Why I Slam People Like Barbra Streisand
Wednesday, December 28th, 2005My wife and I had a discussion last night regarding my last post regarding Barbra Streisand’s comments on George Bush. Basically, my wife thought that I should not have “gone for the jugular” when Babs stated that:
Thirteen of the fifteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
I told her that I was more or less obligated to blast her for the mistake because it concerned such a well-known matter that anyone who has been paying attention since the 9/11 Attacks knows that there were 19 hijackers, not 15. It also goes deeper than that.
People like Babs (I am using her for an example here, more or less because she is a text book case), because of their celebrity, are assumed to have a lot of credibility when it comes to the causes they chose to champion. I’m not saying that this is right or wrong, just that that’s the way it is in American society, where celebrities are treated like gods. In my opinion, this assumed credibility places a responsibility on these celebrities to at least familiarize themselves with the basic facts of a given topic when they chose to use their celebrity to promote an event or point of view. When these celebrities start spouting their opinions, and it becomes apparent that these opinions are based upon false or flawed information, it makes me mad. Now I’m not talking about whether or not they agree with me about a certain subject, I am talking about the basic facts regarding that subject that, though easily verifiable, are nonetheless glaringly incorrect.
This is where Babs’ above statement comes in. Before the sun set in New York on September 11, 2001, all of the cable and network news outlets were displaying pictures of all nineteen of the hijackers, along with their names and countries of origin. The only question regarding the number of hijackers came about when some people thought that they had discovered a twentieth hijacker. Four years have gone by, along with several television specials and documentaries, and the fact that there were nineteen hijackers is common knowledge throughout the world, let alone America. How on God’s green Earth can Babs be so ignorant as to state that there were fifteen hijackers? Does she not read the statements that she publishes on her web site? Does she farm out the creation and writing of these statements to some minimum-wage flunky, and then take credit for it?
Who knows, and frankly, who cares? The whole point is, it’s her name attached to these statements, and that means that the content of these statements represents her and her thinking. It also tells me she does little or no research about the political subjects she rants about. Finally, it hints at what I’ve suspected for a long time: she is merely regurgitating the Democrat Party line, and trying to give that line the credibility that unfortunately comes from her celebrity status.
If all of this were happening in a vacuum, it wouldn’t matter. However, since it happens in a celebrity-worshiping society, her reckless disregard for the truth is digested by thousands of her fans who don’t know any better. Her words carry weight with these people, and because she has little or no regard for the facts, these fans are taking her disinformation as gospel.
This is why the modern Democrat Party is falling apart before our eyes. This is why a raving lunatic like Howard Dean gets elected as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. This is why Ted Kennedy is known more for his drinking than for his work in the Senate. This is why radio networks like Air America have no audience and hosts like Al Franken are nothing but a joke. In short, this is why more and more people no longer take the Democrat Party seriously when it comes to issues of National import.
John Kennedy and FDR must be spinning in their graves.
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