Oy

Everybody's offering up their opinions on the super-sized celebrity blog at The Huffington Post. Since I'm mostly interested in the stuff these celebrities do for a living -- arts n' entertainment -- I thought I'd go through the ten zillion posts and see if there's any arts content there.

Conclusion: Not much. David Frum's wife Danielle Crittenden, one of that weird generation of blonde conservatives who rose to prominence in the '90s -- for the uninitiated, she's sort of like Ann Coulter, except she's a woman -- has a couple of typically lame pieces about Hollywood liberals. Richard Bradley gives us the shocking news that movies aren't very good these days. Larry Gelbart reminds me again of why I think he's an overrated joke writer. Tina Brown is, well, the Tina Browniest. And the Thirtysomething guy writes a post that I think I already read some years earlier, when they had that flap over the sanitized videos of Titanic.

As a clearing-house for famous and semi-famous people to give their thoughts on politics, frankly, it's not all that bad (superficial, yes, but not bad) and once they figure out how to give people a way to track new posts from their favorite writers (instead of having to wade through the aforementioned ten zillion posts), it might even be semi-successful. But they need some art/culture stuff in there, if only because culture is part of the political conversation.

Also, here's a question that occurs to me: when did the term "Hollywood liberal" become common? I would assume that at any particular point in time, a majority of Hollywood movie actors would have been fairly liberal, but it seems like it's not until fairly recently that the idea that Hollywood celebrities = liberal has become a common topic of conversation. Personally I don't see why the term "Hollywood liberal" should be more of a pejorative term than "Wall Street convervative" (a wealthy stockbroker might not know any less about foreign policy than a movie actor, but he undoubtedly doesn't know any more).