Actor Steven Weber Exposes the Totalitarian Heart of the Left

It’s easy to dismiss the political ravings of the celebrity left as so much insubstantial hot air, but they occasionally provide a useful exposé of the totalitarian streak just beneath the surface of the “tolerant” left – as in a recent online commentary from actor Steven Weber.

If you are familiar with Weber at all, it’s likely from his Wings sitcom fame in the early 90s. You may be even less familiar with the fact that he is also a frequent political blogger at Huffington Post, the one-stop shop for narcissistic pop culture demagogues like Weber, Russell Simmons, and purported comedian Russell Brand.

Last week Weber, a self-described “wise-ass” (he got that half-right anyway), posted a painfully unfunny political rant there entitled “Comedy Relief.” As near as I can decipher it, the piece asserts that conservatives are a big joke, what with their insistence on sabotaging this country and demonizing the genius President Obama despite all the good he has accomplished.

Weber clearly amuses himself, but when it comes to savagely funny and incisive political commentary, the man is no Mark Steyn. Here’s an example of his wit and insight into current events: “Bin Laden’s been gone, Qaddafi’s ka-dead, and the Arab Spring’s been sprung.” Weber actually cites these as examples of Obama’s “real foreign policy victories.”

He is apparently uninformed that the death of bin Laden has done nothing to diminish al Qaeda’s worldwide vigor; that post-Qaddafi Libya has become a fountain of illicit arms making their way into the hands of terrorists and fueling conflicts elsewhere; and that even the mainstream media have quietly abandoned the rosy misnomer “Arab Spring” in the wake of Islamic barbarians ravaging the Middle East. In fact, Obama’s primary “foreign policy victories” have been to facilitate the spread of sharia and alienate our allies like England and Israel. On second thought, I suppose Weber has a valid point – after all, those are victories from Obama’s point of view.

I will also concede that Weber is right about his vague statement that Obama has the American people “aroused and assembling.” Yes, millions of Americans are aroused and assembling – not in support of Obama, but in opposition to his dismantling of our Constitutional rights, our military, our economy, our borders, our very exceptionalism.

I must disagree, however, with Weber’s accusation that the right is “actively preventing” Obama from fixing the economy. If only that were so, since Obama’s strategy for “fixing” the economy is to turn America into Greece. Unfortunately the Republican leadership is doing very little to hinder Obama from that goal.

Weber’s convoluted rambling continues:

The corporate media is taking the same sought-for outcomes which have wildly eluded the Right and reconstituting them into their kooky contrivances, constructing their alternate realities at odds with what is actually happening in the streets and in the people’s houses that line them.

Since I have no idea what that translates into in English, I’ll simply let it stand as an example of Weber’s inability to construct a point or to argue it convincingly – not that HuffPost readers demand that from their bloggers.

He derides the right for their “painfully obvious abortion fetish.” Yes, how perverse of us to try to stem the tide of millions of unborn being violently and thoughtlessly discarded. The left rush to exploit children when it suits their painfully obvious gun-grab fetish, but turn a blind eye to them when it suits their painfully obvious baby-murder fetish.

Weber sneers also at the right’s “glorification of Ayn Rand,” whose books and philosophy he probably has no time to explore, considering he is busy with scripts for TV shows like Hot in Cleveland and the cartoon The Ultimate Spider-Man.

“Driven to real madness by unadulterated greed they have embraced an ideology, the success of which hinges upon the very ruin of this nation,” Weber belches forth, ignoring the historical fact that the engine of capitalism is precisely the reason for the world-beating prosperity America once enjoyed; it is the big-government progressivism Weber favors that is bringing about “the very ruin of this nation.” But that’s an inconvenient truth, so he simply falls back on the juvenile accusation that “all these greed-saturated corporate brainiacs” depend on “obsolete, dumb ass [sic] bully tactics to make their money.”

He goes on, pointlessly, to attack former Republican presidential candidates like Herman Cain and Rick Santorum (um, the election’s over, Mr. Weber) for something he calls the right’s “Assault On America” and “the relentlessly reflexive kneecapping from the FOX folks.” “It’s sedition as vaudeville,” he quips in an apparent attempt at a punchline (proving that brevity, in Weber’s case, is devoid of wit). Sedition? During the Bush years, Hilary Clinton proclaimed that “dissent is patriotic,” but when the totalitarian left occupies the White House, opposition is treason.

Finally Weber runs out of diarrhetic verbal flourishes and offers his solution to all this resistance from the right:

The scale of Right Wing sociopolitical sabotage necessitates a Nuremberg-scale trial for all the corporate agents and treasonous capitalisto-fascist architects of our democracy's current and most pressing misery. From the blatant Republican policy doublespeak emanating from think-tank sponsored word doctors to the outright obstruction and lies expectorated by Republican congressional representatives and senators, the very concept of governance can only be considered once the culprits are removed.

You read that right – Weber is equating Republicans with Nazi war criminals and advocating Nuremberg-like show trials, because “governance can only be considered” (whatever that means) once the “capitalisto-fascist” [sic] traitors are “removed.” He doesn’t specify how they should be removed, whether by firing squad or simply re-education camps, but regardless, his recommendation exposes the totalitarian heart of the supposedly tolerant left, who are all about every diversity except diversity of opinion.

The left would be much happier simply eliminating any opposition as casually as they carry out abortions. That way, they can pursue their liberty-crushing utopian vision unfettered by the frustrating, messy compromise of two-party democracy.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 4/16/13)