http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2007/04/04/71415

I never thought I'd say this, but Rosie O'Donnell is a great American.

The 45-year-old stand-up comedian and actress, who has been the outspoken co-host and moderator of ABC's popular daytime chat show "The View" for the past six months, has gone from stupidly off-color to vividly shining moral Technicolor in that same span.

Eschewing the tabloid-chattering controversy of her embarrassingly racist "ching chong" representation of Chinese people last December, O'Donnell has, in my mind, culturally redeemed herself with her clear-eyed commentary on the U.S. escalation to war with Iran and her sudden and comprehensive endorsement of the 9-11 truth movement.

On the March 26 broadcast of "The View," the women were discussing the recent hostage crisis with Iran, in which 15 British sailors and Royal Marines had been captured by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard just three days before.

"I have one thing to say: Gulf of Tonkin. Google it," declared O'Donnell in perhaps the eleven most politically provocative words uttered on television in the past forty years.

Of course, the Gulf of Tonkin incident was the alleged pair of attacks by the North Vietnamese against two American destroyers in August 1964, which led to President Lyndon B. Johnson's rapid large-scale U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict, which ultimately cost over 58,000 American lives.

Subsequent research, including documents declassified by the National Security Agency in a 2005 report, clearly demonstrates that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was nothing more than a slickly crafted, false, political pretext for joining the war in Indochina.

Admiral James Stockdale recounted in the early 1990s that "our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets - there were no PT boats there. … There was nothing there but black water and American firepower."

Sound familiar, anyone? Can you say 'Iraq?' (Nothing there but black gold and American firepower.)

On March 28 - the day after her Gulf of Tonkin reference - O'Donnell returned to the Iranian situation in her Internet blog.

"The British did it on purpose," she wrote of the naval personnel who were seized in the Persian Gulf nearly two weeks ago.

"(They went) into Iranian waters as the U.S. military builds up on the Iranian border. We will be in Iran before summer as planned."

As if that wasn't provocative enough, "Tehran Rosie" (as she is now known to right-wing talking heads, in reference to Tokyo Rose, the famous Japanese propagandist from World War II) used that very same March 26 broadcast of "The View" to suggest that World Trade Center Building 7 was brought down by controlled demolition on September 11, 2001.

"I do believe that it defies physics … It is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved," O'Donnell claimed, followed by cheers from the studio audience.

On March 13, O'Donnell used her blog to link and quote excerpts from WhatReallyHappened.com - a popular alternative media news aggregator and Web site. O'Donnell suggested that WTC 7 was blown up in order to destroy thousands of evidential documents of massive corporate tax and options fraud, documents which were housed at the building's offices for the Internal Revenue Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It goes without saying that the rabid cable-news blatherers - all of whom are complicit in the destruction of our "free" media and undermine American-style democracy - have been on the march against Rosie, calling for her head on a pike every chance they can get.

On a March 30 broadcast of "Fox News Watch," syndicated columnist Cal Thomas called O'Donnell a "Marxist and unredeemed America hater" - as if the two labels had anything to do with each other.

Fellow Fox employee and hate-spewer extraordinaire Bill O'Reilly stated that O'Donnell "is now actively supporting Iran against her own country and Britain."

Much to the chagrin of the media-government complex/war propaganda machine, the tense political climate - buffeted by progressive-leaning midterm election results and increasing anger about failed policies domestic and abroad - has reached such a pitch that celebrities such as Rosie and Charlie Sheen can use their significant pop-culture leverage to challenge their government.

According to the New York Post, Sheen

recently signed on with billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban's Magnolia Pictures to narrate

the final cut of "Loose Change," the 82-minute pseudo-documentary and Internet phenomenon that took Google Video by storm (10 million views and counting) and in many ways became the centerpiece of the 9-11 truth movement.

The movie, written and directed by 23-year-old film-school reject Dylan Avery of the town of Oneonta, N.Y., presents a comprehensive and painstakingly researched theory that the U.S. government planned and executed the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The third and final edition of "Loose Change" will be released in late summer, says Avery, and it will be distributed by Magnolia.

Until then, rest assured we'll all stay busy, fighting wars not only in our own private Idahos, but by proxy in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

It ain't over till the fat lady sings, and by gumbo, Tehran Rosie's still got a tune or two left.

Adri Mehra welcomes comments at amehra@mndaily.com.