Celebutards (14 page)

Rosie repeatedly let loose the “F” bomb, and said she was sad when Donald Trump called her fat and disgusting because “it was always my dream to give an old, bald billionaire a boner.” She concluded by grabbing her crotch and shouting “Eat me.” Barbara Walters was observed lowering her head on the dais and covering her face with her hand. Two days later, ABC announced Rosie would leave the show when her contract ended in June.

Yet her ugly feud with token
View
conservative Elisabeth Hasselback proved to be the last gasp. It started May 17, when Rosie asked, stupidly, on air, “655,000 Iraqi civilians dead. Who are the terrorists? If you were in Iraq and another country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?” What do you think Rosie meant?

The following Wednesday, Rosie complained her words had been “twisted.” Rosie asked Elisabeth if she believed American soldiers were terrorists. Elisabeth hesitated. Then she sensibly asked Rosie to explain what she meant when she ranted about the troops. But Rosie ignored her.

A couple of days later, Rosie again shot her mouth at Elisabeth: “Because here’s how it gets spun in the media,” she said. “Rosie, big, fat, lesbian, loud Rosie, attacks innocent, pure Christian Elisabeth.”

It was unfair. Elisabeth said, “I just don’t understand why it’s my fault if people spin words that you put out there or phrases that suggest things. And I gave you an opportunity two days ago to clarify the statement that got you in trouble on all those things.”

“That got me in trouble?” Rosie asked sarcastically. “As a friend, you gave me the opportunity. That was very sweet of you. I was asking if you, who actually knows me, do you believe I think our troops are terrorists, Elisabeth? Do you believe that, yes or no?”

Elisabeth put her finger in the air. “Excuse me. Let me speak.”

“You’re going to doublespeak,” said Rosie. “It’s just a yes or a no.”

It went on like this for ten grueling minutes, an eternity for television, as the show switched to a split screen, with each woman in a separate box.

“Every day since September I have told you that I support the troops,” Rosie spat. “I asked you if you believed what the Republican pundits were saying. You said nothing, and that’s cowardly.”

“No, no, no!” Elisabeth shot back. “You will not call me a coward, because No. 1, I sit here every single day, open my heart and tell people exactly what I believe.”

“So do I!”

“Do not call me a coward, Rosie.”

“It was cowardly.”

The next day, Rosie took a planned day off to celebrate Kelli’s birthday. On Friday, March 25, she was gone from the show.

Barbara Walters wished her well.

And looked mighty relieved.

L
AURIE
D
AVID STANDS APART
from the celebutards featured in this volume because she is not an entertainer, politician, minister or prison inmate. She is a wife. Or rather, she was the wife of a fabulously rich and famous person, Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, an achievement that has opened doors to her pet projects and opened wallets in support of her obsession of choice—the urgent, imminent crisis of global warming. But those disciples inclined to enlist in Laurie’s army should be cautioned to do as Ms. David says, not as she does. For while the erstwhile star wife is known to flip the bird at those who drive gas-guzzling Hummers in Los Angeles from behind the wheel of her Prius hybrid, she is then likely to fly, via Gulfstream jet, between her gargantuan, fuel-drinking California mansion and a second, humongous abode in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. For this transgression, she is wholly unapologetic. It is in this hypocritical manner that Laurie David has grown into the living, breathing, dry-cleaning, embodiment of celebrity environmentalism.

She was born Laurie Ellen Lennard on March 22, 1958, in Long Island, New York. Her first brush with fame came when she started a career in New York City booking comedians for David Letterman. There, she met her future husband, Larry, an unknown who wanted five minutes of airtime. He was turned down. Only later would Larry David find fame, fortune and a “busty, shallow” wife—his words—through his wild success with
Seinfeld
, and for starring as a misanthropic comic with a fictionally tolerant spouse on HBO’s
Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The Davids have produced two daughters.

Laurie’s interest in global warming began as a hobby, then turned into an obsession, a religion and finally into a form of performance art in which the ability to spin seemingly contradictory ideas—SUVs bad, Gulfstream jets good—is paramount. She told the environmental website Grist.org that her environmental mania began at a breakfast with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son of the slain politician and an environmentalist himself.

