Pick a card, any card. Doesn’t much matter which one: They’re all wild; they’re all crazy.
1 Last week, a group called One Million Moms, proponents of family values and common decency — I was raised to have both — called on JCPenney to rescind its new endorsement deal with Ellen DeGeneres because she’s gay.
“Funny, [sic] that JC Penney thinks hiring an open homosexual spokesperson will help their [sic] business when most of their [sic] customers are traditional families,” the group’s Web site scolded.
Does that mean the organization would have had no problem had DeGeneres not been an “open homosexual,” if she’d instead been a covert one?
Better question: Have any of this group’s members ever watched “Ellen,” her syndicated weekday TV show? Or at least watched it behind closed doors and drawn curtains, with no other members around?
“Ellen” is everything that any decency-in-TV activist could demand, let alone wish for. It’s entertaining — she is extremely funny. It’s clean — her humor is aimed at the shoulders and up, with no cheap-shots, no name-calling — and she consistently demonstrates traditional American kindness and generosity.
How many commercial TV talk/variety shows can make that claim?
DeGeneres is a superb choice to represent the values of traditional American family shoppers (don’t miss the traditional Thanksgiving Midnight Stampedes!), JCPenney and the One Million Moms’ honorary spiritual leader, also with the initials J.C.
As for whether DeGeneres spends eternity in heaven or hell, we can hope that the answer doesn’t come for many years. But of all the trees for the One Million Moms to be barking up, to stop at Ellen DeGeneres’ surely isn’t what my traditional American shopping mom and decency advocate would have done. Even had she been into traditional witch-burnings, she wouldn’t have gone after a good witch.
2 In the same week One Million Moms demanded JCPenney’s removal of DeGeneres, two companies — Suzuki Motors and Radio Shack — rolled out ad campaigns starring 50 Cent, the rapper.
But Fitty, as he’s called, isn’t merely a rapper, he’s a gangster rapper who practices what he raps. He’s a lifelong crime wave — drugs, weapons, assaults, bullet holes — whose N-worded, misogynistic lyrical artistry is loaded with disturbingly violent, hateful, vulgar boasts and down-and-deadly challenges to rival rappers.
In a world that made any sense, the only commercials he’d land would be for bail bondsmen and makers of RIP photo T-shirts. But there he is pitching headphones for Radio Shack and fast cars — suitable for drive-by shootings? — for Suzuki.
50 Cent is among the leading advocates of the sustained self-enslavement of black urban America, yet people keep lining up to throw money at him.
3 Interesting how the news media, TV entertainment news shows and GOP presidential candidates don’t yet know what the American public knows: The only difference between Donald Trump and a neighborhood-variety attention-starved jerk is money.
America’s lucky that way. We have a national bird, a national anthem and, in Trump, a national village idiot.
Do Newt Gingrich, then Mitt Romney — after Trump dumped Gingrich for the front-runner — genuinely believe that standing with Trump before TV cameras as he endorses them actually enhances their credibility? Why not, along with the top clown, seek the endorsement of the guy they shoot out of the cannon?
Can those with legitimate presidential aspirations — those who claim to be the saviors of middle-class America — be so out of touch that they’d play to Trump’s imagined, then purchased self-importance?
What if Gingrich or Romney had said, “Thanks, but no thanks. Donald Trump’s approval is not among my campaign priorities. This is serious stuff; I’m running for president”? You’d think either would have suffered from that, or benefited?