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Chely Wright, Fooling Everybody

By Michael Goldfarb
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I couldn’t help but notice that conservative blogs have suddenly embraced country singer Chely Wright and her patriotic ditty “Bumper of My SUV.” Today Michelle Malkin is giving Wright “kudos” for heading to Iraq to entertain the troops. And last week, Blackfive praised Wright for “singing her heart out for our troops.” The song’s been out for a while, and I interviewed Wright a few years ago in relation to a mini-scandal that developed when the Tennessean accused Wright of mounting a “campaign of deception” to push the song up the charts. According to the newspaper,

Seventeen members of a handpicked team of fans contacted radio stations around the country asking for more airplay for Wright’s pro-military ballad, The Bumper of My SUV. It was all part of an organized campaign by leaders of the fan club who encouraged the team to do such things as ”tell ’em your husband is a marine–whatever it takes.”

Here are some quotes from my interview with Chely:

On where she gets her news: “I get my news from BBC, MSNBC, CNN, FOX News, NPR, I don’t, uh, certainly Fox is slanted right. I’m not a Republican. CNN is slanted a bit left, although not far left, NPR is slanted way left. I get all the information that I can from every source that I can . . . so no, I’m not a big fan of Fox News. I’m not opposed to it. I think it’s information, it’s an opinion.”

When I pushed her on who she’d be supporting in the 2004 presidential election, she accused the president of “a hate crime” for pushing a constitutional amendment to prevent gay marriage:

Um, you know what, I suggest to anyone who is still undecided, which by the way, honestly, swear to God, I’m still undecided. I have a big problem with the president’s desire to amend the constitution, as far as the marriage between a man and a woman. As far as I’m concerned that’s a hate crime.

And finally, on the Dixie Chicks:

I sent Natalie Maines a registered letter in support of her freedom to speak her mind. You can go back to a video that was shot on Toby Keith’s record that was so big, the Angry American, the song that they were fighting about, that Natalie and Toby were fighting about. You can go back to that video and if you were to go to the CMA [Country Music Awards] footage where he performed and the entire crowd was given a flag, all of us on the floor were given flags to wave during his performance because we were told it was to be shot and they were going to use it for a clip for his video. You can go back and you can slo-mo it, and you can freeze-frame it and super-zoom in to the third row, I was the only person on the floor level, out of all the artists and people in our industry, that would not wave her flag.

Not that being a liberal prevents her from supporting the troops, and not that performing for the troops isn’t noble regardless of her political beliefs, but I would recommend that our friends in the blogosphere be a little wary of Ms. Wright. The report from the Tennessean suggests Wright is quite capable of manipulating patriotism in a craven effort to boost record sales. And while she denied any connection to that creepy PR campaign when I spoke with her, I did not get the sense that this was a person who supported the mission, even if she does support the troops.

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