Author: McCain's Movie Cameo Was Wrong Part for Presidential Hopeful
by Chad Groening and Jenni Parker
July 28, 2005
(AgapePress) - A 21-year-old Harvard Law School student, author and syndicated columnist believes Senator John McCain did the wrong thing by making a cameo appearance in the movie Wedding Crashers, a recent film many regard as a vulgar sex comedy of a low order.McCain, who has been at times an outspoken critic of Hollywood morality, is catching some flak from the press and the public lately for his appearance in what online columnist Matt Drudge has described as a raunchy, R-rated "boob-fest." The senator's tongue-in-cheek response, offered during a recent appearance on the Tonight Show, was to joke about the matter with host Jay Leno. McCain suggested his cameo was no big deal and quipped, "In Washington, I work with boobs [i.e., idiots] every day."
Ben Shapiro, a Harvard Law student, is the author of Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (Nelson Current, 2004) and now has written a new book called Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism is Corrupting Our Future (Regnery, 2005). He feels McCain was misguided to appear in the family-unfriendly film and says the senator probably made the brief onscreen appearance in Wedding Crashers in an effort to seem "more hip" in the eyes of voters.
"He's attempting to appeal to what I call the porn generation," Shapiro explains. "John McCain is attempting to run for president in 2008, as everyone realizes by this point. It's just a mark of how bad our society has become that it's now considered hip and cool for a conservative senator to appear in such a socially liberal movie."
However, the author believes McCain's White House chances are already lost. "Politically speaking, I think he sank his chances when he flirted with John Kerry about being VP on the Democratic ticket last year," Shapiro says. "But it certainly is not going to help to have the opposition willing and able to pull out his appearance in Wedding Crashers for their campaign slogans."
The larger problem, the up and coming young conservative and social critic points out, is that "pornography has really entered the mainstream." He says for McCain, who is among the most well-respected members of the GOP, to lend his presence to this "raunch-fest" and then joke about it on late-night television is definitely a bad sign.
The illogic of conservative compromise or complicity with social liberalism is obvious to Shapiro, and he hopes to many other Americans. "We've been told that to have any sort of social standards in the public sphere is discriminatory and intolerant," he notes. "So instead, in order to show that we're tolerant, we're going to participate in these kinds of immoral behaviors."
It was a mistake, Shapiro asserts, for the Arizona Republican to try to appeal to "the porn generation" with his Wedding Crashers cameo. In a Townhall.com column this past May, the conservative author and columnist observed that the "side-dealing" Senator McCain "loves the media more than either his base or his principles."
