After having touched off the controversy over former President Barack Obama’s ties to militant preacher Jeremiah Wright in February 2007, I doubt that I’ll ever look at the adage regarding one’s chickens coming home to roost in the same way again.
For the uninitiated: Throughout the 2008 election season, the Rev. Wright story gave rise to several now-iconic video clips of the flamboyant Chicago pastor going on various anti-American, anti-white and anti-Semitic rants, all of which were cited by conservative analysts as evidence of Obama’s lack of fitness to hold the highest office in the land.
One of the video clips, recorded shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on our nation, featured Rev. Wright asserting before his congregation (which at the time included Obama and his family) that the attacks were a herald of “America’s chickens coming home to roost.” As justification, Wright pointed to the United States having allegedly usurped lands from Native American tribes, its military excursions in Grenada, Panama and Libya, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as other instances of what he called “state terrorism.”
We are now seeing instances of chickens coming home to roost across the political continuum. While some of these may be gratifying, others are giving rise to a certain uneasiness for reasons that will become apparent.
In one case, we have widespread condemnation of Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein following a New Yorker exposé which revealed that he committed sexual harassment against numerous women over the span of decades, and that the incidents had been buried via hefty financial settlements. Weinstein has been a Democratic mega-donor for years, so conservative pundits quickly capitalized on how the story epitomized the hypocrisy of the left. Days after the scandal broke, the porcine and rather unhygienic-looking Weinstein was ousted from the film company he helped to found and which still bears his name.
Since the Weinstein story had its genesis in The New Yorker, it was summarily accepted by those on the left, and thus certain Hollywood celebrities were compelled to respond to the story. On Monday, actor George Clooney, who reportedly received his “first big break” in a movie from Weinstein, said, “I’ve known Harvey for 20 years,” but that he had “never seen any of this behavior – ever.”
Which, oddly enough, is nearly word-for-word the response Obama articulated many times in 2008 regarding his former pastor’s militant tirades.
Other than the political angle – which shames those on the left vis-à -vis their ostensible stance on the sexual exploitation of women – neither Weinstein’s behavior nor his status as a grotesque stereotype of Hollywood excess are anything new. Whether we’re talking about silent film actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle killing ‎Virginia Rappe with a wine bottle in 1921 (he did not beat her to death with it), MGM kingpin Louis B. Mayer’s serial sexual abuse of Judy Garland throughout the 1930s, director Roman Polanski sodomizing a 13-year-old girl and then skipping the country for decades, or the revelations of child sexual abuse in Hollywood brought to light by a number of prominent child actors over the last few years, it is apparent that the powerful in Hollywood have always exhibited an abysmal level of moral rectitude.
This top-down amorality permeates all levels of the entertainment industry, and explains why it was perfectly natural for those in Hollywood to sign on to the degenerative social agenda of the political left.
Another recent roosting media chicken involved ESPN’s Jemele Hill. On Sept. 11, the blithely ignorant black network host said on Twitter that President Trump is “a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/other white supremacists,” but a more recent social media outing actually got her suspended from the network. Earlier this week, she responded to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ statement that his players would be benched if they disrespected the flag by tweeting the suggestion that Americans should boycott teams like the Dallas Cowboys over such action.
On the political side – as if Hollywood and pro sports haven’t become eminently political lately – there have been widespread calls for Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., to resign following his statement this week confirming that establishment Republican lawmakers wanted to nullify the November 2016 election that resulted in Trump ascending to the presidency, as well as a New York Times piece in which the senator belittled the president with great relish, then attempted to backpedal with regard to related comments when confronted.
The fact is that Western socialists seek to undo nearly 250 years of societal evolution through a retrogressive movement back to oligarchical rule, and the lion’s share of Republican elected officials in America have been complicit in this effort. Literally dozens of Republican representatives and senators richly deserve to be “primaried” out of office at the earliest possible opportunity for their collusion in this area.
The Corker fiasco will likely give rise to a certain apprehension on the part of Republican voters because it involves a Republican. The sports media upheavals will give pause to voters in general because of the high profile of pro sports. I would point out, however, that no one ever said draining the swamp would be painless.