"Growing up in Queens in the 1970s was a little like death, except less interesting," Andrea Peyser wrote in a 2004 column lamenting the untimely demise of Johnny Ramone, one of Andrea's local heroes while growing up.
She was born in Manhattan and lived briefly in the Bronx, before Andrea's parents, immigrants from Europe by way of Israel, settled in Bayside, Queens. There, Andrea learned to ride a bike and take the subway back into Manhattan. In between, she managed to graduate from Bayside High School and then from the State University of New York.
Andrea started her career in upstate New York with the Associated Press in Albany, then the AP bureau in Charleston, W.Va. She has worked for CNN in Atlanta, and the Tampa Tribune in Florida, before finally returning home to the New York Post, where she started as a reporter. She was named columnist in 1993.
Her columns have won awards from the Newswomen's Club of New York, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, and the New York State Associated Press, which named her Columnist of the Year for 2004/5.
She is author of Mother Love, Deadly Love: The Susan Smith Murders (HarperCollins.) She has been profiled in "Mademoiselle" and "New York" magazines, and her work has appeared in publications ranging from "Cosmopolitan" and "Glamour" to the late "George."
Andrea lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Mark Phillips, and daughter, Eliza. She also has made peace with Queens, and visits quite frequently.
Her latest release is Celebutards.
Andrea Peyser
Celebutard of the Week: Joe Jackson
by Andrea PeyserIn the unappetizing race to scavenge the remaining flesh from the bones of Michael Jackson, Joe Jackson, the star’s Daddy Dearest, is turning the singer’s death into a spectacle unimagined by Barnum & Bailey.
Joe, to whom his son left nothing in his will, is the architect of the star’s final world tour, putting him on display like a freakish piñata. Joe also disrupted a weird press conference this week to promote his record label, unable to resist waiting a millisecond to profit from what is shaping up as the biggest celeb death of the decade.
This is why Joe Jackson is my Celebutard of the Week – in keeping with my book, Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians who are destroying America. (Kensington.)
In his life, the superstar was clearly damaged beyond repair, reconfiguring his face and allegedly sleeping with underage boys. You need to look only as far as Jackson’s relationship with his father to understand where it all began. Jackson has said in interviews that his father was a tyrant, beating him mercilessly if he missed a dance step, ridiculing his dark skin and wide nose. (more…)
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Celebutard of the Week: Michelle Obama
by Andrea PeyserWhat’s the matter, Michelle? Did the White House food taster quit?
Michelle Obama really, really likes life in the White House, what with all the toadies and underlings scampering under foot. The mystery is how did she ever manage before life as Mrs. President?
Here’s what she said about her “current life’’ in the White House: “[It is] a very blessed situation, because I have what most families don’t have — tons of support all around, not just my mother, but staff and administration. I have a chief of staff and a personal assistant, and everyone needs that.’’
She could have stopped there…or not…
“Everyone should have a chief of staff and a set of personal assistants,” Mrs. O gushed. (more…)
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Celebutard of the Week: Janeane Garofalo
by Andrea PeyserJaneane Garofalo is an unreconstructed, unapologetic racist.
Yet the uncouth actress will never be punished, vilified or marginalized, because she openly disparaged the one ethnic group which enjoys no Hollywood protection. That would be white people. Particularly, white people from the South.
What do you think would happen should anyone turn the tables, reverse the races, change the geography, and denigrate an urban person of color? The conservatives I know do not resort to gutter talk.
For her bold and unbridled racism – offenses that are sure to draw deafening applause by the American left – Janeane Garofalo is my Celebutard of the Week, in keeping with my book, “Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America.” (more…)
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Celebutard of the Week: Ron Howard
by Andrea Peyser
Question: What do you get when you cross an American icon such as Academy-award-winning director and former kid actor Ron Howard with the continent of Europe – and shake with double doses of celebrity idiocy?
Answer: A baguette-eating Celebutard.
Oh, Opie! From Mayberry to Hollywood. How did you stray?
