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Heartland Values Strike Back Against Hollywood Campaign Hijackers
By Kevin Fobbs
August 16, 2004

All during the course of this Presidential campaign season Hollywood actors and actresses have been inserting their ill-informed mis-information into the body politic and have been hoping that their star presence will win the day over our commonsense and our need to be informed with facts and reality over rhetoric.

Well, Susan Sarandon visited the Buckeye State the other day and was given a good dose of ceremonial Ohioan kick to her hind quarters when state Party GOP Chairman, Robert T. Bennett told her to get out of town and asked her to cease and desist her campaign of theatrics over substance.

Maybe Bennett has stumbled onto something which other conservative and reality-based Heartland leaders have been seeking as well. Just tell these Hollywood Heartland Value Hijackers to do what John Wayne and some of our other legendary movie stars from the past would have said, "Get out of town by noon".

Is it that simple?

I think so.

Sarandon wants to be bellicose with her "Un-truth Squad about what is happening in Ohio. While there has been some job loss between 2000 and 2004, 4.1 percent of its jobs, Gov. Bob Taft has launched a very innovative Third Frontier project and Republican leaders in the legislature are considering even more tax reforms to help stimulate the Ohioan business climate.

Sarandon coming into Ohio to insist that Ohioans follow her values is disingenuous. Perhaps she should have done her homework. Maybe she should have first learned that Ohio was one of several states to early on define in its 1953 legislation the definition of a marriage being between a man and a woman. Maybe Sarandon should have gone a little further to find out that its current state version of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) maybe be on the Nov. General Election ballot, and more than likely will be voted in as did the voters of Missouri did in their August 3rd vote. Commonsense Heartland values at work.

There has been a growing movement across America of commonsense folks who seem to possess the audacity to ask for and in some cases clamor for a return to knowing your place when presenting them with their values or version of the "facts".

NuPac believes in taking back our communities and enrolling heartland voters in community efforts which represent our values. We are advocating a Stars and Stripes community faith-based effort. Many entertainers, men and women of the military, and Shepard's as well as members of the choir and congregation have volunteered in community-based projects of compassion.

Last month, President Bush visited Cleveland where he outlined an urban agenda that works. He also focused on Eugene Brudno, one if Cleveland's members of the President's Armies of Compassion. The President said, speaking at the PlayHouse Square Center, "Eugene is a Cleveland resident who has spent a lot of time ... volunteering in the community. The reason I mention Eugene is, one of the true strengths of this country is the fact that we've got so many citizens who have heard the call to help somebody in need, and they don't need a government telling them to do it." The President added, "They just do it because they love their community."

We have seen these same types of efforts during historic occasions of calamity like Hurricane Andrew and now this past week with volunteers helping residents who were victimized by Hurricane Charley. The members of the President's Armies of Compassion come together to reach out and assist their fellow Americans. Stars and Stripes only takes it a step further by including those stars of the entertainment community and those members of the military families and faith community to help America by sharing their human and spiritual resources with folks in the Heartland.

Propaganda prognosticators like Sarandon and Michael Moore would like to fly into a town, with video flim-flam and fly out, leaving those residents with a dab of star glitter but a pot full of hate and fear mongering. Well, those of us who openly embrace the stars and stripes believe our communities deserve far more than just a litany of lies. We believe that fighting terrorism is more than a four act play or an hour and a half movie filled with countless inaccuracies which are meant to paralyze Americans into non-thought, and spellbound to abandon all reason and rational thinking.

Instead, Stars and Stripes will take a page from Ronald Reagan's book. He spoke about the Shining City on the Hill. Well, In the America of old, we helped out our neighbors during the day, by building barns, cleaning up communities and assisting in taking in our neighbor's crops. In the evening we would be served up with a little bit of gospel, country, blues, or spiritual music provided by local, regional or national star power entertainers who would come in and help to re-energize our faith, our values and our energy from a long day or week of work.

If they talked about politics, it was from politics of faith, of helping your neighbor, and of celebrating our nation's gift of freedom. They were not entertainers of hate but singers of salvation. They were truly the stars in our flag's stripes.

These entertainers were full of the hope of America and visited towns like Columbus, Ohio; Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Charlotte, North Carolina, Austin, Texas or Detroit and entertained with song, with plays, with comedy but most importantly with representations of our traditional American values.

Why is this effort so important? Why is heartland community action so needed during this campaign? The two are synonymous. The two are inextricably tied to the other. Hollywood stars feel that their stage is in each and every town that their movies or their songs are heard. They feel we should mindlessly or subliminally embrace their pandering.

Well, in most cases the voices of the Heartland have not embraced it. Thankfully, there are other entertainers who now are willing to do more than just say from the safety of their press release that they are willing to go out and stand shoulder to shoulder with Americans in the Heartland. We have heard some voices of sanity which have risen up to inform and educate America about the fierce urgency of the moment, but in America the most time honored tradition which has had the most meaningful staying power has been when citizens have taken their feelings, their beliefs, their principles into their own hands and said as GOP Chairman Bennett said in Ohio to Susan Sarandon, enough is enough and get out of town.

In America, each community has the power to dictate who we want to represent our values. We understand as De Tocqueville did almost 180 years ago, as he traveled through our then young nation, that our culture and our values were distinctly different from the English or the French. That in America, as he observed, we had hewn out of the mountain of possible despair a stone of idealistic hope. He fully understood that our faith and our strong belief in assisting one another during tough times, and defining the "family" as being more than just "blood relatives", but rather to be all inclusive as the family of all Americans, was how we defined ourselves.

His feeling of America was so over powering that he spoke to the rest of the world about our special quality of hope, and instead of embracing the old world view of governments being submerged in the coursing rivers of despair which had paralyzed older European governments, cultures and countries, we had embarked upon a new pathway.

So when Susan Sarandon showed up on the doorstep of Ohio, and wanted to tell a state which had itself given birth to many of the nation's knights of creativity in the Wright Brothers, some of the knights of public service to our nation in the form of President Rutherford B. Hayes, President Ulysses S. Grant and President Howard Taft, Bennett had the Heartland values right, Sarandon had it wrong.

Ohioans have a history of commonsense, of being one of the first states to give safe harbor to slaves on the Underground Railroad in which nationally historic Oberlin; College took the lead to demonstrate our time honored heartland values.

So you see in many ways, Ohio represents a microcosm of the heartland of America. In many ways the Stars and Stripes brigade of heartland value soldiers of faith, freedom and family got their marching orders, their spiritual strength, in farmlands and cities in Ashtabula, Lorain, Cuyahoga, Medina and Geauga Counties of Ohio.

Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen, Whoopie Goldberg, Barbra Streisand, Jennifer Aniston, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Costner, Danny DeVito, Meg Ryan, Ted Danson, Mary Steenburgen, Oliver Stone, and Dustin Hoffman maintain a triple threat in their Hollywood Hate Brigade during our campaign season by being pundits of propaganda, proponents of fear, and masters of deceit by playing slight of hand with the truth.

Well, America, Heartland truth is on the way. Stars and Stripes will be going into every state and asking each one of you to get involved and join entertainers, faith leaders and our military families to stand up and reject fear, embrace faith, run the muckrakers out of town like Michael Moore and his muckraking mayhem masters and wannabes.

Our country, our people our presidential campaign season deserves better, right here, and right now. Let's renew our celebration of truth over fiction, and truly embrace our American family of faith, that celebrates freedom first, rejects fear and supports "One Nation under God." Stars and Stripes forever!!

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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.