Self-styled comedian Margaret Cho names her dog after a member of the infamous Baader-Meinhof terrorists of the 1970s. "Terrorism was different then", she was quoted as saying. "It had a chicness to it, which made it seem less like a dangerous menace and more like fashion."

Cho describes Baader-Meinhof as being "art terrorists".

Those fashionable art terrorists are believed responsible "for killing from 30 to 50 people, including high-ranking German politicians, business executives and U.S. military personnel", accoriding to the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism.

You know, this would be the equivalent of a senator praising Osama bin Laden for buildings schools and day care facilities.

Not that such a thing would ever happen of course...

Roger L. Simon has some more-or-less related thoughts on the stances that celebrities enjoy taking:

By making the pronouncements they do, they are trying to convince the audience of their own seriousness and their own goodness (their own value). But most of all they are trying to convince themselves. Fragile egos, not inflated ones, are at work here.

The psychodynamics can be more complex than that, and to dump all celebrity "leftists" in one pot is grossly unfair, but that is, I think, close to the essence. And this, of course, does not exonerate these people for their often peurile opinions. It only indicates why they are not thought through. Most Hollywood liberals of this sort will not engage in a substantive discussion of the issues because they have no real desire to. Thought, or even truth, is not the point. Stance is.