HOLLYWOOD, OUR CENTER OF POLITICAL THOUGHT – AT 8:51 A.M. ET:   Can there be any doubt?  Who needs Lincoln when you have Oprah?  Who needs Jefferson when you have Meryl?  Who needs a Constitution when you have the edicts handed down by the "Academy"?  Look to Hollywood for political wisdom.  It'll only take a few seconds.  From Wes Pruden at the Washington Times: 

We’ve just completed the first presidential primary of the 2020 election year, and the decision is unanimous.

This was the Hollywood primary — not to be confused with the California primary — and after the votes were counted, there wasn’t a dry eye or a deplorable in sight.

The winner was Oprah Winfrey, the onetime actress, sometime activist and full-time talk-show hostess and now a presidential nominee.

You might even call her the front-runner of the Pity Party.

Or so the Hollywood branch of the Pity Party decided, assembled as it was in Beverly Hills for the annual dinner of the Golden Globes, one of the endless occasions of the Hollywood glitterati to exchange prizes with one another. This is a rite that has yet to catch on with plumbers, morticians and other professionals, with prizes for the most effective use of say, a bathroom plunger or, the most skillful application of rouge on a dearly departed.

Miss Winfrey had a very good night, with a moving speech celebrating a hero and a heroine “of color.” She invoked pathos (and even a touch of bathos) reciting how she watched an Academy Awards telecast as a little girl, “sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother’s house in Milwaukee,” and how thrilled she was when Sidney Poitier — “the most elegant man I had ever seen, his tie was white and of course his skin was black” — was called up to the stage to accept his Oscar.

And...

But Hollywood, suffering from a long bout of feelings of irrelevancy, is back with the gaga. Seth Meyers, the emcee at the Golden Globes, credited his remarks at a dinner of the White House Correspondents Association for goading Donald Trump into the 2016 race for president (the goad was actually a speech by Barack Obama). Meryl Streep says Oprah has no choice, now that she carried the Hollywood Primary, but to run. Indeed, Mzz Streep is ready to be secretary of State in the Oprah administration, eager to negotiate with heads of state, since she once portrayed Margaret Thatcher in a movie.

Stedman Graham, Oprah’s fairly significant other, thinks she’s up for a run for the White House.

“It’s up to the people,” he says, generously. “She would absolutely do it.” Tom Hanks is widely tipped already for Oprah’s running mate, though her natural running mate is Beyonce, but only if she has been winked at, and it’s hard to imagine that she hasn’t.

COMMENT:  Politically, Hollywood is a joke.  You can be sure that most of the speeches made by the "stars" who spoke – "stars" most of us have never heard of – were written by PR men or interns at talent agencies. 

What many people don't realize about Hollywood is that it's actually a rather boring place.  Yes, there are plenty of good, hard-working people, but there is so much fluff on top that you often can't see the work.  And then there is the characteristic that links Hollywood with its sister industry, the federal government.  And that is the colossal waste of time.  When I was out there I sometimes thought that the objective of most of those I met was to do nothing.  No one in Hollywood is fired for doing nothing.  It's when you do something that you get in trouble. 

I don't believe that most voters care what Meryl Streep stands for.  Or Streisand.  Or the hopeless Michael Moore.  They care what's on their dinner table, and they care about the schools their kids attend.  And they watch movies for entertainment, not politics. 

Will Oprah be president?  I hope not...unless she first learns where North Korea is.

January 9, 2018