Recording artists - singing a different tune these days??

Perfect. Just perfect!!

George W. Bush was president of the United States, and celebrities came out of the woodwork, spewing their political vitriol like they had some kind of authority on the subject.

Then Obama ran for president. Again, Hollywood was everywhere. Oprah and Alec Baldwin and Ben Affleck and Elton John and God knows who else took to their global soapboxes to lecture about how this man was the Second Coming of Christ. Literally. It was frighteningly bizarre how these people bought into his whole schtick. (Guantanamo Bay will close within a year of his being elected... yeah, how's that workin' out for ya, pal??)

But, whether you were a supporter of Bush or not, or a supporter of Obama or not, the question was and still remains...

WHY do celebrities think that their opinions on anything political are more valid, or worthy of that global soapbox, than yours, or mine? WHO the hell are these people?

I'll tell you a few things that a growing number of them have in common -

1) They're really, really greedy, obsessively so.
2) They're reallly, really stupid, embarrassingly so.
3) They're being really, really exposed for being #1 & #2, delightfully so.

Unless you've been living under a rock these past couple of weeks, you must know that Muammar Gaddafi over there in Libya is fending off protests by the Libyan people who are eager to oust this genocidal maniac. The protests first started in Egypt, and their president, Hosni Mubarek, stepped down. Then, Libyans took to the streets, trying to get rid of this nutjob Gaddafi who has been running - or should I say "ruining" - this obscenely oil-rich nation for decades. Seems he's not so eager to step down as his Egyptian counterpart was, hence the current violent, bloody uprising in Libya.

That's all well and good. What does that have to do, you ask, with the world of obsessively greedy, embarrassingly stupid Hollywoodites?

Just this...

On an almost daily basis, there are reports of mostly music artists, who have been paid exorbitant amounts of money to perform for Gaddafi's family.

The list of these artists includes Nelly Furtado, 50 Cent, Lionel Richie, Beyonce, Mariah Carey, and now yesterday, Usher joined their dubious ranks.

I believe it was Mzzz Carey who made a cool $2 million for her performance. Might have been Beyonce. Whatever. They are, to a man, all saying they had no idea for whom they were performing.

Listen... I make a micro-fraction of that, annually, but I can certainly tell you in no uncertain terms who's paying it to me. I have a very hard time believing that someone approaches these people's handlers, offers $2 million for a private concert, and no one asks who's footing the bill. Basic human curiousity, combined, in their case, with ego if not any sense of morality, would REQUIRE someone to ask. I don't care HOW rich they are. They're not that rich that they take $2 million for a night's work for granted. They're not.

Which brings me back to the point about Bush & Obama. Here are all these people with their global soapboxes, calling any Republican (especially Sarah Palin) everything imaginable and unimaginable. They ridicule anyone who does not toe the Democrat party line, or who dares run for public office against their Chosen One. Yet they'll accept millions from a man who is being charged with crimes against humanity.

NOW, of course, now that these payouts have been revealed, they're tripping over themselves to make sure we all know that they're giving the money to various charities. How nice.

How friggin' hypocritical.

I am now content in the knowledge that any moral authority that these people had in preaching their politics to their fellow countrymen and the rest of the world is now gone. However, that assumes they had any moral authority to begin with, which they most certainly did not.

So, the next time I hear some clapped-out, strung-out celebrity rattling on about politics in any way, shape or form, I will smirk and know that this person is merely a puppet of the Democratic party, and doesn't have the faintest clue about what they're saying. They're merely reading scripts, or singing someone else's lyrics, like they do in their day jobs.

Bottom line - Their opinions are no more valid than anyone else's. The crying shame about this is that, sadly, they have the right to vote. There really should be an IQ test people must take to earn the right to vote.

When I run my own country, that will be the first law of the land - pre-election IQ tests! And the second law will be no multi-million dollar concerts for my family. Instead, I'll download pirated music from websites and play it to my heart's content - for free!! YAY!! I'll even hold up a Bic lighter and sway back and forth, for effect.

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