Mel Gibson’s man for Congress

August 11, 2006

If you’ll indulge a little Friday-afternoon diversion, I thought this was hilarious.

A California Republican will no longer use a campaign fund-raising letter penned by [tag]Mel Gibson[/tag] following the actor’s anti-Semitic outburst during a traffic stop, the candidate’s spokesman said on Wednesday.

State Sen. [tag]Tom McClintock[/tag], Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, will stop mailing the letter in light of Gibson’s comments after being pulled over for speeding last month, spokesman Stan Devereux said.

The word “stop” was my favorite part of that sentence. Yes, Mel Gibson’s letter on McClintock’s behalf has already gone out and has already produced campaign contributions for McClintock’s campaign. Little did the candidate know at the time….

I particularly enjoyed the spin from McClintock allies.

Republican political consultant Karen Hanretty said McClintock’s Democratic challenger and state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi should not make an issue of the Gibson letter. “It’s not unusual for politicians to be endorsed by entertainers who have problems in their past,” Hanretty said.

Problems in their “past“? Gibson was arrest for DUI, at which point he ranted about “fu**ing Jews” and declared Jews “responsible for all the wars in the world,” two weeks ago.

As for McClintock’s response, his campaign spokesperson said the candidate was “disillusioned by the Gibson incident.” Given Gibson’s comments, and the media firestorm that ensued, McClintock couldn’t do better than “disillusioned”?

Of course McClintock can’t do better than be “disappointed.” The majority of his voters agree with Mad Mel! Why do you think he managed to “not notice” the letter till he got caught on it?

  • I love watching the anti-semitic and pro-zionist conservatives distance themselves from each other.

    Anything to make that unholy alliance fall apart is fine by me.

    Of course, it’s particularly fun to see the Theocratic Reactionaries, who happen to be both anti-semitic and pro-zionist, trying to keep their allies together.

  • McClintock is worse than Mel anyway. Mel’s letter would actually raise the level of discourse by the Republican right.

    I don’t like Mel but it’s hard to condemn him too much for what he might say when he’s drunk. The condemnation should be for driving while he was drunk, I think. Drunks say the darndest things.

  • Dale,
    So your theory is drinking causes uncontrollable hate speech ?
    Sorry, my theory is that the hate was already there, the drink just loosened the control valve.

    I don’t really give 2 cents about Gibson, but I really not down with people acting like being drunk is an excuse to be an ass. They are/were already asses, the drinking just lowered the mechanism that lets them hid it.

    We have all said stupid crap when we were drunk, but it’s all stuff that we were thinking, but had the common sense sober to keep it in.

  • Sorry Dale, I see it the other way around. While Gibson clearly was too intoxicated to operate a motor vehicle, his BAC was hardly high enough to make him irrational. That’s the part of this that puzzled me. Getting upset over a traffic stop is probably a fairly common reaction. How on Earth that led him to an anti-Semitic diatribe is beyond me. A .147 BAC, by itself, is simply not high enough to explain his bizarre behavior.

  • Garamendi should not make an issue of the Gibson letter.

    This is hilarious, coming from one of the opposing candidate’s consultants. Imagine a consultant for Delay, Ney–oh, wait, let me think of someone who’s running–saying, “My opponent should not make an issue of our candidates connections to Jack Abramoff. . .” (because it might be a potent political weapon).

  • Well, Scott and Joe, you obviously aren’t heavy drinkers. Or Freudians. 🙂 I think you’re both right about Mel’s hate and that drinking is no excuse for his ranting. On the other hand, politeness and suppression are pretty much what keeps society functioning. I think our lizard brains contains all kinds of censored ideas and drinking opens that cauldron sometimes. Drunken-ranting alone wouldn’t affect my judgment of a person.

    Hey Lance, welcome back. I like “Theocratic Reactionaries, who happen to be both anti-semitic and pro-zionist”. Good distinction!

  • Hi Dale,

    What I’ve found deeply distrubing is the embrace certain Israelis will make of the Theocratic Reactionaries striving for the end of the world who think most Jews are going straight to hell. These are their friends?

    Like our asking Osama bin Laden to fight our war in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

  • “…the actor’s anti-Semitic outburst during a traffic stop…”

    You really have to slow down and chew that quote.

