[VIDEO] Leftists with conservative values, and the virtues of Dancing With The Stars

bindi-irwin-02-800I’ve mentioned before my fondness for Dancing With The Stars, which I see as a weekly morality tale for conservative values. Sure, I like watching beautiful people dance beautifully, but the show’s real attraction is how gosh-darned hard the winners — and most of the losers — work.

The most recent example of the work ethic that creates winners is 17-year-old Bindi Irwin, daughter of the late Steve Irwin:

Bindi Irwin delivered another sparkling performance on Monday night’s “Dancing with the Stars” as she earned 28 out of 30 points by channeling Grace Kelly in her foxtrot with partner Derek Hough.

But rehearsal footage aired revealed something less glamorous: Bindi’s feet are a mess!

Irwin, 17, showed the cameras that her toenails are falling off and she has to use Super Glue to put them back on.

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Like she did on her show package, however, Irwin bravely downplayed the situation.

“It’s fine. You can keep going,” she declared.

When asked if it was painful, she admitted, “Yeah!” with a laugh, but quickly added, “It’s all right. Everyone gets like this. I just have to Super Glue them, and tape them up. It’s all good.”

Irwin then told FOX411 that her toenails aren’t all she has to deal with – there are also a lot of unsightly calluses: “There’s like holes—the skin rubs out so there’s actual craters in my feet. Every night I’m kind of like cutting all the skin off ’cause it catches. You know when you get a hangnail? Think about tearing a hangnail but dancing on top of it.”

That’s a pretty darn serious work ethic right there. Nor is Bindi the only star to perform despite physical injuries, illness, and exhaustion. It turns out that dancing all day is grueling work, and it takes a toll on a body unused to that exertion. In addition, many of the stars still have active performance schedules that require them to fly back and forth across the country, all the while trying to learn a brand new, challenging skill that takes the form of four or five hours of hard physical exercise a day.

I find the work ethic one sees on DWTS admirable. As I said, each show is the perfect morality tale of someone working hard and reaping a reward. The reward isn’t always the mirror ball either. It can be weight loss; a renewed sense of self- confidence; a feeling of camaraderie with the other dancers, something that’s often lost when one is in the fame bubble; or anything else that lights someone’s fire.

The work ethic one sees on the show, of course, is innately conservative. Although the stars work with professional dancers and set designers and make-up artists and all the other supporting characters, the stars have to do it themselves. They are the antithesis of the Obama and Warren contention that people never achieve anything on their own but must, instead, always view themselves as subordinate to government programs. All the support staff in the world won’t save someone with innate talent who nevertheless refuses to try.

And here’s the sad thing: I don’t know the politics of any individual star on the show, but I’m willing to bet that, between professional dancers and stars, at least 80% of them vote Democrat. (It’s my understanding that many of the behind-the-scenes people are more conservative, but the “faces” invariably run to the political Left.) Despite proving the importance of conservative values — hard work, mental organization, etc. — they invariably believe that all of the other people in the world, the “little people” without these stars’ unique gifts, need government to care for them.

I’ve repeatedly pointed out the same thing about my neighbors and friends in the Marin community. Without exception, they did things in the right order — first they got educated, then they got married, and then they had children. Without exception, all of them work exceptionally hard, which is how they can afford to live in Marin. Without exception, none of them are serious stoners because most people can’t be constantly stoned and still work hard enough to afford Marin. (Author Lee Child is stoned every day and has a prodigious output, as was also the case for musician Louis Armstrong, but I think they’re the exceptions who prove the rule.) These same people expect their children to work hard, perform well in school, go on to higher education, and repeat their parents’ successful lifestyle pattern.

And yet, by a 70 to 30 ratio, my Marin friends are not just Leftists, but hardcore Leftists who believe that success is only to be found with Big Government. Rather than demanding that African-Americans and other traditionally economically limited groups get with the success pattern that the Marin elite practice — education, marriage, children, rather than children, no education, no marriage — members of the Marin elite hew to politics holding that the only answer to dysfunctional behavioral problems is government largess.

None of my neighbors can understand that the best thing they can do for the poor is to insist that the generationally poor abandon proven destructive habits and embrace proven successful habits — habits that are inherently conservative insofar as they rely on the individual and not on Big Government.

I’m happy to report that Greg Gutfield agrees with me:

Of course, since PragerU has a conservative imprimatur, none of the successful Leftist friends would deign to watch and then learn from that video. Sigh.