Wow -- it's true, then. Hollywood really DOES run the world.
Oh, not the Streisand-brand entertainment-liberal part. Just ask President Kerry whether he believes that fairy tale. I mean the other Hollywood -- the part Mel Gibson is in charge of.
The Mighty Mel is evidently so potent a force on the international political stage that the agency that arrested him worried that his merest utterance while in his cups might set the world a-tremble. Even when he was cooling his heels in the drunk tank, the remarks he had just allegedly made -- about Jews being ''responsible for all the wars in the world'' -- were considered diplomatic dynamite.
The TMZ website, which first reported the matter, said the Los Angeles County sheriff's sergeant on duty worried that the report the arresting deputy had just written up was too ``inflammatory.'' Calls were made, the website reported; international matters of great weight and heft were discussed. To put Gibson's supposed remarks into the record, it was feared, would incite ``Jewish hatred,'' and matters in the Mideast were ''way too inflammatory'' for that, TMZ wrote. ``For a drunk driving arrest,'' debated the Talleyrands of the LA Sheriff's Department, ''is this really worth all that?''
Is it indeed? Imagine letting that information loose on the world. The fate of nations might hinge upon it. At a critical point for Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Hezbollah, the U.N., the United States itself -- this report would give them all clues to try to divine the answer to the burning question, WWMD: What Would Mel Do?
The sheriff's officials chose another path. Write up another report, TMZ said the arresting deputy was told -- a bowdlerized one that would be made public. Let the other report, the complete one, the one that could change the course of the Mideast, be locked safely in the watch commander's safe, away from the eyes of a world that hangs upon Mel Gibson's words.
It was the news media, of course, that thwarted that plan, and on whose shoulders now lies the heavy burden -- and perhaps the heavier consequences -- of knowing that Mel Gibson's reported remarks are confidential no more. The entire globe may shake because of their perfidy.
But the Friday shift of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, in trying to avert an international incident of blockbuster proportions, is surely a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.