Danny Glover has been fired as MCI spokesman, apparently because of his political views. Apparently a phone campaign launched by MSNBC's "Scarborough Country" had something to do with it, as claimed in this editorial. According to the article, Glover's "extreme views" and actions include the following:

He called the president of the United States a racist, he blamed American policy for the murderous acts of September 11th, and he signed a petition comparing American soldiers in the Gulf War to 9/11 terrorists. He called America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” And most recently Mr. Glover signed a letter of support for Fidel Castro.

I don't know many of the details of Glover's statements. His celebrity status is not owed to his political views, but to his visibility as an actor. MCI hired him as spokesman because of that visibility. I don't think most Americans would have been interested in Glover's political views if not for Scarborough Country's "celebrity muck-raking." Why would the folks at MSNBC want to get a non-politician fired for his political views? According to Joe Scarborough, "It has everything to do with an American citizen being held responsible for his words and actions." "Responsibility" for political views includes losing your job? What does it mean to have "irresponsible" opinions? Is that Scarborough-code for unconservative? What kinds of professions should hold people "accountable" for their political views and activities? Should we allow liberals to be teachers or university professors or child-care providers? Should they be allowed to raise children? Though, as I said, I still don't know precisely what Glover has said on these issues, the opinions which this article references do not sound that unreasonable to me. Someone might have a collection of valid reasons from which they conclude that Bush is a racist (perhaps based on crime-and-punishment data from Bush's tenure as governor of Texas). American foreign policy has played a significant role in the rise of terrorist groups. It is not an "extreme view" that the US government provided funding and training to Osama bin Laden and the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, which later evolved into Al Qaeda. That is a fact. American policy is thus partly to blame for the attacks, and our government's apparent refusal to learn from past errors will probably lead to more indirectly US-sponsored terrorism against US interests in the future. America has also played a central role in all of the destructive violence that swept the world during the nineteenth century. The carnage really began in the 1860's when Richard Gatling (an American) invented the Gatling gun. He sold his gun to the British army, which used it to sweep across much of Africa and Asia, leaving each newly occupied area much less populated than when they found it. I don't directly blame the US for all this carnage; I blame our close ally, Great Britain. The US during this period was mostly isolationist, quietly supplying the armies of Europe with military tools for imperial expansion. Waning imperialism was arguably at the root of every conflict in the 20th century. In hindsight, the role of the US was really one of negligence. The rise of Castro is another example of negligent foreign policy leading to a global crisis. Sure, he was a bloody dictator who began puging his political opposition as soon as he came to power, and refused to hold free elections. But what really annoyed the US was Castro's decision to nationalize all US-owned businesses in Cuba. American investors were stripped of their assets in the peon island country. The US responded by ostracizing Castro. Castro and the Cuban delegation to the UN received undignified treatment in New York in 1960, being driven out of their hotel. They moved out of Manhattan and went to a hotel in Harlem, where Castro befriended Malcolm X and Nikita Khrushchev. As Malcolm X put it, "Premier Castro has come out against lynching, which is more than President Eisenhower has done." In a final insult to the new Cuban government, the US empounded Castro's plane in compensation for "unpaid debts." In the midst of all this foul treatment from the US, one thing was no doubt clear to Castro: he and his country amounted to nothing in the eyes of the US government. Washington would never be friendly with Cuba unless Cuba went along with the interests of the US. It must have been glaringly apparent to Castro that he could elevate himself to immense importance by allying with the Soviets. This relationship was consumated when the USSR provided Castro with a new plane in which to return home. Washington did nothing to pursue a friendly relationship with Cuba, to encourage Castro against his affiliation with the Soviets. Intimidation was the wrong answer, because Soviet backing gave Castro the ability to reciprocate. The Cuban missile crisis was a painfully obvious outcome from this chain of events. The arrogance of US policy toward Cuba took us barelling down the road toward nuclear war. And I've apparently gone barelling away from the point of this post. The point was, Why should I, the potential customer, care what the MCI spokesman thinks about Castro?