FLIP-FLOPPING ROSIE

Here’s Rosie O’Donnell from October, 2001:

Talkshow host and ardent Democratic activist Rosie O’Donnell stunned Los Angeles radio listeners Thursday morning by declaring she’s changed her opinion of President Bush.

“I love him now!” O’Donnell told KRLA-AM’s Dennis Prager.

O’Donnell said she even got to Yankee Stadium an hour early for a World Series game so that she could videotape Bush!

‘I brought a videocamera and my six year old son and no security so that my son could see the president,” said O’Donnell.

“We left at 6 o’clock in order to do that. And since September 11, I have had nothing but accolades for the job he has done for this nation… I am in full support of the President.”

O’Donnell added: “Honey, I love him now! He is our President. We are at war.”

And here’s Rosie O’Donnell, December 11, 2003:

“The country was really taken over. It was a coup. This man was not elected, he sits in the White House and he’s declaring war. That’s a coup d’etat. America should be in the streets picketing. And our boys and our girls, our teenagers and 20- year-olds, are off there killing people. And war begets war.

Rosie, a coup d’etat is a brief and bloodless revolution. Essentially, our government has one every four to eight years, as a new administration replaces the old one, bringing new people and new ideas, without firing a shot.

You’re a passionate supporter of gays and lesbians in America–why not share a little sympathy for their counterparts in the Middle East?

Contrast Rosie’s “BUSH SUX” cliches to this carefully nuanced essay by Paul Varnell, from Gay City News.com, which I found at the top of a Google search using “Gays, Iraq, Hussein”. It’s from February, shortly before we began to liberate Iraq:

Saddam Hussein’s one-party dictatorship severely oppresses gays and lesbians. As British gay activist Peter Tatchell points out, two years ago Hussein decreed homosexuality a capital crime. Doing so was either a further effort to control the lives of his subjects or one of his many recent efforts to display zealous support for Islam. Eliminating Hussein and installing a more secular, pluralist regime would benefit Iraqi gays.

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To the extent gay progressives vocally oppose the war in order to ensure heterosexual progressive support for gay equality, that sounds like exactly as good a reason for all the rest of us to vocally support the war–to show moderate and conservative Americans that gays share many of their fundamental values and have the general interests of the country at heart. After all, the underlying benefit the Iraqi war will be the pressure on neighboring Arab states to moderate and modernize, reducing their tendency to tolerate, support, or generate fundamentalist terrorism.

Mr. Varnell gets it. You sounded like you did for a moment in the fall of 2001, Rosie. What changed?