Hollywood Smears Sarah Palin

Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):
1. Hollywood Smears Sarah Palin
2. Daytime TV's Un-Fairness Doctrine
3. NBC, CNN Execs Tweaked by Sarah Palin Comment
4. Hollywood's New Anti-faith Assault
5. Leonardo DiCaprio's Anti-U.S. Film Timed for the Election?
 

1. Hollywood Smears Sarah Palin

There's fear and loathing in Hollywood.

Annette Bening, actress and wife of Warren Beatty, believes that the selection of Sarah Palin represents "bizarre" politics.

While giving a news conference to promo her latest film, "The Women," Bening said, "I think it's exciting to see a woman chosen to be on a major ticket."

As you might expect, a "but" quickly followed.

"But the idea that people, who voted for Hillary, who tend to be Democrats, would change and vote for McCain because of Sarah Palin seems to me bizarre," she said.

Why did Bening find it odd? Because "Sarah Palin's politics are to the right of McCain's," she explained.

Diane English, the director of Benning's film, happens to be the writer-creator of the 1990s hit TV series "Murphy Brown," in which Candice Bergen's character had a child out of wedlock and the real life Bergen engaged in a war of words with then-Vice President Dan Quayle.

"I just wish our show was on the air right now," English told Canwest. "We'd be having a lot of fun with this."

Meanwhile Candace Bergen gave her assessment of Palin's nomination acceptance speech, saying, "I heard her (RNC)speech, and it's scary."

Jamie Lee Curtis wrote in The Huffington Post, "The scariest thing I hear about the Palin nomination was that she would appeal to voters because they would be able to relate to her and she to them."

Curtis admitted, "I couldn't hold my own for one minute in a debate on any issue with someone like a Barack Obama or Joseph Biden and neither can Sarah Palin."

"When the call comes at 3 a.m. I want a mind who was at the top of their class, who has gravitas and a real intellect. I want a leader who is a scholar who can hold the history of civilization in his head and will read and learn from the past as he charts the future," she added.

Perpetually pugilistic Alec Baldwin blogged, "Palin is Bush."

Baldwin tried to make the case that what helped President Bush get elected was "his lack of a record in public office."

Still fixated, Baldwin compared Bush's foreign policy experience as a governor with Barack Obama's, and claimed that Obama's experience in being a senator running for office was somehow superior.

Baldwin did acknowledge that "Palin looks a lot like a really attractive TV star I know. Underneath all the Tina, she's George."

The voice of celebrity wisdom came from an unusual place: Lindsay Lohan's MySpace blog.

"I keep hearing about the issues related to 'teen pregnancy' — It's all related to Sarah Palin and her 17-year-old unmarried pregnant daughter," Lohan wrote. "Well, I think the real problem comes from the fact that we are taking the focus off of getting to know Sarah Palin and her political views."

2. Daytime TV's Un-Fairness Doctrine

Democrats have been pushing the Fairness Doctrine, which is a not-so-veiled effort to kill talk radio.

Enter Oprah, the daytime TV talk-show diva. Her Web site is filled with e-love for Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama. She herself welcomed the Illinois senator and his wife Michelle to the comfy stage sofa.

But now Oprah has issued a written statement that she will not allow Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin anywhere near her Chicago soundstage. She says she has "made the decision not to use my show as a platform for any of the candidates."

So much for consistency in Fairness Doctrine ideology.

Interestingly, though, the people have a way of implementing their own Fairness Doctrine, or when they're unable they at least know how to give media elites some grief.

One Republican woman's group in Florida has announced a boycott of Oprah's show and her magazine.

Oprah's Web site, too, has been flooded with complaints over the Palin rebuff. Female fans are up in arms and are letting Oprah know that if her daytime show features influential women, it is outrageous to refuse to have on the first female Republican vice presidential candidate in history.

Meanwhile one of the hosts of ABC's "The View" has defamed Alaska's governor via a Web blog.

Whoopi Goldberg said on the show that it was legitimate to question how Palin would raise her children and govern. And co-host Joy Behar told a vulgar joke while showing a video of Palin's daughter, Bristol, and Bristol's fiancé.

