Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor that hosted Obama’s supporters in her New York townhouse and who recently co-hosted a $35,000 per person fundraiser at Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s home, is heading up the venture. In the past, Wintour’s tony political functions were attended by the likes of Alicia Keys and $70,000 dinner power couple Coldplay singer Chris Martin and his actress wife, the “suddenly everywhere” Miramax “muse,” Gwyneth Paltrow.

So with Wintour now raising reelection funds, you can just forget the $5 raffle tickets for a hot dog dinner with Barry and Shelley. Instead, the campaign will be hawking designer duds to people who, last time around, were in such dire straits they hoped the new president would fill their gas tank and pay their mortgage.

For her latest effort, Anna Wintour has recruited Hollywood notables, designers, pop and hip-hop artists, and other all-around really rich people to raise money for Barack 2012 by designing overpriced T-shirts, tank tops, scarves, wristlets, and bags to sell at inflated prices to people who, in the midst of an Obama recession, really can’t afford them.

Thus, “Runway to Win” is yet another example that Barack Obama and his helpful circle of elite Hollywood friends and Seventh Avenue designer devotees are all pretty much insulated from reality, out of touch, and oblivious to the plight of the common man.

Recently, in order to make a point that a $40 tax cut is needed in order to feed starving American families, Obama asked the question: “What does $40 Mean to You?” Most Americans were probably thinking warehouse club paper towels and lunch for two at Taco Bell, not $45 T-shirts.

Unlike them, Obama was thinking T-shirts!  Apparently, the budget-minded President is comfortable with Mrs. Jay-Z, barely off the delivery table and out of the special maternity suite with the 10-man security team at Lenox Hill Hospital, designing cotton tee jerseys for impoverished Americans.

Beyonce’s creation stands to pull down a hefty profit for merchandise that’s actually worth no more than $5. For 45 bucks, clotheshorses all along the “Flaws and All” campaign trail, instead of buying groceries, will have a chance to wear a cheap quality “Yes we can… Greater Together” T-shirt.

New mom Beyonce is only one of many slobbering Obama supporters who will be joining forces to produce a trendsetting Barack Obama clothing line for 2012.

Thanks to all the participants, Obama for America supporters will have an opportunity to parade around with an Obama-logo tote bag while wearing clothing that shouts to the world that just because a person’s been unemployed for more than three years doesn’t mean they don’t want to contribute to four more years of watching Michelle Obama wear $2,000 sundresses.

For most Americans, splurging means shopping at Target. In the meantime, while the 99% eat Spaghetti-Os for dinner, the “Runway to Win” list of designers reads like a Who’s Who of attendees at White House Wednesday-night Kobe-beef Conga/cocktail parties.  The list is a couture catalog of who dresses Mrs. Obama in outfits whose one-year cost, when totaled, tallies to an amount that could save 1.2 million American homes from being foreclosed.

Some of the 22 designers participating in the effort are: Russell Simmons, billionaire business magnate of Def Jam fame; Sean “Diddy” Combs, another billionaire, rapper, and record producer who’s also recognizable by the names Sean John Combs, Puff Daddy, and P. Diddy; and even Tory Burch, the designer of the $500 boots Michelle wore to turn over the White House lawn when instructing Americans on the money-saving benefits of planting an at-home organic vegetable garden.

Many of Michelle Obama’s highbrow clothes designers will also be contributing to the effort: Narciso Rodriguez, Jason Wu, Alexander Wang, Joseph Altuzarra, Rag and Bone, Rachel Roy and Tracy Reese.

For those wanting a “first access pass,” on the tongue-in-cheek “Proudly made in America” campaign blog is the following announcement:

We’re launching something new, and a little different, over the next few weeks: Runway to Win, a collaboration by some of the country’s top fashion designers in support of Obama 2012. In the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out Obama-inspired designs by everyone from Tracy Reese to Jason Wu to Tory Burch at runwaytowin.com. The details are still under wraps, but sign up for your First Access pass to get updates—and a first look at the new designs. Then invite your friends and family to do the same.

The truth is, any designer invested in Obama winning another term is probably secretly hoping their names will continue to be printed on the tags of what fills Mrs. Obama’s sartorially-stuffed clothes closet.

On the other hand, previous Obama supporters like Donna Karan, who participated in 2008, decided this year their idea of change would be to put Republican customers and capitalism first. Apparently, some decided to bow out because maintaining a customer base means more to them than being introduced by Scarlett Johansson at an Obama 2012 fashion show/fund raiser.

