'You’re an Actor, Act. Don’t Talk About Politics or Religion'

Safe to say Julia Roberts gets it. Unfortunately too many of her Hollywood brethren have never figured that out. It's political season, which means it's time for celebutards to say really stupid things.

As August winds to a close, midterm elections are just around the corner, and the debate on who will bring home the bacon in November is heating up – in Hollywood, that is.

“The Tea Party is going to split the Republican vote,” songstress Sheryl Crow predicted to Fox sister publication The Australian this week. “Which can only be good for the Democrats. That has to be the hope. Either that, or we all move to Canada.”

Is there anything more childish than the ritualistic declaration you're going to pick up and leave the country if you don't get your way?

Crow is on tour to promote her new album, 100 Miles from Memphis. Reviews for the album have been mixed – but Crow has not minced words in giving her own review of the political scene. New song “Say What You Want” takes aim at Sarah Palin: “I saw you ranting on TV today // I heard you tell me to reload // You got a lot of nerve to talk that way // Someone unplug the microphone.”

Crow told The Australian, “It’s risky to do that because you just get slagged off for being preachy. But the morning Sarah Palin came out and said, ‘reload,’ there was no way I wasn’t going to write about that. I did struggle whether to put it on the record or not, because it’s such a hot button.”

Crow, of course, became a national laughingstock over her weird obsession with toilet paper. Being a punchline apparently hasn't curbed her nuttiness.

On the upside, some Hollywood types know better.

One star this week even felt obligated to explain why she doesn’t sound off on hot topics. “I’ve realized something my mother told me 22 years ago,” Julia Roberts said while on tour in Tokyo to promote her new movie "Eat, Pray, Love". “You’re an actor, act. Don’t talk about politics or religion.”

But while the Sean Penns, George Clooneys, and Jon Voights of the world are known as much for their politics as for their art, many Hollywood celebrities still stay out of the political arena – at least publicly.

“Jennifer Aniston has been on every single show this week, but you haven’t heard her talking about Afghanistan. You don’t hear Stallone talking about health care. Give me something of depth, something meaty,” says Grobel. “There’s a glut of celebrities not having opinions and being vapid and dumbing down America with attempts at promoting themselves over and over again. Let them take a note of seriousness once in a while.”

Update: Via Sister Toldjah, apparently Roberts hasn't always practiced what she's now preaching.

How the Democrats Won the Cold War

Remarkably, after the epic bombs Redacted and Lions for Lambs, now Hollywood will soon release a film explaining--get this--how the Democrats won the Cold War!

You can't make this stuff up.

TURNS OUT THE DEMOCRATS WON THE COLD WAR. WHO KNEW?

At last, Hollywood has (sort of) made a pro-CIA, pro-war, anti-Soviet movie: "Charlie Wilson's War." It's all about how Democrats defeated the Soviet Empire.

A better title for the movie would be “The Invisible Man," because the man who doesn't appear in it, and is barely mentioned in the background, is Ronald Reagan. Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer and even Rudy Giuliani - back when he was still “Rudolph" - are much more prominently name-checked than Reagan in the movie, which was directed by Sawyer's husband Mike Nichols.

The Dec. 21 release stars Tom Hanks as a 1980s Texas Congressman named Charlie Wilson, a coke-snorting, skirt-chasing, boozing liberal. Who better to write the script than Aaron Sorkin?

Wilson, backed by a Commie-hating right-wing Christian millionaire fundraiser played by Julia Roberts, helped funnel CIA assistance to the Muslim rebels in Afghanistan who originally tried to repel the Soviet invasion using weapons George Custer would have called obsolete. They needed Stinger missiles and eventually got them.

The film is going to flop, unless Christmas finds millions of Americans saying, “Hey, kids, now that everyone's unwrapped their presents, let's go see a movie about fighting in Afghanistan!"

The movie has something for everyone - to dislike. Some liberals will say it isn't tough enough on Republicans (though at the end, it all but blames the U.S. for the rise of the Taliban, a notion I don't have space to get into here), possibly because it is being released by Universal, a division of Defense Department contractors G.E. (Color me skeptical that G.E. sends an Alec-Baldwin-on-“30 Rock"-figure to spy on Tom Hanks movies and polish the dishwashers on the set.)

George Crile, who wrote the book upon which the movie is based, didn't attempt to hide its provenance. Crile was basically a mouthpiece for a tale spun by the two guys who painted themselves as the heroes of the story: “The extensive recollections of Charlie Wilson and Gust Avrakotos [the CIA man played by Philip Seymour Hoffman on screen] form the backbone of the greater part of this narrative," Crile wrote in his source notes.

Read the rest.

This might be a shoo-in for the best comedy of the year.