Jessica Simpson snubs Bush

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- Concerned about politicizing her favorite charity, singer-actress Jessica Simpson Wednesday turned down a invitation to meet with President Bush, a snub that left Republicans dismayed.

 

The apparent final word that Simpson would be a no-show at a major Republican fund-raiser with Bush and congressional leaders Thursday night came after a day of conflicting reports from her camp and organizers of the event.

 

The blond star of the film "The Dukes of Hazzard" still plans to visit Washington Thursday to lobby members of Congress on behalf of Operation Smile, a non-profit venture offering free plastic surgery for disadvantaged children overseas with facial deformities.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/03/15/simpson.bush.reut/index.html

 

 

I'll admit, when I first saw this story I wasn't expecting it to be related to a fund raising attempt, nor that it involved a charity. I was expecting Jessica to have done or said something stupid that the media would just use as a punch line for a joke. However, I must say, I'm rather impressed Jessica. It takes a lot of gut to do something like that, whether you came up with the thought or not.

 

Sure, people will laugh about a  charity that involves "plastic surgery for disadvantaged children overseas with facial deformities." We're not talking about nose jobs and face lifts. This is a serious issue in other countries.

 

I recently watched a show in Discovery, albeit with protest from my fiancée, that documented the multiple surgeries involved to help a young boy from the Philippines with tumors on his face so big, his head accounted for a third of his total body weight. Without the surgeries the boy would die a slow and painful death. It pained me to watch him, but at the same time gave me hope that there would be doctors in this world that would work so hard to save the life of a boy so disfigured and so grotesque.

 

There are many illnesses today that cause massive lesions and tumors to appear in otherwise healthy children. This will almost always lead to death at some point in time either with pressure on the brain, or some form of destruction of the nervous or respiratory system. This is not something that most charities work towards assisting either, as it is must harder to market a deformed person than a skinny starving child. The fact remains that both of them will die without help, is it fair to help one and not the other?

 

Jessica, you may be dumb, I may not care for you and your movies, I may feel sorry for your ex-husband for having to deal with you, but you do have a good charity here and if you are at all serious about working with it, I commend you.

 

Bravo.

 

-O