Goldberg posted a piece on her wow-o-wow Web site titled "Sarah Palin Is a Very Dangerous Woman" in which she accused Palin of wanting "to secede from the United States."

Whoopi then linked Palin's speech to a German Nazi rally, writing, "This girl is dangerous to me. This is a very dangerous woman… I just found the whole thing sad and very musty and very much like a Bund rally, but maybe that was just me."

Judging by the gazillions of Sarah supporters, it appears so, Whoopi.

3. NBC, CNN Execs Tweaked by Sarah Palin Comment

Sarah Palin has demonstrated that she knows just how to get under a media exec's skin.

A couple of prominent executives from two major news sources have responded to references in the GOP vice presidential nominee's acceptance speech.

Palin maintained that "some in the media" labeled her as unqualified because she's "not a member in good standing of the Washington elite."

NBC News President Steve Capus told Broadcasting & Cable, "What people who are politically motivated are trying to do is take every outrageous blogger that exists online and lump them into traditional media."

Capus added, "That's not a sophisticated analysis of journalism. That's someone making a political argument."

CNN President Jonathan Klein had a similar reaction: "It's a time-honored marketing ploy, and every time they bash the media, it means they're not talking about a vision or a plan . . . But the best antidote to cynical marketing is solid reporting."

Solid reporting sounds like a great idea. Maybe the mainstream media can give it a try.

4. Hollywood's New Anti-faith Assault

Hollywood is launching a new group of films, which contain themes that people of faith are likely to find offensive.

Bill Maher's "Religulous" embraces the substance of best-selling disbeliever books like Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and Christopher Hitchens' "God is Not Great." The HBO host's film attempts to use a "Borat" approach to belittling organized religion in particular, and theism in general.

Since the overseas success of "The Da Vinci Code," studios have been on the lookout for scripts with the same underlying concept: Jesus had offspring. They've apparently found two that fit the bill.

Johnny Depp is in talks to produce and play the lead in a film that features the so-called descendants of Christ. The movie will be based on a comic book novel titled "Rex Mundi." The story is a fanciful history in which the Reformation never occurred (elements of "The Golden Compass").

Taking adult comic books and making them into films seems to be of great interest to Hollywood execs. In another upcoming comic book novel novel-turned-action movie, Jenna Dewan, who has appeared in music videos for Justin Timberlake and Mandy Moore, will portray a female fantasy warrior in a film called "Magdalena."

The twist is that the heroine is the supposed descendent of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

5. Leonardo DiCaprio's Anti-U.S. Film Timed for the Election?

After failing to draw audiences with anti-Iraq war movie fare like "Rendition," "Stop-Loss," "The Kingdom" and "In the Valley of Elah," Hollywood is at it again.

In the closing days of the presidential campaign season, "Body of Lies," starring Leo DiCaprio, is set for release.

The film is another attempt to portray America as evil and includes themes of torture, covert operations, and terrorist accusations being made toward innocent victims.

A Los Angeles Times headline states that DiCaprio and director Ridley Scott "conspire" to make a hit movie, and then tags on the following subtitle: "The director and actor think 'Body of Lies' will be the Iraq-war movie that finally draws a crowd."

The Times also characterizes the movie as "the most stinging screen portrayal of American foreign policy by any Hollywood studio movie in recent memory."

In the flick, DiCaprio and Russell Crowe play CIA operatives who are pursuing terrorist cells in the Middle East. DiCaprio's character is an idealistic agent while Crowe's is a power hungry bureaucrat.

American agents torture a suspect with a cricket bat and one of the torturers whispers the words, "Welcome to Guantanamo Bay."

DiCaprio and Scott don't exactly seem to be on the same page when it comes to the torture of terrorists issue.

"If I'm going to get down to brass tacks, there's no rules," Scott says. "If I want to get the information out of somebody, I have to do it," he continues. "And it makes it a lot easier if that person put a bomb in a square or blew up a bunch of kids. I'd definitely take a cricket bat to him."

Scott looked to DiCaprio for consensus but got a "no" headshake in return.

DiCaprio admits that films with these types of themes have not resulted in box-office success.

"It is a failed subject matter in the sense that none of those films has been successful," he says. "But whether ['Body of Lies'] was going to be commercial or not was never a factor."

I wonder how the investors feel about that.