Celebutards (18 page)

T
HE
TV-
WATCHING PUBLIC
knows Martha Stewart as the “domestic diva,” a freakishly exacting homemaker, magazine editor, sales-woman and host of an eponymous daytime TV show. But in 2004, the government added the titles “conspirator,” “liar” and “obstructor of justice” to Stewart’s name, as she was convicted in a federal trial that turned into a three-ring circus with the appearance of famous friends such as Bill Cosby and Rosie O’Donnell. Even actor Brian Dennehy showed up. He called Martha Stewart a “good broad.”

I added to her moniker the title of “domestic dominatrix.” No one bullies toadies and underlings as thoroughly as Martha Stewart.

Born Martha Helen Kostyra on August 3, 1941, in Jersey City, New Jersey, Martha risked the company she founded, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, in 2003 when she was advised by stockbroker Peter Bacanovic to sell her shares of ImClone stock. By selling, the billionaire magnate avoided a loss only of some $45,000.

Ironically, Martha was not charged with the sale, but rather with working diligently to cover up the deed, a crime that harms the integrity of the nation’s stock market. At any point, Martha had an opportunity to simply admit what she did. She could have said, “I’m sorry,” and walked away with barely a slap on the wrist.

Admit she was wrong? You don’t know Martha Stewart.

Defiantly protesting her innocence to the end, she was convicted one cold day in New York of conspiracy, obstruction of an agency proceeding, and making false statements to federal investigators. Bacanovic was hit with convictions for perjury, conspiracy and making false statements.

The day she went down, Stewart, a chinchilla scarf draped around her neck, stepped out of the courthouse and said, “Today is a shameful day. It’s shameful for me, and for my family, and for my beloved company, and for all of its employees and partners.”

Her company is “beloved.” And her family? Not so much.

“What was a small, personal matter became, over the last two years, an almost fatal circus event of unprecedented proportions. I have been choked and almost suffocated to death during that time, all the while more concerned about the well-being of others than for myself, more hurt for them and for their losses than for my own, more worried for their futures than the future of Martha Stewart, the person.”

And then, the sales pitch—“Perhaps all of you out there can continue to show your support by subscribing to our magazines, by buying our products, by encouraging our advertisers to come back in full-force to our magazines.”

A masterful performance. Martha Stewart, criminal, had transformed herself into a victim, and turned her guilty verdict into a business opportunity. She soon became richer than ever before. Message: Don’t mess with a diva wielding garden shears.

Stewart insisted on immediately serving her five-month sentence in the federal penitentiary in Alderson, West Virginia, rather than wait for appeals to go through. Brilliant. Nobody noticed when her appeal was denied.

Before she took off for the can, another billionaire ex-con, convicted tax cheat Leona Helmsley, passed, through me, these words of advice to Martha: Get along.

“I was a good girl,” Helmsley revealed of her eighteen months as an inmate. “I got up early. I went to bed early. I obeyed everything they told me.

“If people are going to be contrary, there’s really nothing that’s going to help them. Darling, they’re not there to torture you. They’re there to reform you.”

Helmsley’s prison secret? “I gave someone a quarter,” she chuckled, “so she made my bed.”

Martha, who treats me with the warmth normally reserved for virulent diseases, did not say goodbye.

S
TEVEN
A
LLAN
S
PIELBERG
,
born December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, has amassed Academy Awards, lavish praise and a net worth estimated at $3 billion as the feel-good director of appealing and highly moralistic films that exude affection for America (
E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial
) and his fellow Jews (
Schindler’s List
). Perhaps Spielberg itched to be edgy. Or maybe he’s spent too many years in Hollywood. But in 2005, he co-produced and directed a film—
Munich
—that made me question his values, his morals, his loyalties. And most of all, his intelligence.

The film concerns the 1972 massacre in Munich, Germany, of eleven Israeli Olympic athletes by Palestinian butchers. Leaving little question as to which side the movie would take, it features a screenplay co-written by Israel-hating Jew Tony Kushner, who describes the establishment of the Jewish state as a “mistake.” Spielberg, not known for subtlety, drives home the point that Israel exists in error.

The film centers around members of the Mossad—Israel’s secret police—assembled to assassinate the killers, one by one. But in the film, one by one, members of the Israeli hit squad suffer crippling crises of conscience. In one memorably annoying scene, an Israeli hit man screams in agony: “All this blood cries back to us! Jews don’t do wrong because our enemies do wrong. We’re supposed to be righteous!” Mercifully, he soon blows himself up.

Munich
reeks of dangerous moral relativism. Unprovoked murder by terrorists is portrayed as no worse a deed than revenge-seeking against unrepentant killers. Spielberg exerted his sense of moral outrage in 2008 when he bowed to Hollywood pressure and resigned as artistic director of the Beijing Olympics, complaining that China did too little to halt bloodshed in Darfur. If only his movie was so morally clear.