Back when he went by the name Ronny Howard, the star gained fame and adoration by playing the ultimate American rural tyke, Opie Taylor. He was a kid so obnoxiously clean, he’d agree to go to bed without supper before he’d ever denigrate his country. (more…)
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Celebutard of the Week: Madonna Redux
by Andrea PeyserThe African nation of Malawi is one of the poorest places on earth, a land in which villagers easily live an entire year on less than Madonna’s annual budget for soy chai latte, and AIDS claims a depressing chunk of the population. It’s no garden spot. But last week it was as if this country, which holds on to its strong tradition of family values in spite of intense international disdain and patronization, defended its honor in the face of a scourge that might do as much psychic damage to its long-term future as disease, hunger and rejection of kabbalah.
When Madonna showed up, via private plane, with her personal trainer and assorted underlings, hoping to snatch yet another evidently healthy child to add to her growing, international brood – and fill a hole in her soul left vacant by the departure of a husband, and soothe her jealousy over other starlets’ ability to save the world – Malawi did something unprecedented. The country said, through a judge, “Take your millions and your treadmill and your vegan diet, and scram!” (more…)
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Celebutard of the Week: Madonna
by Andrea PeyserThis is an emergency Madonna update, a warning that the one-time Material Girl has turned from a bra-baring, Britney-slurping, intercourse-simulating extrovert into a greedy baby-collector. At mid-life, an unmarried Madonna is, right now, in the African nation of Malawi, choosing a matched child to go along with the tot she already purchased from the African nation like so much luggage, David Banda.
This is why Madonna is my Celebutard of the Week, in keeping with my book, “Celebutards: the Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America,” (Kensington).
Madonna is asking a judge to let her adopt 4-year-old Mercy James, a child who, like David, has a biological father but no mother. Her grandmother was incensed. (more…)
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Celebutard of the Week: Robert Redford
by Andrea PeyserRobert Redford likes to play the nation’s Environmentalist in Chief, making the wildly earnest claim in last week’s Huffington Post that he was “too early on solar power.’’ He boasts, like a self-absorbed prophet, that he promoted clean energy way back in his filmmaking hey day of the 1970s. He even gave a shoutout to Barack “Special Olympics’’ Obama, who in his State of the Union address “noted that although America invented solar energy technology, we have fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in producing it. He is right of course’’ Never mind that Redford, self-proclaimed savior of the earth, probably promotes the burning of more fossil fuel than virtually any other single American outside of Mobil. Or Al Gore, whose Nashville estate burned 20 times the national average in fuel. Obama, too.
This is why Robert Redford is my Celebutard of the Week, in keeping with my book – Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America (Kensington).
Redford founded a ski resort in Park City, Utah, a particularly environmentally unfriendly venture in which rich folks routinely travel from points afar – and they’re not riding in hot air balloons. He also started the environmentally ruinous Sundance Film Festival, an SUV-choked venture that annually pulls in countless Gulfstream jets full of busy film executives to the remote and pricey environs, where hot air is expelled, unharnessed, into the atmosphere. (more…)
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Celebutard of the Week: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: (George Clooney Edition)
by Andrea PeyserWhat’s next? Brad Pitt’s sweat socks on eBay? Britney’s backwash at a yard sale?
The dead-serious jokesters who run Hollywood’s favorite terrorist organization, PETA, whose members are known to toss red paint on women wearing perfectly good fur coats, and enforcing punishing vegan diets on healthy carnivores through a disinformation campaign (meat is cruel! It’ll kill you!) unseen since the days of the Soviet Union or the Clinton administration, are back at it.
And they’re even more hypocritical and weird than Madonna, who pushed a dairy-free diet (no ice-cream for Lourdes, Rocco and little David!) while importing 1,000 pheasants to her British estate for the purpose of allowing rich guests to shoot the poor birds to death. (more…)
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Celebutards of the Week: Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey
by Andrea Peyser
Jackie Kennedy did it graciously.
Hillary Clinton did it grudgingly.
