Hang on to your hats everybody. There's another airhead Hollywood activist on the loose. Spiderman cutie Kirsten Dunst is forming a forum for young Hollywood celebrities in which they'll discuss politics and encourage each other to take world issues more seriously.
Now let's face facts here. Kirsten Dunst is adorable and does a fine job on screen; but why she thinks she is well suited to forming an intellectual discussion group is beyond us. The gal didn't even vote in the last election. "I think it was just laziness," she says.
Yup, she's off to a good Tinseltown 'political-activist' start there.
Here's how Dunst describes her motivation for starting the new celebrity salon, along with boyfriend actor Jake Gyllenhaal: "It's not that we're not patriotic. It's just that we don't want war."
Oh, Kirsten. How very...well, deep of you. And heck, it's about time. Sure seems like everyone in Hollywood's been very reticent about expressing their political views so far. Maybe with a little work, Kirsten, you'll be able to bring Martin Sheen and Barbra Streisand out of their shells.
We're hoping Kirsten and Jake also decide to release transcripts of their new group's meetings. We can think of nothing funnier than a bunch of ill-educated baby starlets whining and moaning about world issues. It'll replace the Onion as the web's top bit of humor.
In the mean time, we strongly suggest Kirsten concentrate on filming the latest Spiderman installment (word is Toby Maguire is back as the web-spinner) and leave the politics to the politicians. While she's at it, she should also watch her back, as gossip hounds have it that Julia Roberts is royally pissed that her husband Danny Moder has been flirting with Kirsten.
Playing Spiderman's squeeze, stealing 'Pretty Woman's' hubby, fighting for world peace, and trying to remember to vote -- it ain't easy being a young Hollywood star these days!
2. MICHAEL MOORE
Talk about being hot. These days, in such "enlightened" cultural meccas as Toronto, Ottawa, Paris, Munich and Malibu, everyone's favorite corpulent filmmaker is Academy Award winner Michael Moore, director of the award-winning documentary film, Bowling for Columbine. Of course, the only award that Michael Moore really deserved for this film was for fiction writing.
Michael Moore may be the toast of the self-annointed tastemakers of Canada and the Continent, revered for his irreverent unearthing of all that is corrupt and evil about Amerika. The problem is that Michael Moore's revealed truths about the U.S. are about as credible as Al Gore's claim that he invented the Internet. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out in a revealing essay on Moore in the Sunday Times of London, Less is Moore, Michael Moore is a serial dissembler. Once he's on a roll, the truth is about as important to Michael Moore as spousal fidelity is to Bill Clinton.
Here's how Andrew Sullivan put it in his Less is Moore critique of Michael Moore's much-praised "work":
It was the Observer's "Movie of the Week." The Independent's reviewer described it as "a bracing and timely exercise in dredging for the truth." The Cannes film festival gave it a Special Jury Prize, with the audience giving the film a 13 minute standing ovation. And the media hype continues. In fact, there has never been a more appropriate moment for the film-maker Michael Moore and his rants against America than now. "Bowling for Columbine," the "documentary" that is now being shown across Britain and the world, is a movie almost designed to slake the anti-American thirst, whetted by the war on terror. And from an American too! Not since Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer have we seen such a successful export of anti-Americanism, a phenomenon carefully cultivated by some on America's campuses and liberal urban enclaves. And like most American products, it sells very well.
The only problem with this scenario is that Michael Moore is a serial dissembler. His book, "Stupid White Men," was laced with inaccuracies and falsehoods. His movie is just as bad.
Andrew Sullivan then goes on to document some of Moore's most outrageous whoppers. For example, here's some of the points Sullivan makes about the falsehoods and distortions that afflict Moore's best-selling book, Stupid White Men:
Take two compelling notions advanced in "Stupid White Men." The journalist Ben Fritz went through the book with a fine tooth comb. In the book, Moore claims that five sixths of the U.S. defense budget went toward one plane. He also claims that two-thirds of president Bush's campaign finances came from 700 people. These claims are so ludicrous it says something about Moore's credibility that he even believed them himself. Both are easily refuted by a quick look at the publicly available Pentagon budget and the records of the Federal Elections Commission, which compiles all campaign contributions. (In fact, Bush's campaign was more dependent on small contributions than Gore's.) But if you are going to argue that Bush was selected by plutocrats and that the Pentagon wastes all its money, you've got to come up with some facts to support your case. So Moore just makes them up.
