The Church of the Blinding White Light of Stupidity

Here's something I like to do.

When a celebrity goes on Fox or CNN whining about the war, I like to go to imdb.com and see just how much trouble that person's career is in. I recently had a very good laugh doing just that with Sean Penn, whose last five movies were seen by fewer people than typically tune in to C-Span on a Tuesday morning.

Now...Janeane...if you want to be merciful and ignore that Bullwinkle abortion, which was significantly less dignified than doing Old Navy commercials (yoo hoo, Morgan), you have to go back to 1999 to a bit part in Dogma. Okay, that was four years ago, so the movie was made FIVE years ago, which would be when she got her last halfway decent script. For a bit part I can't even recall seeing, and being a Kevin Smith nut, I saw Dogma earlier this year.

Before that, she sort of registered on the national radar screen in 1997, in the flop, The Matchmaker.

If you want to restrict yourself to movies she could honestly point to as something other than depressing handouts to a failed movie star wannabe, you have to go back to The Truth About Cats and Dogs, which was not exactly Casablanca.

In other words, this woman is just barely a celebrity. And God bless Tony Snow, he gave her a rare shot to put her bitter little mug in front of a few million people seven years after her last meaningful movie appearance.

I notice that Julia Roberts and Jennifer Lopez and, well, most of the other actresses who can find jobs are not trampling each other to get on Fox News. Why? Because they aren't so desperate for exposure that they have to risk offending the public with their estrogen-crazed, eighth-baked political notions.

No one ever points out the obvious: when a failing star gets exposure, that person's financial position improves. The more people know who you are, the easier it will be for you to get that lower-left-hand corner on Hollywood Squares or to get that job cutting the ribbon at a new Best Buy. Naturally, Hollywood's losers and feebs migrate toward the only cameras they can find.

I was impressed with Brian for having his facts straight and going for her throat. At one point, in the F&F's early days, I had him pegged as the shows "liberal." He changed, or I was way off.
BTW, here's the re-run.

I'm ever so impressed with the jargon Steve spouted on Garofalo. Perhaps she isn't the most seen actress on movies - could it be because she doesn't fit the impossible levels of perfection set by media standards into which perhaps 2% of all American women fit? Or could it be that she is actually coming out and risking a career (as she had a movie wrapping up and a t.v. series abuot to begin on ABC when this occurred) where others will not? Why is it so unsettling that a woman, a woman who has the public light and can use it, would choose to speak anything other than the party line? Would choose to express concern and digress from the jargon the White House's spin doctors are postulating in World War-era propaganda mode? Disagree with what a person is saying, yes - that's intelligent and true expression of your First Ammendment rights. But, when you opt to slander a person - for her life, her career, her "bitter" whatever - you reduce yourself to one who can not argue the actually relevant topics but must, instead, go "for the throat," as Roger Schultz stated. You debase your own argument against Garofalo by attempting to slander her character...thereby making your character far more sullied than her own.