Spielberg told
Time
magazine, bizarrely, “A response to a response doesn’t really solve anything.” With that, Spielberg changed the nature of the atrocities committed in Munich from murder, to a “response.” To what, exactly? He never said.

In the end, the demoralized leader of the Israeli hit team, Avner (played by Eric Bana), flees to Brooklyn. The head of Israel’s Mossad (Geoffrey Rush) shows up and tries to lure him back into service, saying his actions will bring peace.

“There is no peace!” Avner wails. In the background, the twin towers of the World Trade Center are visible.

Is Spielberg issuing a ham-handed warning about America’s response to the looming terrorist attacks of 9/11? “Revenge?” he seems to say. “Not such a good idea.”

Last I checked Steven Spielberg does not make foreign policy. For that I am grateful.

W
HAT TO DO IF YOU DISAGREE
with your government? Write a letter? Stage a protest? Vote? If your name is Sharon Stone, you would travel to the heart of the Islamic world and give an anti-American earful to Saudi Arabia.

Stone, born Sharon Vonne Stone on March 10, 1958, in Meadville, Pennsylvania, rocketed to fame by crossing and uncrossing her legs and displaying her goodies in 1992’s
Basic Instinct
. Her reputation as a man-eater got a further boost on the day she famously fed ex-husband Phil Bronstein’s big toe to a Komodo dragon at the Los Angeles Zoo in June of 2001.

But sex kitten roles quickly grated on the starlet, who craved being taken seriously. And yet, crashing into the public consciousness via celebutard-heavy Hollywood requires more strenuous measures than flashing a peace sign at the Oscars or complaining about the president.
Anyone
can do that.

To that end, Stone gave an interview to a newspaper owned by citizens of Saudi Arabia—the country that spawned Osama bin Laden. She said the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States should not have been used as a pretext to launch wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“When we choose war, we should understand that we choose murder, bloodletting and torture,” Stone dramatically told the newspaper,
Al Hayat
, while attending the fourth Dubai International Film Festival in the United Arab Emirates in December 2007. The paper published excerpts in February 2008. Its sister publication,
Leha
, eagerly printed the entire interview.

“I feel at great pain when the spotlight is on the death of 4,000 American soldiers, while 600,000 Iraqi deaths are ignored,” Stone continued—using a number of Iraqi casualties that is widely considered to be vastly overstated. Nevertheless, “War is not a movie. It is a tragedy of dead bodies, victims, the disabled, orphans, widows and the displaced.”

Stone told the Arab media, known for its biases, that she checked out the region because the media in her own country distorted the truth.

“I feel sad when I realize how much truth is being changed or obscured in the American media,” she said. She added that she disapproved of military conflict with Iran, saying the United States should rather negotiate with Tehran or enact a trade boycott and sanctions.

Stone further slammed both Arab nations and Israel for failing to resolve conflicts that have long raged in the Middle East. The answer, Stone suggested, is as simple as joining a twelve-step program.

The region is “addicted” to the status quo, she said vapidly, adding that hysteria takes over whenever a solution to violence is close at hand.

“People sometimes get used to their choices and they fear change,” she said.

The noted Middle East scholar presumably kept her legs tightly crossed, so as not to offend.

Of course, Stone’s hardened and loopy spiritual principles can be bent, for a price. Stone was dropped as Christian Dior’s China pitchwoman, when she remarked, bizarrely, in May 2008 that the killer earthquake that decimated parts of China may have been the result of “bad karma” over China’s treatment of Tibet.

The actress issued a groveling apology, as she tried to save her lucrative ad campaign. “Due to my inappropriate words and acts during the interview, I feel deeply sorry and sad about hurting Chinese people,” she said.

The
Xinhua News
agency dubbed Stone the “public enemy of all mankind.”

That karma’s a real bitch.

B
ORN
R
AMON
G
ERARDO
A
NTONIO
E
STEVEZ
in Dayton, Ohio, on August 3, 1940, the actor known as Martin Sheen shot to fame for starring in 1979’s
Apocalypse Now
. But his helmet hair, not his vertically challenged stature, has typecast him for decades in roles as politicians and presidents. He portrayed both President John F. Kennedy (in the 1983 TV miniseries
Kennedy—The Presidential Years
) and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (in the 1974 TV special
The Missiles of October
). He was White House Chief of Staff A. J. McInnerney (in the 1995 flop
An American President),
and creepy future president Greg Stillson (in 1983’s
The Dead Zone
).

Finally, he played popular liberal President Josiah Bartlet in the TV series
The West Wing
—in which he proved incapable of correctly pronouncing the capital of his supposed home state of New Hampshire, Concord. (Any New Hampshire resident will say Concord is pronounced like “conquered” Sheen insisted on putting stress on the first syllable, like the grape.) But never mind. According to the show, we’re supposed to believe that a lefty Eastern academic could be elected to the White House, too.