First Ladies have reinvented themselves into softer, gentler, more user-friendly versions of their former ornery selves since the dawn of TV. But none has done it so radically and dramatically – and quickly – as Michelle Obama, relaxing the arches of her disturbingly angry eyebrows, covering her naked upper arms, and putting a figurative muzzle across her disapproving lips. She has emerged, butterfly-like, as vacuous and silly as any chick you’d meet in a shopping mall. And she’s performed this metamorphosis with the expert encouragement of your friendly neighborhood celebutard, Oprah Winfrey. (more…)
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Another Celebutard of the Week: Jeremy Piven
by Andrea PeyserYou are what you eat, I guess.
It was the performance of Jeremy Piven’s life. Last week, he tearfully persuaded five fellow actors that he was deathly ill from mercury poisoning due to his lifelong love of sushi – and not merely slacking off with Britney – when he abruptly walked away from the Broadway production of “Speed-the-Plow.’’ I predict future actors will have “no raw fish” clauses attached to their contracts. Entire A-list restaurants will tremble at the loss of high-profile business. On the bright side, fish will live.
Piven dodged a financial bullet by pleading his case to a grievance committee of Actor’s Equity. He could not escape the hilarity that ensued over his fishy tale. As “Plow’’ playwright David Mamet joked to the New York Post’s Michael Riedel, “My understanding is he is leaving show business to pursue a career as a thermometer.’’
This is why Piven is my latest “Celebutard of the Week,’’ in keeping with my new book, Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberal and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America. (more…)
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Celebutard of the Week: Gwyneth Paltrow
by Andrea PeyserAfter winning the Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, Gwyneth Paltrow has been shamefully idle (Shallow Hal, anyone?) Even her latest film, Two Lovers, co-starring Joaquin Phoenix, premiered, depressingly unnoticed, at the Sunshine Cinema on New York’s Lower East Side.
But Gwyneth, who moved to London after declaring, “We’re all going to die when George Bush has his way,’’ is far from allergic to taking home our money. Nor is the lady bred in an exclusive Manhattan private school opposed to reinventing herself in a curiously American kind of career: lifestyle guru.
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Another Celebutard of the Week: Britain (and much of Western Europe)
by Andrea Peyser
Can a country get so caught up in lunatic political correctness that it ceases to respect human values and dignity? Can an entire land drink the Kool-Aid of enforced Islamofascism, to the point where every man, woman and child within its borders earns the cursed title “Celebutard?”
How about a continent? (more…)
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Celebutard of the Week: Bill Maher
by Andrea Peyser
You’d think they’d learn.
The Oscars have always been a venue where celebs bash presidents, governments and endorse leftist candidates. But this year the Oscars hit a low even for Hollywood – allowing Bill Maher to bitterly bash religion. For personal reasons. This earns him the title of Celebutard of the Week, in keeping with my new book: “Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who are Destroying America.’’ (Kensington). (more…)
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Celebutard of the Week – Sean Penn
by Andrea Peyser
He’s the gift who just keeps on giving.
This week’s featured Celebutard already figures like an incurable disease in my new book, “Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America” (Kensington). He is Sean Penn – the A-list actor who brazenly broke bread with America-hating Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. He also traveled to Iran where he heard 10,000 people shouting in unison, “Death to America’’ and “Death to Israel’’ – and decided they didn’t really mean it. Let’s give ‘em all a hug. (more…)
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Celebutard of the Week: Cher
by Andrea Peyser
My new book, “Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America” can’t possibly keep pace with the full-mouth, feeble-brained rants that emanate regularly from the celebutard mouth.
So I’m offering a Celebutard of the Week. (more…)
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Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals, And Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America
by Andrea PeyserFOREWORD: WHAT IS A CELEBUTARD?
ce – leb – u – tard (suh – LEB – yu – tard) noun:
- A famous person with a grandiose notion of his own importance and contribution to the known universe.
- A human being of sub-par intellect, oversized ego and colossal bank account, whose existence represents a drag on the food chain, waste of oxygen and severe annoyance.
- An egregious moron. (Origin: from the Latin celebutardus Paris Hiltonus maximum Baldwinus
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