Jon Voight on President Obama

I just finished watching Jon Voight's recent speech at a fundraising dinner thrown by the National Republican Congressional and Senatorial Committees. Voight, an accomplished movie actor and father of megastar Angelina Jolie, reminds us all that Hollywood isn't exclusively peopled by liberals and card-carrying Democrats.

Voight has been causing quite a stir with his harsh criticisms of Obama.

In the speech (YouTubed above), Voight berates his Hollywood colleagues (and mainstream media outlets) for buying the hype about Obama, and he denounces Obama for pretending to be a "moderate" on the campaign trail and turning out to be "wildly radical."

He also implies that Obama's campaigning techniques were illegal and that his backers inaccurately depicted Bush as a war-monger.

Voight states, quite emphatically and without qualification, that "everything Obama has recommended has turned out to be disastrous." But he doesn't just blame Obama. America's problem is the Democratic Party.

"We can blame Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, George Soros, David Axelrod and their ilk," he maintains, "for the downfall of this country."

But Voight's big concern is that the modern state of Israel continue to be a "safe haven forever" for Jews. And he has been genuinely invested in Israel for quite a long time.

According to Voight, Obama doesn't understand the Middle East. Our new president is foolish enough to think that Palestinians are sincere about peace, but Voight knows better. And he dismisses Obama for mere utopianism and self-aggrandizement.

"He thinks he can conquer the world with his soft-spoken sweet-talk," Voight says, "and really thinks he's going to bring all the enemies of the world into a little playground where they'll swing each other back and forth."

I recognize that he is giving a kind of motivational speech at a party fund raiser, so it stands to reason that he'd deploy such a confrontational tone. But is our only mode of politics, on the left and right, this register of self-assured certainty and dismissiveness?