Hoping for the best…But not surprised by the worst

On Tuesday I posted something on the Weekly Standard’s blog that was picked up by a couple of conservative blogs. The original post was about a comment Robert Downey Jr. had made to a NY Times reporter…he said that “you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t.” Feeling this was relatively self-explanatory, I wished Downey the best and told people to check out Iron Man when it opens next week.

There were two disparate reactions to my post. On the one hand, the folks at Hot Air retitled it “Downey Jr. a conservative?” and on the other, Ace suggested that Downey was more likely to have gone off the deep end and become a radical Maoist than a conservative.

Both reactions were intriguing. Over at Hot Air you saw the need many conservatives have to grab onto anyone in Hollywood who offers a remotely conservative opinion and claim him for their own. And Ace offered the skepticism that the rest of the conservative sphere feels when a conventional Hollywood type offers an opinion on politics (“So, you’re not a liberal huh? Must be a Gotdamned anarchist!”).

I don’t think either reaction is terribly helpful. Conservatives need to get it through their heads that, for the time being, the best we can hope for are guys like Robert Downey Jr—guys who a.) keep their opinions to themselves, and b.) have enough experience outside the cocoon of Hollywood to realize that the left-liberal line on many, many issues is, quite simply, foolish. Eternally waiting for the other shoe to drop, as Ace seems to be, isn’t helpful either. Downey is, I would guess, not a conservative in any philosophical or practical sense, and, as Mr. Salam suggested, his quote could mean any number of things.

But I’d say that Downey’s time in prison seems to have led him to believe that criminals typically deserve to be behind bars. This isn’t a strictly conservative line of thought…but it’s definitely something that would get him into trouble at dinner parties in Hollywood surrounded by liberal colleagues. We right of center types should be happy with what we get and avoid projecting our own beliefs onto everyone from the West coast who utters a statement a little off the leftwing line.