In the era of "warmonger" Republicans in the White House, the Toronto International Film Festival would have been fertile ground for bold, outspoken "dissent" from actors against war in the Middle East. Now with Obama on the brink of missile attacks in Syria, you would expect the same agitation, but this time coupled with a dash of betrayal.
Instead, the Hollywood Reporter found nothing there but an icy pile of "no comments" from more than a dozen celebs, including Susan Sarandon, Josh Brolin, Penn Jillette and Tim Robbins.
For
divorced Sarandon and Robbins, left-wing rabble-rousing against the
Pentagon was too reminiscent of "The Way We Were." It's the Obama era;
the government now can do no wrong.
Meryl Streep skipped the Toronto swirl, so what might she have said?
Push the replay button on her remarks about Bush and Iraq at a 2004
Kerry-Edwards fundraiser: "I wondered to myself during 'Shock and Awe,' I
wondered which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our president's personal
savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families of
Baghdad?"
Not in your wildest dreams would this lady say that about this
president. Since Obama's version of Christianity came from a preacher
who thought we deserved 9/11 and yelled "God damn America," he's spared
this kind of movie-star character assassination.
Ed Asner didn't mince words when he told the Hollywood Reporter that
celebrities won't be mobilizing against any Obama wars: "A lot of people
don't want to feel anti-black by being opposed to Obama." People in
Tinseltown watch a little too much MSNBC.
Asner sounded very cynical. "It will be a done deal before Hollywood is
mobilized. This country will either bomb the hell out of Syria or not
before Hollywood gets off its ass." He doesn't even think clogging the
town square in protest accomplishes anything any more: "We had a million
people in the streets, for Christ's sake, protesting Iraq, which was
about as illegal as you could find. Did it matter? Is George Bush being
tried in the high courts of justice?"
The Left used to want the president and his national-security minions
frog-marched to court and tried as war criminals. But with the Hope and
Change President running the wars, even the "idealistic" folks in
Hollywood are running for the tall grass.
Where is Sean Penn? Crickets. Where is the Sean Penn movie where he
stars as the idealistic lefty like Joe Wilson who exposes the corruption
of a war-mongering president? Silence.
The Valerie Plame Wilson scandal even caused "socially conscious"
comedian Al Franken to joke to David Letterman in 2005 that as a result,
"(Scooter) Libby and Karl Rove are going to be executed" and then joke
that the country was close to executing a sitting president. Now the
Minneapolis press reports, "Al Franken is way more hawkish on Syria than
Michele Bachmann."
Some are still pretending Obama is the state senator opposing the "dumb
wars". Barbra Streisand tried to support both Obama and "peace" by
reprinting leftist Katrina Vanden Heuvel on her website: "President
Obama has sensibly pushed to bring the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to
an end." Earth to Barbra and friend: Obama expanded the war in
Afghanistan, and 73 percent of the American deaths there have occurred
during his presidency.
But the desperation continued: Obama "has resisted those who wanted
earlier intervention in the Syrian civil war. And now he may just need
the American people and Congress to keep him from getting more deeply
involved in a war that he knows will only further weaken the nation and
hurt our interests and our values."
In other words, Obama was against it before he was for it. He just
needs a nudge from the people to get back in touch with the American
people's liberal values.
Hollywood still has a few serious radicals, the ones who think all wars
are cynical profiteering opportunities and Obama and Bush are both
willing tools of the military-industrial complex. There's John Cusack,
and Danny Glover, who's circulating a no-war petition. Michael Moore is
attacking John Kerry on Twitter. But they are the outliers. The
"mainstream" in the entertainment world sound like Robert DeNiro on CNN,
"I know he'll make a decision and whatever decision he makes, I go with
it." It sounds like that wonderful Second City comedy skit gone viral,
with a group raising money for World War III called, "The Americans for
Whatever Barack Obama Wants."
What Obama wants right now from his leftist base is support or at least
silence on Syria -- and his friends in Hollywood have sycophantically
obliged.