WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED

Guess who’s the main speaker at the White House Correspondents’ dinner this year? Last year Stephen Colbert roasted W. so badly, the audience of correspondents and celebrities—as well as W. and Laura and “honored guests”—forgot to laugh.

Rich Little.

He said in a New Yorker interview: “…believe me, you won’t hear the word ‘Iraq’ out of my mouth the whole evening. They know I’m a safe bet over there at the White House.”

The White House Correspondents’ Association said the White House put no pressure on them, which I believe, because they didn’t have to.

The correspondents themselves were embarrassed by Colbert’s performance after it became one of the most popular YouTube videos.

Because, after initially laughing at Colbert’s barbs at W. and Dick and their gang, they began to laugh less and less. Some in the audience continued to get, and obviously enjoy, the direct hits on W.’s hypocrisy and narcissism, but most quieted down, either not getting the joke or not wanting to embarrass junior any more.

The choice of Rich Little is just another sign of their bending over for this administration’s lethal media manipulation.

But it is also a sign of something else I’ve ranted about before, that the whole Hollywood-Liberal connection is a smokescreen used to manipulate voters who feel envy or resentment toward celebrities and their seeming power.

The reality of my almost twenty years experience working in “Hollywood” is: there are as many, or more, conservative Republicans in “show business” as there are liberal Democrats. Especially among comedians.

Little says he’s a Republican. Drew Carey did too. Colin Quinn is blatantly anti-Liberal, pro-Conservative as his supposedly topical comedy show on TV in recent years made clear, giving a platform to rightwing perspectives sold as reality and all else as elitism.

That’s the perspective Nixon’s dirty trick team came up with in his bid to win over “the silent majority”—a rightwing invention to begin with. The idea was to redirect working peoples’ anger over the circumstances of their lives, getting worse every year under the growing power of corporations.

To divert attention from the true source of the growing disparity in incomes and power in this country, the Nixon political machine successfully redirected voters’ resentment toward the Kennedys and what they represented—East Coast, Harvard-educated, ethnic/immigrant up from poverty recently rich (as opposed to the WASP Walkers and Bushes W. descends from who’ve been wealthy and powerful for centuries) and their Hollywood friends.

Of course they also redirected that resentment toward blacks and the poor, which strategy was later perfected by Reagan and his minions, using so-called “welfare queens” as the symbol of what was wrong with the country, rather than the newly minted “homeless” families that hadn’t existed since the depths of the Depression until Reagan took power.

W. and his cronies have extended this mis-information of whose to blame for the troubles of ordinary folks by blaming homosexuals, feminists non-Christians (or rather non-their-kind-of-“Christians”) etc., and most obviously, Hollywood.

But that’s just as much a myth as “the welfare queen’ was. Most Hollywood producers I’ve worked with are Republicans, and at least half or more of the directors and writers and comedians I’ve known are Republicans, as well as many of the stars.

Yes, the “liberals” seem more represented in the monologues of comedians at awards events, or in the acceptance speeches of some of the recipients. But that too is an illusion. When Clinton was president, or Gore running for office, comedians, even ones allegedly “liberal Democrats” skewered them just as readily, and were easily manipulated into doing it on the basis of the misinformation propagated by the right-wingers.

Like Gore’s alleged claim of starting the internet, which he never said, only taking credit for his part in making it what it became, which is fact not fiction, and so on.

The rightwing Republicans are as good at manipulating the myth that Hollywood is somehow more liberal than the real people out there in the middle of the country, despite the evidence of so many, including comedians from Bob Hope to Rich Little to Drew Carey to Dennis Miller to Colin Quinn et. al.

And “the media” goes right along with it, as it continues to do with everything else, taking the administration’s word on Iran’s supposed interference in Iraq with infiltrators and bombs etc., setting up familiarly false rationalizations for military action against Iranians, first in Iraq and soon in Iran itself, repeating meaningless body counts (today it was “250 insurgents killed” in a battle no news person was witness too, so why exactly are they repeating that figure as fact?) et-fucking-cetera.

Rich Little. It’s come to that.