“I sat down to breakfast with Bobby Kennedy and I got up from that table and I have not been the same since,” she said. She was asked what Kennedy actually told her, but she couldn’t remember a thing. “Nothing specific that I can remember. It was like ten years ago. I’m sure we talked about global warming and rivers and oceans and pollution and pesticides and toxins. The gist was that everybody should have the right to clean air and water the way they should have the right to affordable health care and racial equality. What’s more basic than the right to health? One in four black kids in Harlem has asthma because of pollution—now that’s a civil rights issue. It’s an environmental-justice issue. A human issue.”

Something happened in November 2004. Sorry, Laurie, but George W. Bush was re-elected president, soundly beating Democrat John Kerry. Laurie David described taking to her bed and crying for three days. If she neglected her two young daughters. I suppose she might justify the crying jag as serving the greater good. Because by the time she got out of bed, Laurie was more than an environmentalist. She was a crusader. A full-blown, fire-breathing celebutard.

Laurie set out to influence every man, woman, plant and child alive. She converted actors, starlets and studio heads in her circle at the salons she held in her monstrous, Tudor-style mansion in Los Angeles. It’s a house she defends, despite its grotesque energy inefficiency, every bit as fiercely as she defends the planet.

“My philosophy about this stuff is, it’s not all or nothing,” she justified. “A lot of people have that attitude: ‘So you drive a fuel-efficient car, what about your giant house? What about this, what about that?’ I just got asked that on Paula Zahn and I was like, ‘I’m not looking for perfection in any of this.’ We’re an imperfect people. But I really feel strongly that if everyone did one thing, we would be well on our way to a better planet. And I try to do more than one thing in my personal life.

“Of course, I’m obsessed with telling my kids, no long showers and don’t run the water too much when you brush your teeth. I always use both sides of the paper for printing and faxing. I recycle obsessively.”

Then came my absolutely favorite part of her rant: “And since I get a lot of clothes dry cleaned, I take a garment bag to the dry cleaner so that I don’t waste the disposable plastic covers.”

This prompted some perfectly logical questions—if dry cleaning is more harmful to the earth than plastic bags, why not dry clean fewer clothes? And why not live in a smaller house? She did not budge.

“Everybody has to strike their own balance between how they want to live and how they can reduce their impact. If the environmental movement wants to be mainstream, it has to lose its purer-than-thou, all-or-nothing attitude. It has to be pragmatic enough to bring everyone on board. If perfection is the measure, we will fail to appeal to anyone but the fringe.” That is, the green tent should be big enough to hold every hypocritical Hollywood piglet. Even Laurie David.

She revealed to Britain’s
Guardian
newspaper in 2006 that she forced Larry to use hard, recycled toilet paper—though she suspected he secretly filched some of the soft stuff from his daughter’s bathroom that she brought home from friends’ houses. She also admitted to banning Larry’s golf shoes inside the house, because they might bear traces of pesticides. Finally, she limited Larry’s showers to a minute and a half. Good thing Larry David is mostly bald, because that leaves no time for the application of conditioner.

But Laurie also copped to being part of the problem, confessing that she’s a member in good standing of the Lear jet liberal crowd.

“Yes, I take a private plane on holiday a couple of times a year, and I feel horribly guilty about it. I probably shouldn’t do it. But the truth is, I’m not perfect. This is not about perfection. I don’t expect anybody else to be perfect either. That’s what hurts the environmental movement—holding people to a standard they cannot meet.”

Um, I always thought burning excess fossil fuel is supposed to hurt the environment. But what do I know?

Finding detractors on the right is easy. Bernard Goldberg ranked her No. 82 in his 2005 book,
100 People Who Are Screwing Up America
. But Laurie David’s jet-set life-style has brought condemnation even from her pals on the left. Ultra-liberal
Nation
columnist Eric Alterman, a friend, wrote in the
Atlantic
, “Laurie David, who dedicates herself to fighting for improved fuel-economy standards and reviles the owners of SUVs as terrorist enablers, gives herself a pass when it comes to chartering one of the most wasteful uses of fossil-based fuels imaginable: a private plane. (She’s not just a limousine liberal; she’s a Gulfstream liberal.)” Ouch.

