollywood on a massive scale.
6. Maher pushes “Politically Incorrect” witchcraft clip of Christine O’Donnell. Kelly really worked hard on this one. First he lies in saying that O’Donnell’s admission to “dabbling in witchcraft” was “comically stated.” It may have been on a comedy show, but she wasn’t joking and even reiterated the point. Then Kelly goes on to lie about her opponent, Chris Coons, saying that he was let “off the hook” for his book, “The Bearded Marxist.” Except that there was no such book, and the phrase was actually attributed to conservative friends of Coons who made it clear that they were joking. Kelly apparently has a difficult time distinguishing jokes, lies, and reality.
5. Meathead says Tea Party on par with the Nazi Movement. I might have been tempted to give Kelly this one. I do not condone any indiscriminate use of Nazi references that trivialize an all-too-real horror. However, by taking Rob Reiner to task while ignoring the king of Nazi references, Glenn Beck, Kelly discredits his criticism and exposes his outrage as phony and manipulative.
4. PBS censors Tina Fey’s anti-Palin comments at the Kennedy Center Awards. Here’s another for which I nearly sympathized with Kelly. It was indeed unconscionable for PBS to edit Fey’s remarks. But as it turns out, Kelly wasn’t upset with the censorship at all. In fact he justified it and took a swing at Fey for “lowering the bar for future Mark Twain Award recipients.” Do you think that Kelly knows that Mark Twain was a sharp-tongued political satirist who probably would have vigorously applauded Fey’s comments?
3. Obama endorses Comedy Central’s Rally to Restore Sanity. Kelly’s criticism of Obama centers on his praise for civility and common sense. What an outrage! Obama and Stewart should be hanged together. Kelly accuses Obama of “Failing to distinguish comedy from real life.” Kelly may be the last man in America to fail to recognize that satire is a valid form of speech that often informs and enlightens. And Jon Stewart is one of the funniest and most effective satirists on the scene today.
2. Filmmaker Moore posts $20,000 for WikiLeaks’ Assange’s bail. This appears to be a blind, substanceless attack on Michael Moore. Kelly doesn’t explain what’s wrong with Moore posting bail for Assange. He is apparently against it because Moore did it. Perhaps Kelly is against Assange as well, but he doesn’t say so. And if he is, then he is also against free speech and freedom of the press.
1. Whoopi & Joy’s Bill O’Reilly walk-off on “The View.” In a typical right-wing embrace of intolerance and bigotry, Kelly defends Bill O’Reilly for insinuating that all Muslims are terrorists and/or all terrorists are Muslim. And he slams Whoopi and Joy for being sensitive to that overtly prejudicial opinion. In Kelly’s world it is perfectly acceptable to smear people with minority beliefs or opinions as criminals, and to escalate hostilities based on those smears.
Conservatives will be working harder than ever this year to demonstrate their repulsive nature. Kelly is off to a strong start in the race to the bottom, but I wouldn’t put down any bets just yet. After all, Glenn Beck hasn’t taken to the air yet this year and Sarah Palin hasn’t Tweeted or Facebooked since Christmas eve.
However, Bristol may not want to get over-confident about her status of cultural superiority. Levi Johnston has his own book coming out in September titled, “Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs.” Obviously, this is going to be a summer of literary enrichment. The two books occupy opposite poles of the political sideshow spectrum, at least so far as the titles are concerned. Bristol’s book extols her lack of fear, while Levi’s is analogically frozen in it.