As for Bowling for Columbine, here's what Sullivan had to say:
In "Bowling For Columbine," the entire premise of the title is false. In convoluted fashion, Moore tries to argue in the film that American gun culture is somehow related to American foreign policy. Even his most fawning critics concede he doesn't exactly make a logical connection between the two; and any historian of the Wild West would be a little mystified by the idea that American gun-culture sprang from post-war American global power. But never mind. The story Moore wants to tell is that the schoolkids who shot up Columbine high-school were so quintessentially American that they went bowling that morning; and that Columbine is also the location for a Lockheed Martin factory for "weapons of mass destruction." Hence "Bowling for Columbine." Neither of these assertions, alas, is true.
Dan Lyons of Forbes magazine has shown that, in fact, the two boys did not go bowling that morning. Early police reports to that effect turned out to be false. Moreover the Lockheed Martin factory near Columbine does not make "weapons of mass destruction," as argued in the movie. It makes space launch vehicles for TV satellites. Moore shows a clip of giant rockets. Nice try, Michael.
Also according to Sullivan, Moore distorts the significance of the notorious Willie Horton political ad used by the campaign team of George Bush Senior to so effectively discredit Democratic opponent and first-class dufus, Michael Dukakis, in the presidential election of 1988. As Sullivan notes, this political ad featured footage of a prison turnstile where inmates came and went at will. It was aimed at highlighting Michael Dukakis's over-generous furlough program for criminals when he was governor of Massachusets.
As we all learned later, one particular Afro-American prisoner, Willie Horton, raped a woman while on parole during Dukakis' term of office. But, as Sullivan points out, the Bush ad never mentioned Horton or specifically played the race card -- an independent ad, not sanctioned by the Bush campaign, was the one that referred to Willie Horton.
However, just to make sure we all know realize what a corrupt, slimy man the current American president's father was, Moore superimposed his own tag line over the Bush ad in Bowling for Columbine: "Willie Horton released. Then kills again." -- as if this is how the original ad ran. As Andrew Sullivan notes, the point is to make today's audiences believe that Bush Senior ran a blantantly racist campaign. Something that is completely false.
The sad thing is that the Academy, not mention the educated audiences around the world who are enthusiastically lapping up this tasty bowl of anti-American agiprop, don't care to know the truth about the Bush campaign or anything else about the United States. The distorted picture of America presented by master dissembler Moore is just the way these audiences prefer to see things -- even if it is total B.S. And who better to feed them this hateful America-baiting dish, than the supreme America hater and ingrate himself, Michael Moore?
WHO'S NOT....
2. PETER ARNETT
Yes, as everyone on the planet knows by now, he's gone and done it again. Not satisfied with his disgraceful performance as a pro-Baghdad CNN reporter during the original Gulf War, nor with the fib-filled, anti-American documentary that got him fired from CNN, Peter Arnett -- reporting from Baghdad for MSNBC and National Geographic-- made an insidious guest appearance on Iraqi TV, where he proudly told Iraq TV viewers that the United Sates was losing the war, that resistance to the war was growing within the U.S. (no doubt he was referring to his MSNBC colleagues and his news-anchcor friends at ABC and CBS), and that coalition forces had been compelled to change their failed war plans because of the courageous resistance by Saddam's goons in southern Iraq (using ordinary Iraqi citizens as human shields).
Talk about giving aid and comfort to the enemy! Benedict Arnett might as well have taken out Iraqi citizenship.
Back at home, the fallout from American viewers quickly hit the fan. And still smarting from the embarrassment of several pain-filled, ratings-deprived months of Donahue, MSNBC wisely fired Arnett, before the news network's paltry rating numbers could fall even further. After all, dropping to 172 prime-time viewers during a war would be really embarrassing?
What surprised most MSNBC viewers was the news that Peter Arnett was not a paid employee of the Iraqi Ministry of Information, Saddam's propaganda arm. Most of these viewers had probably just assumed that regularly switching live to Arnett in Baghdad was MSNBC's way of providing the official Iraqi point of view -- a very reasonable assumption considering how often Benedict Arnett's reports seemed to dovetail with the latest propaganda spin from the Iraqi Ministry of Information.
Unfortunately, Peter Arnett won't be wanting for media work in the near future. London's extremist anti-war tabloid, The Mirror, has hired the dissembling broadcaster to report on the Iraq war for them. And recently Mr Arnett was additionally hired by an Arab TV network to be their Baghdad correspondent -- what better way to provide Arab viewers with a pro-Saddam, anti-American perspective than hiring cable news' most enthusiastic Saddam apologist and anti-American crusader.
Continuing his rapid career decline, Baghdad Pete appears to have ended up where he belongs -- obsequiously confirming the reality-adverse prejudices of his hate-filled London and Arab audiences.....