So, while Americans continue to suffer, big-name fashion designers and a diverse group of entrepreneurs like ‘Let’s Move’-Beyonce will be directly involved in “Runway to Win.” And yet, aside from the all the glitter and glamour, in light of 2008’s “Runway to Change,” the whole thing is really a bit scary. Why? Because if “change” is any indication of what four years of “winning” will be like, instead of walking the runway, if Mr. Fashionista manages to win a second term, America will more likely be walking the plank.

Abraham Lincoln and P.T. Barnum (you know, “You can fool some of the people some of the time…” and “There a sucker born every minute.”) had it right. It was the huge amount of money spent on advertising that bought those ratings. Ratings of course bring in advertising dollars but to put it bluntly, dog feces still smells bad and is hard to shake off of your foot. This series was the historical documentary equivalent a big steaming pile. In fact numerous Los Angeles-based cable documentary producers have quietly expressed their disdain to me at the poor execution, production values and content of The Story of Us.

The Story of Us was produced by Jane Root an English producer and former Discovery Channel President and BBC executive. So a foreign producer not only got the considerable money for this show but also tells us about us from a decidedly British, ill-informed and surface, slop politically correct point of view. At a time when American cable producers are starving for work, History shows their true colors by enriching an English company with a major series on our history. Most of the terribly produced reenactments were actually shot in Great Britain and South Africa, standing in for the good old USA!

History had numerous far better filmed and authentic looking reenactments in their vault made by American producers like Craig Haffner’s Greystone Productions and Gary Foreman’s Native Sun Productions. Producers who can no longer get the time of day at the now reality-driven History who would rather show dumbed-down, contrived tripe like Pawn Stars and Ice Road Truckers. They should have just bumped those American producer’s footage up to High Definition and saved themselves time and money and got it right.

In the interest of fair disclosure, I wrote and co-wrote several shows for Native Son Productions like The Battle of New Orleans and Boone & Crockett. I defy anyone with half a brain and a decent eye and ear for top quality historical programming to not score those shows as far better than The Story of Us in visuals, content, historical accuracy and production values.

Partially told through the slant of American commercialism and technology The Story of Us most often utilizes know-nothing non-experts like Donald Trump, Melissa Ethridge, P. Diddy, Bill Maher, Michael Douglas, Sheryl Crow and even Pawn Stars patriarch Richard Harrison. Only Generals Colin Powell and David Petraeus, historian H. W. Brands and a very few others loan any air of knowledgeable dignity to the proceedings.

Comedian Margaret Cho was tapped to talk about the Chinese laborers who helped build the Central Pacific Railroad – didn’t anyone check, she’s Korean!  Al Sharpton and Henry Lewis Gates certainly didn’t lend any air of accuracy or legitimacy to the historical proceedings. Most of the celebrities wind up sounding like the verbal equivalent of a deer stuck in the headlights, as if they were just given a printout from the pages of the book that the producers wanted regurgitated.

The series even violates its own standards. Take for instance the story of Timothy Murphy, the frontier rifleman who changed the course of the American Revolution. In 1777 at the battle of Saratoga, he shot British General Simon Fraser at a distance of over 200 yards with his early Kentucky Rifle ensuring an American victory. The English filmed reenactment of the event is so amateurish looking that it might have been culled from a bad episode of NBC’s 1960s Daniel Boone series which was at least entertaining.   Murphy isn’t even shown with the unique double-barreled swivel breach flintlock rifle he used. The system allowed the skilled rifleman to flip a toggle and change to a second loaded barrel for another quick shot.

In a show that supposedly features exceptional American technology there is no mention of this unique American made weapon. There are actually contemporary American flintlock rifle makers who still make swivel-breach flintlocks today. I guess the English producers couldn’t find their way to these skilled American artisans who live and work in flyover country. Just as surprising there is no mention that Murphy’s feat importantly reverberated all the way to Paris where the American victory at Saratoga helped Ben Franklin convince the on-the-fence French to finally support our Revolution with gold, guns and troops.

The series computer-generated graphics were continually recycled and poorly conceived in the first place with an eye towards grabbing a channel surfing thirteen-year-old boy. Every time a new group of settlers or immigrants cross the Atlantic it’s the same boring under the water CGI shot of the same ship’s hulls racing through crystal clear water. The buffalo herd looks like a bunch of furry cockroaches and one historian described the horde of wagons heading West as the “stampede of the covered wagon RV’s.”