New Republic
writer Gregg Easterbrook estimated that “one cross-country flight in a Gulfstream is the same, in terms of Persian-Gulf dependence and greenhouse-gas emission, as if she drove a Hummer for an entire year.” But remember—Laurie David screams at drivers of Hummers. Well, I guess eschewing that vehicle is like a fat person who pigs out on Twinkies, then tries to make amends for her gluttony by drinking Diet Coke.

For a long time, Larry David was forced to adapt. He stuck it out and provided financial support as she authored two books, produced a star-studded comedy special,
Earth to America!
for TBS, and an HBO documentary,
Too Hot Not to Handle
, as well as co-producing the Academy Award-winning,
An Inconvenient Truth
starring Laurie’s fellow celebutard Al Gore.

He found the enthusiasm to speak these words at a fund-raiser for his wife’s pet charity, the National Resources Defense Council, and reproduced them in his wife’s 2006 book,
Stop Global Warming: The Solution is You!
: “Thirteen years ago I met a materialistic, narcissistic, superficial, bosomy woman from Long Island. She was the girl of my dreams. She read
People
magazine, watched hours of mindless television and shopped like there was no tomorrow. Finally I’d met someone as shallow as me. I was hopelessly in love. But then after a few, short months I began to sense that something had changed. She started peppering her conversation with words like ‘ozone layer,’ ‘sustainable forestry’ and ‘toxic runoff.’” But what was not all too painfully obvious was that Larry David, the shallowest man in the world, had married an environmentalist.”

The marriage came to an end in July 2007, when Laurie David filed for divorce after fourteen years of marriage, citing “irreconcilable differences.” The differences reportedly may have had something to do with Martha’s Vineyard resident Bart Thorpe, five years Laurie’s junior. And a Republican. He was helping build a massive property for the Davids, and was frequently spotted in Laurie’s company. His wife filed for divorce as well.

Thorpe was helping build for Laurie a new 25,000-square-foot house, bigger even than Al Gore’s Tennessee spread, which was estimated to use twenty times as much energy as the average home in this country.

Laurie David has not addressed this hypocrisy. Except, when pressed, she told ABC that she’d try to fly commercial. Ick.

Asked by reporters for a reaction to his wife’s abandonment, Larry passive-aggressively quipped, “I went home and turned all the lights on.”

She’s not done yet. In the fall of 2007, Laurie and co-author Cambria Gordon published
The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming.
It’s a children’s book.

“Kids are the most optimistic human beings—they only see the future ahead of them and it’s bright,” David told
Publisher’s Weekly
. “Kids also are the number one influence on their parents, so if you want to reach the parents, go to the kids.”

There you have it. In her long-range plan to indoctrinate the public, Laurie David makes no apologies for scaring the stuffing out of children. It’s all for the greater good!

Pass me a dry cleaning bag, Laurie. I fear I may be sick.

M
UMIA
A
BU
-J
AMAL
—or Mumia, as his disciples affectionately refer to him—has the distinction of being the only celebutard in this volume convicted of first-degree murder. Others have done time, notably Paris Hilton (twenty-two days) and Lindsay Lohan (eighty-four minutes). But none except Mumia has been sentenced to death. If you don’t mind, I’ll just call him Abu-Jamal.

The Black Panther, radio reporter, and cab driver was ordered to die in 1982 for gunning down a Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner, a newlywed who was 12 days shy of his twenty-sixth birthday when he breathed his last. Abu-Jamal’s death sentence was overturned in 2001, and transformed to a life prison term that he is currently serving in Pennsylvania, where he enjoys elite status as the prisoner with an energetic, star-studded fan club. He is routinely invited to address college commencements and municipal and civic organizations, for which he provides taped addresses. In 2003, he was named an honorary citizen of Paris, France—though I doubt he could get a table in a restaurant in downtown Philly. But to a specific swath of celebrity-worshiping America, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been anointed a rock star.