Sheen is not like Josiah Bartlet. He’s far to the left. Fortunately, the actor, who’s never attended college, has resisted calls to run for office. “You can’t have a pacifist in the White House,” he said. “I’m an actor. This is what I do for a living.”

That did not stop Sheen from being named honorary mayor of Malibu, California, in 1989. Promptly, he kookily proclaimed the town “a nuclear-free zone, a sanctuary for aliens and the homeless, and a protected environment for all life, wild and tame.” The Malibu Chamber of Commerce considered revoking his title, but chose not to.

Sheen has lent his face to myriad causes, including the anti-Iraq War sleep-in outside President Bush’s ranch in Texas by celebutard Cindy Sheehan. “At least you’ve got the acting president of the United States,” he cracked.

But Sheen far outdistanced himself from the wacky Hollywood pack in October 2007, when he agreed publicly with his actor son Charlie Sheen’s theories that the September 11, 2001, terrorists attacks were an inside job.

“Up until last year I was very dubious,” he said at a Los Angeles anti-war rally. “I did not want to believe that my government could possibly be involved in such a thing. I could not live in a country that I thought could do that—that would be the ultimate betrayal. However, there have been so many revelations that now I have my doubts, and chief among them is [World Trade Center] Building 7—how did they rig that building so that it came down on the evening of the day?”

How indeed? I wish Sheen would return to fighting genocide in Darfur, Sudan, a more appropriate celebutard cause.

But then, that hobby is not as sexy as accusing the government of conspiring in the mass murder of Americans.

H
E’S BEEN CALLED
the “Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization.” He’s also been dubbed a Jewish anti-Semite. And a threat to democracy.

George Soros, who made billions as a hedge fund operator, has financed untold numbers of political and social causes through his lavishly appointed Open Society Institute, an organization that quietly buys influence in the American way of life. Soros is well known for donating to Democrats and the radical group MoveOn.org. But less well publicized was his financing of rallies in favor of illegal immigration that seemed to “spontaneously” erupt around the nation in 2006. The apparent grass-roots nature of the protests clearly had the desired impact on public policy, persuading fence-sitters that illegals were here to stay. Little did we know that George Soros was the Wizard of Oz pulling the strings behind the curtain.

He was born August 12, 1930, in Budapest, Hungary, as Gyorgy Schwartz. His family changed its name in 1936 to the non-Jewish sounding Soros because of rising anti-Semitism in Europe. Soros has said he grew up in a “Jewish, anti-Semitic home.” Some things never change.

Soros came to the United States by way of London, founding Soros Fund Management and co-founding the Quantum Fund, which made him incredibly wealthy. And willing to share: PBS estimated he’s given away $4 billion.

But he’s not above making a buck at others’ expense. He was called the “Man who broke the bank of England” after he sold short $10 billion-worth of pounds in 1992, making a billion in the process, and prompting a devaluation of the pound sterling. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamed called Soros a “moron” for weakening Asian economies through currency speculation. He was convicted of insider trading in France, but paid only (to him) a small fine.

Soros established himself as a self-hating Jew when he said at a 2003 forum in New York that the administrations of President Bush, Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon—and oddly, himself—are to blame for renewed anti-Semitism.

“There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that. It’s not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti-Semitism as well. I’m critical of those policies…If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish…

“I’m also very concerned about my own role because the new anti-Semitism holds that the Jews rule the world…As an unintended consequence of my actions…I also contribute to that image.”

Soros’s organization paid some $720,000 to aid the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, who claimed in interviews that the U.S. government had “censored” his belief that global warming was an imminent threat. But the Soros connection somehow ended up on the cutting room floor,
Investor’s Business Daily
reported in 2007.

It’s stunning to see how many moves aimed at protecting Americans from terrorists have been scrapped or postponed, thanks to Soros’s magic money.

Soros provided cash to the move to ban military tribunals against enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. These were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006. He also pushed the Transportation Security Administration to dump “Secure Flight,” recommended by the 9/11 Commission—which matched airplane passenger lists with the names of known terrorists. Due to the invasion of privacy it presented, the program was suspended in 2006.

He was a key financial supporter behind the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, who took his dough even after Soros compared the Bush Administration to the Third Reich. “America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany,” he said. “We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process.”

But his pet project remains the legalization of marijuana, a cause to which he’s dropped millions. It’s led James Califano, Jimmy Carter’s secretary of Health and Human Services, to blast him as drugs’ “Daddy Warbucks.”

Soros insists there’s nothing wrong with trading money for political influence.

Certainly, $4 billion—and counting—buys a lot of juice.