Monday, July 31, 2006

Mel's Mouth a Lethal Weapon

At least to his own career.

Mel Gibson gets picked up for drunk driving the other night. Oops, we thought; another public defender of virtue hoist by his own petard. Paging Bill Bennett .... The next morning, Gibson gives forth a remarkably contrite public confession of guilt, which includes an admission of alcoholism and apologies for verbally harrassing the guys who arrested him. Wow, we thought; old Mel really is a stand-up guy.

Then we found out that the verbal harrassment wasn't so much "you blankety-blank coppers" as it was "are you Jewish, officer? And does that make you responsible for all the wars in the world?" Stand-up guy turns into can't-keep-denying it anti-semite. (He also, apparently, threatened to pee in his jail cell. Boy, there's a first.)

And that's about where things stand for most of the country, including
Arianna Huffington, who falls a bit below her usual prose standard in an effort to demonstrate that drunken anti-semites ought not produce TV miniseries on the Holocaust. (Although they probably ought not).

But there is another wrinkle: per Australia's Herald Sun, Mel was photographed cavorting with a bunch of women to whom he was not married. "Cavorting," mind you, not having sex. But still, it makes the picture that much worse. Not a big deal in Hollywood, to be sure. But for a guy whose fan base now includes a lot of very conservative Christians, this may prove to be the biggest problem of all ....

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