Arianna
2003-08-07 | 7:28 p.m.

Just a little article on Arianna Huffington...even though I kinda like her...

Who Stole Arianna Huffington?

What is an Arianna Huffington? Up until the mid 1990s Huffington was a mouthpiece for the conservative right � I liked her back then � now it seems she has returned to her roots as Arianna Stassinopoulos of the very leftist and socialist Greece. Perhaps it was the unfortunate and very public coming out gay of her former husband Michael Huffington or it could be that buying teeny tiny little cars and still living in a huge mansion and flying on private planes has her confused � could be just that she decided it wasn�t as profitable to be a consistent conservative as it was to be a reformed liberal. Whatever happened to Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington � it is all Greek to me.

Remember the good old days when you could count on Arianna to tow the conservative line in that sexy Greek accent always dressed in designer duds? Nothing was off limits including lamenting the fact that Hillary Clinton claimed not to know that her husband was having tawdry little affairs on the side � all around the same time her husband was coming out of the closet in a pink boa wearing high heels. So much for Arianna�s assertion that there are no secrets in marriage. Seems that these days Arianna is more interested in getting her mug on television and her voice on radio programs than she is explaining what happened to her.

The transformation was gradual, albeit entertaining, as she joined Al Franken in bed to critique politics and many of the same politicians that gave her the venue to speak her mind. She was very close to the Newt Gingrich Republicans and was thrilled when the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994. She referred to it as a temper tantrum by the American people and news anchors quickly picked up her verbiage, but her love for Congressional Republicans stopped around 1999 when she became an all out leftist. She claims to have been sold a bill of goods by Newt Gingrich and criticizes him and the GOP for not solving all the pains of a civilized society � namely poverty, hunger, environmental issues, and the like.

Entertaining is that when Democrats were in control of Congress for over 4 decades the same problems afflicted the nation, but Arianna was a Republican stumping for her husband (nothing better than having a sexy accent while working Congressional dinner parties and running for the U.S. Senate) and other Republican candidates and most importantly, taking money from Republicans. She loved the Republican Party until it got into power � then she had an epiphany that nothing Republicans did was good and that everything she used to stand for was bad. Amazing!

Her most noteworthy attempt to make it into the news was to sponsor a television and radio campaign that took on sport utility vehicle owners as aiders and abettors to terrorist states. The Detroit Project aims to show all of us the ills of owning and driving SUVs (and other �gas guzzling� vehicles lest SUVs be singled out). Arianna, the stunning spokeswoman for the campaign, tossed her Lincoln Navigator aside and prefers to get around her posh Los Angeles neighborhood in a trendy little hybrid vehicle.

The campaign says that buying Iraqi oil kept Saddam Hussein in power � methinks they should change their talking points since last I checked it was the United States Marine Corps in control of oil production in Iraq � and that buying a gas guzzler actually kept his terror regime going. I think we can all see today the folly of that argument. Arianna is also upset that Americans use about 10% of the worlds oil, but she dismisses the fact that the United States also produces over 25% of the worlds products. Does she prefer we scale back production, something that would inevitably lead to unemployed people (something liberals enjoy when a Republican is in the White House)? More comical is the notion that we should all drive smaller cars. I wonder if Arianna considered how much more gas is used by four or five small cars going to a ballpark to take in a bunch of kids than one SUV full of them.

Okay so the SUV thing fell of the radars of public discussion so what does Arianna attempt next? Well the obligatory name calling of the President of the United States. In a recent interview she concluded that President Bush did not possess the intellect required to think in complexity and only thinks about the needs of the upper class Americans. Aside from the issue of education � yes Arianna went to Cambridge, but our President holds degrees from both Yale and Harvard so the intellect insults don�t work � I suppose the almost 80% approval rating that the President enjoys is probably encompassing the millions of Americans who he is ostensibly out of touch with, right Arianna? So what�s next? Of course � corporate scandals.

Arianna now decides it is in her interest to take on corporate America � the same corporate America by the way that allowed her to have a Lincoln Navigator to begin with and who makes the private jets she flies on and certainly had some part in financing the 9,000 square foot mansion she lives in. But hypocrisy aside, why should we allow hypocrisy to get in the way of Arianna getting on radio and television to bash corporations, Arianna doesn�t like tax shelters and business practices that make some people rich and others not so rich. Well then by all means we should overthrow the government and get rid of the lot of politicians who take money from corporations.

Okay � so that is not so smart since getting rid of corporate money in politics is impossible so her next thought is to demonstrate. Pickets, mass demonstrations, and civil disobedience � she even singles out the success of protestors against the World Bank (as if they�ve accomplished anything except trashing cities where the World Bank meets � they don�t affect policy in the least). Before the war in Iraq she spoke to how powerful the demonstrations against the war were, but they didn�t change anything so her declaring the importance of demonstrations is about the same as someone declaring the sky color important � if it changed from blue to green � wouldn�t change much of anything.

So where does being wrong all the time leave Arianna Huffington? Well at the top of the liberal speakers bureau of course. No matter how wrong you are on the left � the more wrong you are the more important you become. Consider Jimmy Carter � an absolute disaster for foreign policy in the United States, but now a Nobel Peace Prize winner for helping to strike the disastrous deal with North Korea. Bill Clinton � the only elected President ever impeached � well by God he is a hero with the left � in most places impeachment would make you a failure � not on the left.

Of course there is Baghdad Bob � the former Iraqi Minister of Information. Not quite a Democrat, but by golly how can you leave him out of such an entertaining group of spokesmen and women of the left. Arianna has her work cut out for her, but between SUV and corruption campaigns I can just see her standing up in the front yard of her mansion saying in her sexy Greek accented voice, �There are no SUV�s on the Westside of Los Angeles� as they speed by because people want them.

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