Clooney: He's starting to get it.

Well, sort of.

My favorite liberal actor, George Clooney, is starting to get it: Celebrity endorsements do not help get candidates elected, so he's vowing to keep quiet in the next round of elections. Unfortunately, Gorgeous George fails to grasp exactly why this is:

"My father ran for congress last year (04). I couldn't campaign for him and I knew I couldn't, because I'd hurt him. They tried to get me to get on the JOHN KERRY train and I said, 'We'll hurt him. They'll use us as 'liberal'.'

"Now, I would argue that (throughout) American history, it's pretty hard to find a time when liberals were on the wrong side of an issue. We thought that the conservative view was, 'Witches should be burned at the stake.' Moderate view was: 'Well, just in case,' and the liberal view was, 'There's no such thing as witches.'

"We thought women should be able to vote and blacks should be allowed to sit at the front of the bus and Vietnam was wrong. We haven't really been on a lot of wrong sides for us to be sort of used as this bad word.

I hate to break it to ya, George, but it's ugly caricatures of conservatives as witch-burners and Klansmen that turn people off.

(Not to mention the fact that your assertions are not entirely true. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had greater Republican than Democratic support, and let's not forget that the segregationist South was largely Democratic. Visual aid: Sen. Robert Byrd.)

We really don't begrudge you speaking your mind about issues or making politically-charged (but artistically excellent) films such as Three Kings and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It's the broad-brush stereotyping (so prevalent in Hollywood) that makes us grab our remotes.

By the way, hope your back is doing better. Love the villa. :)