To understand Abu-Jamal’s allure, realize that some inmates draw fan clubs of lonely women and confused men who are convinced the imprisoned are wrongly convicted. But Abu-Jamal has developed not just fans, but total fanatics who believe in him as fervently as they believe in building tremendous houses on California sand. It seems every Hollywood blowhard worth his bloated bank account has developed a thing for Abu-Jamal, from Susan Sarandon to Paul Newman, Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Alexander, and Oliver Stone. Tim Robbins and Mike Farrell took out a full-page ad in
The New York Times
advocating for a new trial, and the Beastie Boys played a concert to raise money for Abu-Jamal’s defense fund. Even former South African President and Nobel Peace prize laureate Nelson Mandela, who served twenty-seven years in his country’s Robben Island prison, has jumped on the Free Mumia bandwagon, evidently making the common mistake of confusing the convicted celebutard with a persecuted individual.

If his fans had their way, Mumia Abu-Jamal would be free to roam the streets tomorrow. I recommend he take up residence in Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins’ guest room.

The crime for which Jamal received the maximum penalty is fairly straightforward: At around 3:51
A.M
. on December 9, 1981, police officer Daniel Faulkner routinely stopped a car driven by Abu-Jamal’s brother, William Cook, on a Philadelphia street. As he handcuffed Cook and awaited backup, Mumia Abu-Jamal emerged from a taxi parked across the street. According to testimony at his trial, confirmed by his conviction and upheld by no less an authority than the United States Supreme Court, it all ended after Jamal pulled out a .38-caliber revolver and shot Faulkner in the back. The officer got off a shot that hit Abu-Jamal in the chest. But the wounded assailant—and Abu-Jamal’s fans strenuously contend it could have been someone else—came back and emptied his gun in Faulkner’s head. Despite his injuries, Abu-Jamal lived; Faulkner did not.

Those interested in truth and justice might call this an open-and-shut case. For one thing, a .38 that Abu-Jamal had owned since 1979 was found nearby, with five spent cartridges in the cylinder. But legions of the Hollywood upper crust, as well as enthusiastic supporters regularly churned out by mainly West Coast universities, have flocked to Jamal’s aid. To the Free Mumia brigade, his conviction and sentence are a grave miscarriage of justice. To Faulkner’s widow, Maureen, it has been more than a quarter century of uninterrupted hell. Because those who want Abu-Jamal to walk are not terribly interested in who killed Daniel Faulkner. Mumiamites contend that a black man in America cannot find justice under any circumstances. In other words, even if Abu-Jamal did the crime, he should be let go.

He was born Wesley Cook on April 24, 1954, and was given the name Mumia in 1968 by his high school teacher who hailed from Kenya. He added Abu-Jamal, which means “father of Jamal,” after the birth of his son, Jamal, from his first wife in 1971.

He was charged with assault for trying to disrupt a George Wallace for President rally in 1968, a credential that doubtless curries great favor with the Hollywood set. The next year he helped form the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party, dropping out of high school and marrying three times. He earned his high-school equivalency diploma, the last formal education Abu-Jamal ever received. He worked various, mostly brief, stints at local radio stations, in which Abu-Jamal espoused the propaganda of radical groups with which he was affiliated, especially the anti-government, anti-technology organization, MOVE. Abu-Jamal was also active in the Marijuana Users Association of America.

After Faulkner was murdered in 1981, Abu-Jamal tried to represent himself at trial, but was removed after he refused to accept the judge’s rulings on points of law. He was so disruptive, the judge kicked him out of the courtroom repeatedly. When things finally got rolling, the prosecution presented four eyewitnesses to the crime: a prostitute, a motorist, a pedestrian and an unlicensed cab driver on parole for arson. Who else would be wandering the streets at 4:00
A.M
.? Needless to say, the testimony has been discredited by Abu-Jamal’s people.

He did not testify in his own defense, declaring years later, “At my trial I was denied the right to defend myself. I had no confidence in my court-appointed attorney, who never even asked me what happened the night I was shot and the police officer was killed; and I was excluded from at least half the trial. Since I was denied all my rights at my trial I did not testify. I would not be used to make it look like I had a fair trial.”

