December 14, 2005
George Clooney for President, Anyway
As long as we're on the subject of actors and the politic - it seems to me that all the really handsome, smart liberal actors stay in the background doing good works and never run for office. Harrison Ford, Robert Redford, Tim Robbins and George Clooney come to mind.
In an interview for for timesonline.uk George Clooney, director of both thinking-person-films "Good Night and Good Luck" and "Syriana" says, among other things:
“I don’t know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues. We thought that blacks should sit at the front of the bus, that women should be allowed to vote, that maybe McCarthy was a jerk, that Vietnam was wrong and strip-bombing Cambodia was probably stupid. We’ve been on the right side of all these issues.”
His one regret is that the Democratic party he has always supported failed to confront the Bush administration in the run-up to the war in Iraq. As a result, he thinks, some of the party’s leading figures — notably Senator Hillary Clinton, frontrunner for the 2008 presidential race — may be in for a rougher ride than they realise from disillusioned Democrat voters.
“The Democrats were scared on Iraq and the truth is they backed themselves into a corner,” says Clooney. “They didn’t have the political resolve to tough it out and now they are paying the price.” .......
I [Tony Allen-Mills] asked Clooney if he felt any sense of vindication that two years after he was denounced as a traitor, his doubts about the war have become mainstream: “You would feel some sense of vindication if 10 of our kids hadn’t been killed the other day just outside Falluja with a rocket-propelled grenade. You don’t see any of us standing up going, hey, hey, we were right. There’s nothing fun about being on the right side of history if the children of friends of mine are being killed .......
Clooney insists that he has no intention of running for political office — he has always described himself as a “yes, I did it” candidate, meaning that he would have to admit to a long list of past misdeeds with wine, women and more besides if ever he submitted himself to electoral scrutiny.
Instead he sees himself as “an irritant — picking at the scab a little — to challenge authority. My father taught me that”.
This is what I call a real heart throb.
Posted by Dakota at December 14, 2005 10:20 AM