It’s Good To Stand For Something, But These Activist Celebrities Can Be So Obnoxious About How They Do It We Automatically Want To Support The Opposing View.
1. Rush Limbaugh
Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh is one of the Activist Celebrities, who has a LOT of enemies in the mainstream media, particularly left-of-center. Often decrying news outlets like CNN and MSNBC, Limbaugh’s points are frequently overshadowed by his tendency to say something outrageous. For instance, in March 2012, he lost advertisers after calling a Georgetown law student a “slut” for her stance that women’s birth control should be covered by health insurance. Limbaugh then said he would “buy all of the women at Georgetown University as much aspirin to put between their knees as they want.”
2. Michael Moore
Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11) is a mental and physical equal to Rush on the liberal side. Like the talk radio host, you’ll never see him acknowledge the failings of his own beliefs, instead reserving criticisms directed toward his own party for not going extreme enough in their aspirations. Moore may say, “President Obama, you dropped the ball on Libya,” for example, but in his mind the ball has been dropped only because it’s conflict of any kind. One could easily get the impression from Moore that he thinks everyone can be dealt with diplomatically, and there’ve been one too many Hitlers throughout history for that to every be true. On the flip side of that coin, Moore allegedly has a tough time responding to criticism as seen in the spat with The Who’s Pete Townshend, who famously outed some of Moore’s hypocrisy in this Ireland Online article from a few years back.
3. Ann Coulter
When one has trouble debating their views, they often go for shock value with comments like this:
- “Women like Pamela Harriman and Patricia Duff are basically Anna Nicole Smith from the waist down. Let’s just call it for what it is. They’re whores.”
- “I think [women] should be armed but should not [be allowed to] vote.”
- “The swing voters—I like to refer to them as the idiot voters because they don’t have set philosophical principles. You’re either a liberal or you’re a conservative if you have an IQ above a toaster.”
That last one’s particularly puzzling when you look at the state of the country and realize it got this way by absolute rule from either one side or the other, but we digress. Coulter chooses her words in as offensive a manner as she possibly can because she wants to be noticed. It sells books and gets her TV appearances. Who knows whether she believes half the stuff she says? That’s unimportant. Destroying civil discourse and driving a wedge between the Left and the Right are where the money’s at.
4. Sean Penn
Sean Penn and Alec Baldwin amuse us because they like to think of themselves as tough guys, but if you notice, every time they get physical, they make sure it’s with as slight and non-threatening a paparazzi member as they can. Or in the case of tough guy Penn, with Madonna. That’s right. Penn and Madonna were the original Chris Brown and Rihanna. The actor’s rep as woman beater came from a nine-hour incident during their marriage when the singer alleged that Penn bound, gagged, and beat her while continuously pouring alcohol down his throat, pausing long enough to tell her that he owned her “lock, stock, and barrel.” Penn later admitted he had drinking problems during their marriage, but, naturally, hasn’t gone into too many details beyond that. He doesn’t have to; the silence speaks volumes. Pretty “villainously and criminally obscene,” in most opinions, which by the way are the terms he used to describe then-President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the War in Iraq. (Guess it’s okay to terrorize as long as you’re just doing it to one person, eh, Mr. Penn?
5. Donald Trump
With close to 25 percent of the country currently unemployed or underemployed (Gallup) and federal entitlement money up 75 percent as of 2010 from where it was ten years prior (CNN Money), there are plenty of questions to throw President Obama’s way. As the Benghazi scandal and the Fast and Furious government gun-running program that resulted in one massacre and the death of a border patrol officer were poised to blow up in the administration’s face, however, Donald Trump chose to ignore all these things in favor of the oft-disproved birth certificate argument. Rather than hitting the president on legitimate issues, he created a media frenzy surrounding a big “announcement” he had planned. He allowed it to build, promising a “bombshell” that would surely upend the Democrat’s presidency. And then, he made some BS financial challenge that President Obama was able to exploit for the purposes of deflecting unwanted media attention. (If you believe the media would have actually called him on anything prior to the election.) Trump is one of those Republicans, who decry the media for jumping on Republican miscues while ignoring Democratic ones, yet he continues to give them all the ammo they will ever need to make him look stupider than that toupee already does.
6. The Onion
Okay, maybe this is a stretch calling a faux news site a “celebrity” but with a pilot pending as part of the Amazon Originals program, and virtually everyone in the US knowing who they are, we’re going to include the unit as a whole on our list of celebrity activists. The 70+ employees on staff at The Onion used to be funny until they took a hard liberal stance and refused to post anything that might make their own ideologies look bad. At any given point, you can find the faux news site harpooning those right-of-center, while turning a blind eye to the ample material their own political leanings provide. The Onion used to be a site where you could go and laugh AT and WITH others. Launched in 1988 as a Thrifty Nickel type “newspaper,” it transitioned well into the online world and took fairly even-handed aim at both political parties up until the first election of their Messiah in 2008. In the five years after, it’s been like a second PR agency for the administration when it isn’t referring to nine-year-old girls as c***s on Twitter. While The Daily Show continues to be a superb example of how to have a political leaning without completely losing sight of reality, The Onion checked out a few years ago and quit being consistently funny long before that.
So there you have it. If these “personalities” would sit down and shut up, society would be a considerably more functional unit. But as long as people follow these Activist Celebrities, expect civil discourse and respect for one another to continue eroding.