He was tried. He was convicted. The entire, ugly episode appeared over. In reality, Mumia Abu-Jamal was just getting warmed up.

It was only after Abu-Jamal was behind bars that he truly began to live. Not terribly successful as a journalist while on the outside, once on the inside he became a world-renowned author and speaker, producing such works as
Live From Death Row
, a collection of commentaries published in 1995 by Addison-Wesley, who paid Abu-Jamal a $30,000 advance. This caused Faulkner’s widow, Maureen, to claim that the sum, which went to Abu-Jamal’s defense fund and his family, defied Pennsylvania’s Son of Sam law that bars criminals from profiting from crime. One day, the dead man’s widow hired an airplane to buzz company headquarters with a banner affixed to the rear that read, “Addison-Wesley Supports Cop Killer.”

But even the appellation “cop killer” has angered some of Abu-Jamal’s fans, who insist the term makes it look as if he habitually kills police officers, while he’s only been convicted of killing a single cop.

Abu-Jamal appears amused by such sideshows, having found fame, influence and a seat high atop the celebustocracy at the center of a movement dedicated to toppling the American justice system. His disciples have gone so far as to claim the authorities found a way to frame Abu-Jamal for having been a Black Panther. Such theories, frankly, give the man more importance than he ever enjoyed when he was a mere cab driver, struggling reporter, and dedicated pot smoker.

Those who believe the ivory tower is fuzzy-headed and out of touch were handed ample ammunition in June 1999, when Evergreen State College, a four-year liberal arts institution in Olympia, Washington, extended Abu-Jamal an invitation to provide a commencement address.

Washington Governor Gary Locke canceled his scheduled appearance at the college in protest. House majority leader Tom DeLay declared Abu-Jamal was selected by “twisted radicals” who “perverted their vocation to better mankind through teaching.” Lynne Abraham, who prosecuted Abu-Jamal in 1982, said, “To dignify a graduation ceremony with the words of a convicted killer is an obscenity.”

But college president Jane Jervis was determined to put her college on the map, insisting that Abu-Jamal served “to galvanize an international conversation about the death penalty, the disproportionate number of blacks on death row, and the relationship between poverty and the criminal justice system.” Not a mention about the wisdom of giving a platform to a convicted murderer.

In the end, Abu-Jamal provided a taped address. He spoke for thirteen minutes.

To this day, Abu-Jamal has never spoken about the case for which he was convicted, except to declare his innocence. His brother, William, also has not talked about what happened the fateful night of December 9, 1981, except to say that neither he nor his brother shot Officer Faulkner.

But who did?

In 1999,
Vanity Fair
magazine published a lengthy story in which an Abu-Jamal supporter, Phillip Bloch, claimed his one-time idol confessed to murdering the police officer. Bloch said that during a prison visit in 1992, he asked Abu-Jamal if he regretted killing Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal replied simply, “Yes.” Bloch said he spoke out because he was concerned about the intense vilification of the dead man. The vilification continues today.

Abu-Jamal’s fans went crazy. They set out to debunk the story and discredit Bloch, and also took off on a similar piece aired by ABC TV’s
20/20
. Abu-Jamal himself said cryptically, “A lie is a lie, whether made today or ten years later.” In a fit of snark, he also thanked
Vanity Fair
for keeping alive the controversy over his case.

Maureen Faulkner’s voice has largely been mute over the years. Except for weak stunts like hiring a plane to protest the publication of Abu-Jamal’s book, she has been violently out shouted by the Mumiaphiles, and badly outspent. However, in 2007 a small publisher printed her memoir, written with conservative talk show host Michael Smerconish,
Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain and Injustice
. True to form, pro-Abu-Jamal protesters assembled outside NBC’s
Today
show during Mrs. Faulkner’s appearance to promote the book, demanding equal time. They didn’t get it.

Maureen Faulkner has been sentenced to live with a pain that will continue as long as Abu-Jamal’s Celebutard Nation continues its assault on her husband’s memory. Her ache will endure as long as the stars whip up a gullible public. Her agony will live, as long as Abu-Jamal speaks, publishes and breathes.

I’m afraid she will suffer for a long time to come.