Custer’s Last Stand is filmed with merely eight or nine horsemen in phony looking uniforms riding over a hilltop, that was either in South Africa or Northern England, and firing a few shots. Of course the white eyes are still the bad guys despite the preponderance of well-researched books that have repatriated Custer for more then twenty years now. And the Indians (that’s right, I don’t use that silly Native American title) in the series, both eastern and western are downright insulting in their laughably inaccurate looking clothing, hairstyles and accouterments.

History wants to provide copies of this abominable series to schools nation wide. So start monitoring your kid’s history classes and put up a fuss. History’s Story of Us isn’t the story of America, but the story of what we are not.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the ridiculous, cynical remake of “We are the World,” an exercise that according to news accounts seemed less focused on assisting the people of Haiti than on stroking the egos of the pseudo-stars and future nobodies who did the yodeling.

The tiresome video (directed by the tiresome Paul Haggis) raises an important question – who the hell are these people?  I think one of them – the dude with the expensive clothes and dull stare – was Puff Diddley or P. Daddy or whatever idiotic moniker he’s using this week.  You know, there was a time when grown men used their given names instead of childish nicknames that are just emblems of the eternal adolescence that modern pop culture worships. 

Now, the original “We are the World” was itself nearly unlistenable, but that’s a matter of taste and reasonable people can disagree (I thought the British supergroup Band-Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was a much better song, though it shared “World’s” inexcusable refusal to confront the reason the Ethiopian drought turned into the Ethiopian famine – the cruelty and stupidity of its left wing government ).  However, at least most of the participants were people with track records of success.  You had Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Diana Ross, Bob Dylan, Dionne Warwick and a bunch of others.  Now, not all of them might have been your cup of tea – I’d rather pass a kidney stone made of broken glass than listen to the Boss – but you had at least heard of them.

Let’s review the crop of hit-making legends present at the recording of the remake:  Well, Barbra Streisand showed up.  She’s a real star, and her presence assures the buy-in of the middle-aged gay couple demographic.  There’s “will.i.am.”  Mr. am is a member of a group called the Black Eyed Peas.  I’ve also heard of them.  They suck.  And you’ve also got noted cannabis aficionado Snoop Dogg, who probably did it because he confused Haiti with Jamaica.

Also present were entities known as “Weezy,” “Drake,” and “Kanye West.”  I thought “Weezy” was Sherman Helmsley’s wife on The Jeffersons.  Apparently she’s gained some tats, some extra appendages and started rapping.  Drake sounds like a cool name for a private eye, but my guess is he’s a rapper too.  Apparently most “stars” today are rappers.  I have heard of this Kanye fellow – I think he blamed Hurricane Katrina on George Bush.  I bet he blames the earthquake on 43 as well – hell, apparently everything’s Bush’s fault anyway.

The news report on the recording session also raised more questions than it answered with sentences like:

Fifteen-year-old Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber, who sang the opening line originally performed by Richie, joked that he would ask his new friend, R&B singer Akon, to get the telephone number of Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls.

I know who Lionel Ritchie is, and I know what Canada is.  Other than that, these words make no sense when placed in that sequence.

We can sum up the whole thing with another sentence from the same news story:  “Randy Phillips, one of the organizers, said his ‘one regret’ was the absence of dance-pop star Lady Gaga.”

How lame is any endeavor where the absence of Lady Gaga makes it worse?

The point isn’t that charity is bad.  USA for Africa generated tens of millions and hopefully it was well spent.  To the extent this generates money that is neither squandered nor diverted into the pockets of thugs, good.  The point is not that these singers are somehow wrong for using their talents, such as they are, to assist others in emergencies – we should all do so when disasters happen.

The point is that in 25 years the concept of celebrity has degenerated into parody.  Borderline cretins with fake boobs and bulging wallets wander the streets of Los Angeles pursued by hordes of shutter-clicking parasites in self-reinforcing cycle of publicity whetting the appetite for more publicity.  Glance about the magazines at the supermarket check-out line – consider yourself on the cutting edge of pop culture if one face in ten makes an impression.  You have some NBC reality star’s heartbreaking split from a dude who plays a brooding werewolf on the CW while a breasty gal from a show on MTV beckons from the cover of Cosmo, promising to disclose her patented sex tips – tips that can probably be summed up with the words “Anyone, anytime, anywhere that might help my career in any way.”

The original “We are the World” was an event; this one is a mere occurrence.  And the reasons are not hard to see.  We have celebrities who do not deserve celebration.  We have a public grown weary of the shameless antics and craven pandering of the celebrity culture.  Who actually believes that most of the participants want anything more from this recording session than a close-up on Entertainment Tonight before they slink back across to the far side of the velvet rope? 

