GUTLESS WONDERS, PROTESTING WHEN IT'S TOO LATE

Forgive me if I'm not impressed by celebrities affiliated with the entertainment side of Fox who are now criticizing Fox News:

Steve Levitan, the creator of “Modern Family,” which airs on ABC but is produced by Fox’s television studio, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that he was “disgusted to work at a company that has anything whatsoever to do with @FoxNews.” The film director Paul Feig echoed those sentiments, writing that he had made two films for the 20th Century Fox movie studio but “cannot condone the support their news division promotes toward the immoral and abusive policies and actions taken by this current administration toward immigrant children.”

Those tweets came several days after Seth MacFarlane, the creator of “Family Guy,” said he was “embarrassed” to work at 21st Century Fox after the Fox News host Tucker Carlson told viewers not to trust other news networks.

Nice of you to speak up, guys, but it's a lot safer for you to do this now than it was when you signed your deals:

Both The Walt Disney Company and Comcast are bidding tens of billions of dollars for control of most of the entertainment assets owned by Rupert Murdoch. Fox News would not be part of either sale, and would remain under Murdoch control.

But with the Fox entertainment empire on the brink of being severed from the Murdochs, there appeared to be a newfound willingness to take on Fox News....

So now you have the courage to say something. Why didn't you say anything when Fox became a welcoming place for birthers, including Donald Trump? Or when Fox's Glenn Beck was calling President Obama a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people"? Or when Bill O'Reilly said that the slaves who built the White House were "well fed and had decent lodgings"? Or when Megyn Kelly produced a series of racist broadcasts, fearmongering about a tiny group of activists called the New Black Panthers and claiming that Jesus Christ and Santa Claus were white? Or when Fox commentators regularly defended waterboarding? And I'm just scratching the surface.

Celebrities should have boycotted Fox years ago. We all should have. The whole thing -- The Simpsons, the sports, FX, the movie studio. When one of the more appalling outrages happened, we should have refused to show up for the opening weekend of the next big Fox tentpole blockbuster. Yes, even the ones we'd been waiting to see for months.

Celebrities certainly had the power to reject Fox. They wouldn't do it until now. I give them no credit for principle now.

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Nor am I impressed by this guy:

Republican strategist Steve Schmidt ... renounced his membership in the Republican Party over the continuing abuses of President Donald Trump....

“This child separation policy is connected to the worst abuses of Humanity in our history,” Schmidt said. “It is connected by the same evil that separated families during slavery and dislocated tribes and broke up Native American families. It is immoral and must be repudiated. Our country is in trouble. Our politics are badly broken.

“The first step to a season of renewal in our land is the absolute and utter repudiation of Trump and his vile enablers in the 2018 election by electing Democratic majorities,” he added.

What took so long? Previous abuses of human rights -- like secret torture prisons during the Iraq War -- didn't bother Schmidt? Oh, wait -- he was an aide top Vice President Dick Cheney. He was the man who pressed John McCain to pick Sarah Palin as his running mate, even though he later denounced her. I guess nothing up till now -- Palin's demagoguery, Trump's demagoguery, the party's rejection of climate science and voting rights, the bad-faith efforts to increase inequality and run up debts so government social programs can be slashed -- upset him enough to make him want to leave.

Why this now? Schmidt has been a Republican strategist, and he probably believed he might someday be one again, despite his denunciations of Trumpism over the last couple of years. But the defeat of Mark Sanford in a primary last week and a recent poll showing that Trump is the most popular president ever among Republican voters at this stage of his presidency, with the exception of a post-9/11 George W. Bush, has demonstrated to Schmidt that he's highly unlikely ever to get a job with a GOP candidate again. Prior to this, he probably thought it was risky for him to leave the party. Now he knows he has nothing to lose.

So thanks, all of you. Where were you years ago, when the direction of the GOP and its propaganda arm were obvious, and all this might have been prevented?