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Friday, October 5, 2012

The Celebrity Left’s Obsession with Obscenity


As the election draws near, President Obama’s celebrity supporters are stepping up their political presence in pop culture – and in the process, exposing their bizarre, immature predilection for spewing obscenities.

Foul-mouthed purported comedienne Sarah Silverman, for example, recently fired off a controversial, unsurprisingly unfunny question to Republican candidate Mitt Romney on Twitter, in which she asked him, “Quick Q: Do you eat p**s? Need to know asap. Thx.” Hilarious. And such a useful contribution to the political discussion in the most critical election of our time, if not in all of American history.

You may remember, if you keep up with the juvenile antics of Hollywood’s out-of-work D-list comics, that Silverman recently posted an online video address to Republican billionaire and Romney supporter Sheldon Adelson. In that mercifully short clip, she proposes to Adelson that he give his millions to Obama instead, in return for which, “I will scissor you, wearing a bikini bottom, through to fruition. That means until you c*m”:

Do you know how many Republican billionaires are giving money to Romney? All of them. How many of them are getting scissored by a bikini-bottomed Jewess with big naturals?

Then she attempts to demonstrate said scissoring with a very unwilling and mortified-looking dog on a couch. Classy. And why that doesn’t qualify as animal abuse, I don’t know.

Moving on from the desperate Silverman, let’s turn our attention to a “How Celebrities Rock the Vote” video featuring a motley collection of lesser-known TV “stars” encouraging people to get out and vote. In the video, posted last week on the “Funny or Die” comedy website, Kathy Griffin, who revels in her grating persona of an aging, raw-voiced prostitute, says she’s voting because everyone at the polling place is of legal age: “Seriously, I can f**k anyone there!” Actor Neil Patrick Harris says he votes because he likes hitting on the little old ladies who check him in at the polling places, because they “have no teeth,” wink wink. The man best-known as the husband of former crack addict/Black-Eyed Peas singer Fergie, an actor whose name no one can ever remember, says he votes because “I love you, America. I f**king love you!”

Despite the fact that the Rock the Vote video is loaded with openly Democratic celebrities and features not a single openly conservative one, the video isn’t explicitly partisan; Obama’s name is not mentioned, and another of its unrecognizable celebs urges everyone to get out and vote for “the candidate of your choice.” But then he adds the punch line: “at least ten times.” That nod to voter fraud would be a funnier line if it didn’t represent the left’s actual election strategy, which consists of voting multiple times and collecting votes from dead people and cartoon characters.

Academy Award-nominated actor Samuel L. Jackson, who believes Obama’s opponents are racist (this, from the man who once said that Obama’s “message didn’t mean s**t to me,” and “I voted for Barack because he was black”) and whose unparalleled F-bomb skills are becoming something of a lucrative side career, recently starred in a video called “Wake the F**k Up,” a parody of his spoken rendition of the children's-book-for-adults, Go The F**k To Sleep. In the political ad, Jackson magically appears in the homes of apathetic voters of all ages to poetically browbeat them into taking this election seriously. Here’s a sample of Jackson's colorful, as well as misleading, language:

Sorry, my friends, but there’s no time to snore
An out-of-touch millionaire just declared war
On schools, the environment, unions, fair pay
We’re all on our own if Romney has his way
And he’s against safety nets
If you fall, tough luck
So, I strongly suggest that you wake the f**ck up.

Jackson interrupts an elderly couple getting intimate, and warns them about the disaster they face if Romney’s elected. “What do you want us to do?” the old lady asks. He shouts back, “Say ‘Hell no, motherf***ers!’” The video closes with a little girl shouting out her window to the world, “Wake the f**k up!” Only progressives, who in recent years have stepped up their anti-family strategy of destroying the innocence of children, could find a child shouting the F-word to be funny.

The Jackson video was sponsored by the liberal Jewish Council on Education and Research Super PAC, which also produced another expletive-sprinkled Sarah Silverman video, this one encouraging Florida seniors to take “the great schlep” to the ballot box and vote for Obama.

These are just the recent standout examples of the celebrity left’s fondness for obscenity in political discussion. It’s always there as an underlying constant. Bill Maher, for example, the host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, can barely get through a sentence on his political show without crudity, and his audience eats it up.

What’s the point of this barrage of F-bombs? What does this obsession with obscenity say about the left – and the right? The left likes to believe that they are “edgy,” and that conservatives are uptight. Substitute “juvenile” for “edgy” and “adult” for “uptight,” and they’d be correct.

Lighten up Tapson, it’s comedy! This is all just meant to be a lighthearted take on the normally heavy topic of politics, right? Not entirely. The expletive-laden silliness educates no one about the issues and adds absolutely nothing to the political conversation, but that’s not the intention. The gutter language is aimed at winning the support of left-leaning youth who respond less to serious examination of the issues than to cool celebrities and “edgy” behavior. It is aimed at a generation that is still young enough to be titillated by dirty words and that gets most of its news from Facebook, Twitter, and satirical news sites like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It is designed to ridicule conservatives as uptight old fogeys like their parents, and to paint the left as youthful and hip by contrast. And what young person doesn’t want to be hip?

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 10/4/12)