Or perhaps this really isn’t a just another ploy designed to feed the fame machine.  Maybe these “stars” do care about the people of Haiti.  After all, if there’s one thing that the name “Snoop Dogg” is synonymous with, it’s caring about others.

No, I don’t say that in the same way that RINO’s say it in an attempt to move towards the center and line their Brooks Brothers’ pockets. I say it in that the political landscape today has changed drastically and we need to do more than look to one transcendent figure as the leader of the conservative movement. Future generations will be won on the cultural front, and never through “politics.” Politicians are boring, plus they smell funny.

Say what you want about leftists; Sure they act a little crazy, wear pointy shoes and spit when they talk, but they are incredibly effective with planting cultural seeds. Avatar, plants a seed. Family Guy, plants a seed. SNL plants a seed. All of Comedy Central plants seeds. On the flip side, the sad fact of the matter is that conservatives have planted little to nothing in the cultural landscape.

Listen, you will never win the young masses through politics or a politician. The only way to win them over is through taking an active role in the culture. This is displayed by the fact that anytime a conservative steps foot into that arena leftists go insane (a kind of “Paula Abdul’s not taking her meds again” insane). One needs look no further than CPAC. The heavy-hitters weren’t the GOP politicians, but people like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Andrew Breitbart. Notice how agitated the mainstream media has become. Lefties are hoping that we’ve given up on Hollywood and mass media as a whole.

See when it comes to the fight for American culture, leftists aren’t looking for a knockout punch (not with their limp wrists). They want to Larry Holmes this thing and flick the jab non-stop so that over time there is a serious cumulative effect and the masses become punch-drunk.

See, conservatives don’t flick the jab, which is why in the 15th round (election time) we find ourselves down on the scorecard and try to crank out a haymaker by finding some supernatural Reagan-like savior in a Sarah Palin or Scott Brown. The problem is that conservatives are fighting like Max Baer when we should be fighting like Cassius Clay.

Ronald Reagan worked in a generation brought up with traditional principles able to observe conservatism at work. Having also observed liberalism at work first-hand, and through critical thinking they decided to overwhelmingly revert back to conservatism.

The problem is that not only has this generation never seen TRUE conservatism at work, but they’ve been raised in a world of situational ethics. When you’ve been weaned on the teat of subjective morality, logic begins to play a smaller and smaller role as facts become subjective. Since we haven’t been planting the necessary cultural seeds with a younger generation, we can’t expect them to follow the logical path of conservatism.

Folks don’t expect politicians to ever step up to this plate either. The D.C. crowd often considers it “beneath them” to address mass media because in doing so they acknowledge that they watch it. After all, we all know that they don’t partake in such indulgences.

Case in Point; Barack Obama. Barack Obama the politician was never elected. Barack Obama the celebrity, on the other hand, was ushered in successfully by the Hollywood elite. It was never the Washington machine that made Obama merchandise the “it” fashion item of the season, but people like The Black-Eyed Peas, Scarlett Johanssen, P. Diddy, GreenDay, Steven Spielberg, Tina Fey, Seth McFarlane… Well I think you get the point.

My question to you is: if offered the power of Hollywood/the entertainment industry or Washington D.C. which would you choose?

I think that if you choose Washington you should seriously consider a CAT scan.

Should you decide to get one, I hear Sean Penn knows a guy.

Witness Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s cavalcade of shiny, happy situational patriots appearing in a derivative public servitude announcement: A “Presidential Pledge” to President Barack Obama.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Forgive and forget? Right.

President Bush was not holding back Moore from “free[ing] one million people from slavery in the next five years.” Nor was he holding back the Obama-biquitous Will.I.Am from “chang[ing] how [he] live[s].” Ditto: Aaron Ekhart (“To be a better person,”) Marisa Tomei (“To integrate into my heart what I already know in my head which is that we are all in this together,”) Kutcher (“To the abolition to 21st century slavery,”) Anthony Kiedis (“To be of service to Barack Obama,”) P. Diddy (” pledge to turn the lights off, cause I used to leave the lights on but we want to conserve energy so I’ma turn the lights off, you turn the lights off,) and all-in-unison (“Because together we can, together we are, and together we will be the change that we seek.”)

Missing are pledges not to kiss the ring of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and other pledged enemies of America. Nor are there pledges not to make movies that glorify these tyrants. Nor are there pledges to take seriously that we are at war, will continue to be at war under President Obama and that our precious and under-appreciated military is fighting an avowed and evil enemy — so that, among other things, Hollywood can continue to make decadent crap that actually motivates our enemy to fight us harder!

