The acclaimed actor and self-described libertarian Gary Oldman comes out with guns blazing against political correctness and Hollywood hypocrisy in a soon-to-be-published interview with Playboy magazine. In the interview, he notes that Hollywood leftists such as Bill Maher and Jon Stewart can publicly use any words they like and imply people are homosexuals (without adding “not that there’s anything wrong with that”), but a private outburst by an actor such as Mel Gibson or Alec Baldwin results in widespread denunciation and loss of employment. (Gibson has been blatantly blacklisted by the Hollywood studios ever since his antisemitic outburst directed at two policemen who were arresting him on a DUI charge, and Baldwin was fired from his talk-show duties at MSNBC.) Oldman, like Gibson, is from the working classes, and he shows a refreshing practicality and directness in his takedown of Hollywood elitists. Here are a couple of samples from the interview, as reported by the Daily Mail:

‘I can’t bear double standards. It gets under my skin more than anything.’

He then claimed certain comedians are allowed to say racist and homophobic things under the guise of satire, while he would get slammed.

The father-of-three claimed: ‘Well, if I called ( Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives) Nancy Pelosi a c*** — and I’ll go one better, a f***ing useless c**— I can’t really say that.

‘But Bill Maher and Jon Stewart can, and nobody’s going to stop them from working because of it.

‘Bill Maher could call someone a fag and get away with it. He said to Seth MacFarlane this year, “I thought you were going to do the Oscars again. Instead they got a lesbian.”

‘He can say something like that. Is that more or less offensive than Alec Baldwin saying to someone in the street, “You fag”? I don’t get it.’

. . .

He said: ‘Alec calling someone an F-A-G in the street while he’s pissed off coming out of his building because they won’t leave him alone. I don’t blame him. So they persecute.

‘Mel Gibson is in a town that’s run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because he’s actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him – and doesn’t need to feed him anymore because he’s got enough dough.

‘He’s like an outcast, a leper, you know?

‘But some Jewish guy in his office somewhere hasn’t turned and said, “That f***ing kraut” or “F*** those Germans,” whatever it is? We all hide and try to be so politically correct. That’s what gets me.’

Clearly Oldman is no longer hiding, and his criticisms will not endear him to the Hollywood power brokers and their slavish hangers-on in the press.

Update, June 25, 10 a.m. EDT: Inadvertently providing more evidence of things about which he complained in his interview, Oldman was forced to issue a statement of remorse for any offense his comments may have caused toward Jews. The statement reads in part:

I am deeply remorseful that comments I recently made in the Playboy Interview were offensive to many Jewish people. Upon reading my comments in print—I see how insensitive they may be, and how they may indeed contribute to the furtherance of a false stereotype. Anything that contributes to this stereotype is unacceptable, including my own words on the matter. If, during the interview, I had been asked to elaborate on this point I would have pointed out that I had just finished reading Neal Gabler’s superb book about the Jews and Hollywood, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews invented Hollywood. The fact is that our business, and my own career specifically, owes an enormous debt to that contribution.

The statement about whom Hollywood people owe their careers to is certainly ironic in that context, given the threat it shows the Hollywood power brokers hold over the heads of everyone thus beholden to them.

And the PC bulldozer rolls on.