    I mean really….
    How does a traffic stop engender an anti-Semitic outburst?

    There is absolutely no cause and effect between the fore and the aft…

    None whatsoever.

    In other words…. Gibson is absolutely insane.
    His brain is diseased.
    He is mentally ill with rampant hate…

    And yes I mean that quite literally.

    “Book him Daniel”

  • I don’t demonize Mel Gibson for his drunken ranting. I demonize him for the violent theocratic porno movie he made.

    Koreyel 5-0 is right. There is a lot of unexplained narrative that went on that night. One thing I wonder is if cops routinely transcribe drunken rantings for the record. And were his quotes accurate? I think the Bible has shown us how weak an oral tradition is on accuracy. Another thing is that Mel said he didn’t remember what he said, but he accepted the account of it. Shows he knows he has those thoughts in him. I wonder if at some point during the encounter if Mel thought, “Gee, I becoming my dad.”

  • “So should I feel guilty for still liking “Mad Max”? Or “Gallipoli”?” – 2Manchu

    Only for liking “Mad Max” and “The Road Warrior”

    “Gallipoli” is okay 😉

  • Lance,

    There’s also “The Year of Living Dangerously”,
    So, outside of the “Mad Max” trilogy, we’ll say movies that he made when he still had an Australian accent.

  • Sorry Dale, alocohol doesn’t create thoughts that aren’t there. It does loosen the tongue to allow thoughts that are there that might be censored when sober to come out.

    Since you obviously don’t know much about Mel, and I happen to personally know more than a few people here in “Da Biz” who have worked with him, allow me to tell you that this wasn’t the first time he has said things like this when drunk (or sober in some company). The Hollywood Jews will allow pretty much anyone who makes lots of money to say pretty much anything, and not respond publically to it, but witness the response when Marlon Brando (who at the time wasn’t making anyone much of anything) merely said that the Jews control (not run) Hollywood. He had to go through a public recantation, then had to go visit the Museum of Tolerance and have Rabbi Weir declare his recantation sincere, and even then he wasn’t really ever let off the hook during his remaining final years.

    In point of fact, Mel Gibson is the son of a vicious, abusive alcoholic and well-known far-right anti-semite, who is such a white supremacist that he took his family to Australia in 1967 due to the “whites only” immigration policy in force at the time, to get away from an America going through a civil rights revolution.

    It is fairly well-known (even among you Freudian heavy drinkers), that a son always wants to please his father to the extent possible. With this kind of father, there are two reponses: absolute surrender or absolute rejection. I had a father similar (not completely, thank God, but enough that I know the game), and I rejected his b.s. – which doesn’t mean that when I’ve been drunk I haven’t said bad things I later regretted and apologized for. But I could point to plenty of actions taken when sober that actively demonstrated complete opposition to such beliefs and statements, so my apologies were sincere and were accepted.

    Mel, on the other hand, chose the route of complete submission, to the point where he refuses to say anything against his father’s loonie beliefs, and has spent $5 million of his own money to build a “Traditionalist” Church in Malibu, as well as spend other money promoting this sect of disbelievers. As can be seen in his movies, he is anti-Semitic, most prominently in “The Passion of the Christ,” which all the righty Christianist apologists said wasn’t anti-Semitic (only it was).

    Mel may know (most of the time unless he thinks he’s around people who think similarly) to censor this crap in public when sober, but he’s a mean drunk, and when he does drink this crap always comes out to some degree or other, and it’s been happening for a good 20 years that I am aware of from the stories I’ve heard from people I know aren’t bullshitters.

    So, sorry to say, but in this case the proper thought is the old Roman statement: “in vino veritas.”

  • I didn’t think a blood alcohol level of .12 was all that drunk — maybe three glasses of wine (?) But perhaps I’m mistaken.

    Loved Steven Colbert’s routine on it–something to the effect that Mel was playing a drinking game with his buddies, where you had to take a drink for every Zionist plot you saw in the world and of course Mel saw lots of them.

  • If Mel Gibson said, “The Hollywood Jews will allow pretty much anyone who makes lots of money to say pretty much anything, and not respond publically to it,” I would have considered it a slur, Tom.

    Rascism is endemic in the public psyche. Give any drunk of any persuasion a Rorschach test and you’ll come up with ugliness that would curl a caliph’s toes.

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