We liberals can be just as stupid as conservatives

Actress Sharon Stone, who is usually counted on our side of the aisle, gave reporters at Cannes her assessment of the causes of the Sichuan earthquakes and revealed a mind just as superstitious and inclined to blame the victim as any reactionary on the right.

“I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else,” Stone said Thursday during a Cannes Film Festival red-carpet interview with Hong Kong’s Cable Entertainment News. “And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?”

Karma sure has bad aim. It shot at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in Beijing and killed thousands of innocent bystanders living in small towns over a thousand miles away. There is no difference between her silly statement and those of televangelists like Hagee and Robertson who claim Hurricane Katrina was the wrath of God on New Orleans for tolerating gays or that 9/11 was caused by feminists. Neither end of the political spectrum has a lock on superstition or muddy thinking.