By Kevin Foley
Have you noticed how many celebrities who call themselves conservative are "un-cool?"
Hank Williams, Jr. compared President Barack Obama to Hitler on Fox recently. Williams is the aging outlaw country performer whose tired "Are You Ready…" theme has kicked off Monday Night Football for the last 20 years (does Disney really think we can't get enough of this yahoo?).
Williams' comments were judged un-cool by ESPN and the theme was mercifully pulled ahead of the Colts-Buccaneers tilt.
I got to thinking about how Junior's insights mirrored those of fellow sexagenarian Ted Nugent, whom I wrote about here recently. Nugent hates all things progressive, especially women who are Democrats, many of whom he calls "whores."
Nugent's un-cool views are so far off the chain that his only outlets for political expression these days are the Washington Times, Sean Hannity, and on stage before a diminishing fan base that has followed him for the last 40-odd years.
Then there's 72-year-old John Voight, whose turn as a male prostitute in "Midnight Cowboy" led to a successful career that mostly petered out after an anaconda regurgitated him in a 1997 movie. No sooner was Obama elected, than Voight was calling the president a "false prophet." Not cool.
There are other conservative celebrities such as Pat Boone, Rick Schroeder, and Chuck Norris, to name a few, but the list is pretty un-cool when compared to the list of celebs who say their politics are liberal.
Seriously, which concert tickets would you buy, Dave Mathews or Lee Greenwood? What film would you pay to see? A movie starring Matt Damon or one with Tom Selleck?
Would you laugh harder at Kathy Griffen or Larry the Cable Guy?
It's the cool factor.
P. Diddy, Ben Affleck and Lady Gaga versus Shannon Doherty, Amy Grant and Wayne Newton.
Obama's 2008 acceptance speech featured the coolest of the cool, Stevie Wonder. Over at the McCain-Palin convention, it was Christian rock singer Rachael Lampa. I'm just sayin'.
What is it about progressive politics that draw celebrities like Cher, Sean Penn and George Clooney?
"I'm a liberal," Clooney told Larry King. "I'm confused when that became a bad word ... the liberal movement morally, you know, has stood on the right side of an awful lot of issues. We thought that blacks should be allowed to sit at the front of the bus and women should be able to vote, McCarthy was wrong, Vietnam was a mistake."
Charlie Daniels is having none of this A-list moralizing. The grouchy septuagenarian country fiddler no doubt reflected widely held conservative sentiments in his 2003 "Open Letter to the Hollywood Bunch" addressed to Clooney and his fellow liberals:
"You people are some of the most disgusting examples of a waste of human protoplasm as I've ever had the displeasure to hear about."
Clooney seems to have a point while Daniels' eludes me. Maybe that's what defines cool and un-cool.
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Kevin
Foley is president of KEF
Media Associates, an Atlanta-based producer and distributor
of sponsored news content to television and radio media. |