Natalie Portman on a slim pretext

Donald Douglas of American Power is a blogger after my own heart:

This post is mainly just a chance to write about Natalie Portman. I mean she personifies eye candy!

Totally, dude! And I've got to admire a man who will seize on the flimsiest excuse to blog about a Hollywood hottie. In this case, it seems Miss Portman was featured in a New York Times story about celebrity activists:

In 2004, Natalie Portman, then a 22-year-old fresh from college, went to Capitol Hill to talk to Congress on behalf of the Foundation for International Community Assistance, or Finca, a microfinance organization for which she served as “ambassador.” She found herself wondering what she was doing there, but her colleagues assured her: “We got the meetings because of you.” For lawmakers, Natalie Portman was not simply a young woman — she was the beautiful Padmé from “Star Wars.” “And I was like, ‘That seems totally nuts to me,’ ” Portman told me recently. It’s the way it works, I guess. I’m not particularly proud that in our country I can get a meeting with a representative more easily than the head of a nonprofit can.”

Microfinancing? Cool. Princess Amidala talking about microfinancing? Awesome.

What we need is a free-market think tank in Hollwyood that sponsors celebrity parties and introduces movie stars to the ideas of people like Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. I mean, just imagine Scarlett Johansen testifying before Congress about the importance of de-regulation and eliminating the corporate tax.

Yeah, it's a fantasy. But isn't that what show business is all about?

UPDATE: If you're going to do babe-blogging, you might as well do it right, so I'm going to make some important points here:

• First, what is it with the pouty look? Don't get me wrong, Natalie Portman can do the smoldering pouty look with the best of them. But she's also got a beautiful smile. So why do the photographers and magazine editors always prefer to show her pouting.
• Second, the gossip site Egotastic does an invidious cleavage comparison between Natalie Portman and her Boleyn co-star Scarlett Johansen. What's up with that? Is Egotastic trying to suggest that every woman in Hollywood must be a silicon queen? Is a B-cup not enough, even for a world-class beauty like Natalie Portman? (C'mon, guys: What's to complain about?)
• Third, am I the only one offended by the ahistorical Women's Studies lecture that intrudes into this Boleyn trailer?

UPDATE II: Here I was, merely indulging in gratuitous babe-blogging when, by force of habit, I decided to do some actual research and discovered that Miss Portman’s status as the favorite Hollywood hottie of right-wing neocons (like Donald Douglas) is no accident.

Yeah, that’s right: She’s Israeli-American. She told Rolling Stone she considers Jerusalem her true home. And, although she tries to be politically correct about it, she’s definitely a Zionist:

Recent events in Israel have troubled Portman deeply. "Anytime anything happens to anyone there, it's like a limb's been ripped off," she says. She adds, perhaps concerned that her entire political position should be assumed from this: "I'm very protective of Israel, obviously, but I'm more protective of humanity than of any of my own personal desires."

Her Wikipedia entry states Miss Portman’s name in Hebrew. Even though my Hebrew’s a little rusty, I’m pretty sure her Hebrew name translates to Super-Hot Sabra.

Obviously, Miss Portman is part of a Mossad/Hollywood conspiracy to undermine worldwide anti-Semitism. Little kids in Egypt and Iran even now are watching “Star Wars” and saying to themselves, “Wow, that Princess Amidala is so beautiful.” They internalize her as an ideal, and then they get a little older and find out she’s Israeli -- completely sabotages that genocidal jihadist mentality, you see.

So, by the most providential accident, I’ve stumbled onto a new argument in my “Hotties For Peace” campaign. The first argument being the original “gee hottie,” Fawzia Mohamed, Miss Egypt 2006. How can you hate people, when their women are so incredibly hot?