Unfortunately, what happens in Hollywood does not stay in Hollywood.

For more mind-numbing background read Kutcher’s companion piece at the… you got it… the Huffington Post .

The conservatives, Republicans and sundry non-lefties I know in show business have had nothing to say but positive and helpful things about the coming Obama presidency.

“We wish him well.” “He is our president now and he needs our help.”

These are the types of things I keep hearing.

And this is exactly the right attitude and exactly the right message.

God bless, President Obama. Even though I didn’t vote for him, and disagree with much of his agenda, he has my best wishes and all of my best efforts.

But that doesn’t mean I will forgive and forget an era of narcissism, petty complaining and conspiracy theory peddling from the majority celebrity class that began well before Iraq. [See "Hollywood, Interrupted " -- my book co-written with Mark Ebner -- which was written before and during the build-up to the Iraq war and before the WMDs weren't found. The public behavior from Hollywood even then was almost uniformly deplorable.]

Conspiracy theories of America’s complicity in 9/11 dominated cocktail party discussions for eight tedious years. They couldn’t simply disagree with Bush. They had to ascribe evil to his motivations and make sure the whole world agreed on that flawed premise.

Yet, hating the president doesn’t mean one can’t still help out the country in a great time of need. But many went to foreign countries and demeaned it instead. Called those that disagreed with them rubes and hicks. The elitism of the celebrities against flyover country America could not have been more pronounced. They made a boat-load of movies that affirmed this narrow and patronizing world view.

And now they want us back.

We’re all Americans — NOW.

It’s a convenient lie the celebrity left peddles that they were with us during the initial Afghanistan phase of the war, and even after 9/11.

No syrupy revisionism will change this fact.

[As I was writing this piece, I received the following unsolicited email from a Big Hollywood reader: "Reminder to liberal celebrities: It's time to set your Fluctuating Patriotism Clock from "Hate America" to "Love America" on Jan. 20th. Remember, it's "Springsteen Ahead - Falwell Behind." Funny.]

Featured in Moore’s goofy, derivative and pretty-in-a-grotesque-way video is none other than Cameron Diaz who had this to say before the 2004 election:

We have a voice now, and we’re not using it, and women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies…if you think that rape should be legal , then don’t vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body, and you have a right to say what happens to you and fight off that danger of losing that, then you should vote…

Such mental insanity posing as erudition usually earns ostracism. But Diaz and her self-serious cohorts have no moral compass, no sense of proportion, no decency and, certainly, no shame.

This video illustrates that the current celebrity class are not citizens but serfs. They need a leader to put their minds in the right place to do the right thing. They are not heroic individualists seeking to extend America’s promise but conformists who chose to sit out and complain during the tough years in order to ensure their guy got in the next go-around.

The celebrity decadence during the “oppressive” Bush years was world class. The clubs raged. The boutique hotels rocked. The private jet industry at Van Nuys airport flourished. The party never stopped. And only a precious few (Thank you, dearly!!!) stepped up to support the American troops who have been valiantly fighting for Hollywood’s right to do lines off of each others’ buttocks at $10 million Hollywood Hills mansions.

They never spoke up against the movies that demonized our military.

They never made movies to counter the libel.

They took the easy route. And blamed Bush for everything.

Moore’s nauseating video — which, like Steven Soderbergh’s “Oceans” franchise, grants a pristine look into the modern celebrity’s sense of self-importance — is not a sign of desire to serve the country under Obama. Watch, by March this pledge like New Year’s resolutions will fall by the wayside. It is a sign that the Democrat is in the White House now. It is a sign that they get to sleep again in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Twenty years ago AIDS was the number one cause for the Hollywood left. Remember the trendy red ribbons at all the self-aggrandizing awards shows? Hollywood has moved on (dot org) to better blame-your-fellow-American causes. But President Bush didn’t. And aside from Bob Geldof and Bono , they ignore this president’s demonstrable goodness .

Amazing that Geldof and Bono could valiantly fight their battles and serve humanity without being paralyzed by the Leader of the Free World 2000-2008’s all-encompassing awfulness.

Remember this video: It is a instructive relic of the era of celebrity decadence and boutique anti-Republican activism under President Bush. It is a sickening display that they want fast and easy absolution for having comported themselves like ill-behaved children for eight difficult and war-torn years.

Good luck, President Obama. The rest of you can go to hell.