Meryl Streep exercises more demagoguery of Trump as politics invade the Golden Globes, White House defends Streep
Meryl Streep used her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes to attack President-elect Donald Trump for appearing to mock a disabled New York Times reporter in 2015 and displayed Hollywood’s demagoguery of a Trump administration. President Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest on Monday defended Streep’s speech as “thoughtful.”
“…Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press,” Streep said, listing off a ton of celebrities born in other countries and around the nation and then said “So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”
Really? Football and MMA?
Actress and cast member of “Into the Woods” Meryl Streep takes part in a Q&A following a screening of the film at the DGA Theater. 2014 in New York City. The Q&A can be seen at Yahoo Movies and the Yahoo Screen App
(Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Walt Disney Studios)
“…there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it.
“O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.”
There was no mention of the AP press scandal or the IRS targeting non-profit organizations during the Obama administration.
“She clearly was delivering a thoughtful, carefully considered message that she believes in deeply,” Earnest said when asked about the speech. “It seemed to me to be fairly straightforward exercise of her First Amendment rights as a citizen of the United States.”
Well, except freedom of religion and freedom of conscience which have been under attack for eight years.
“He’s got institutional responsibilities,” the spokesman said of Trump. “He has to set aside those personal feelings in order to preside over an effective transition … The president has faithfully presided over a process that has done exactly that.”
Trump responded by dismissing Streep as an “overrated” performer and a “Hillary [Clinton] flunky who lost big.”
He added that “for the 100th time, I never ‘mocked’ a disabled reporter (would never do that).”
photo/ screenshot of video coverage
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[…] hardly alone as Meryl Streep tainted to celebration at the Golden Globes with her nonsensical, sanctimonious lecture on politics as she […]