Just one year after a White House correspondents' dinner made Ozzy Osbourne the toast of the D.C. beltway, his family is firing back at one high-profile politico who used Jack Osbourne's recent entry into a rehab facility to bolster an argument against reality television.
During a segment on CBS' "60 Minutes," former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole called the Osbournes "dysfunctional people" and used Jack Osbourne's stint in rehab as a platform for an attack on the "debasing and degrading" reality TV trend.
The 17-year-old Osbourne checked himself into Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena, California, last month for undisclosed reasons. He later told People magazine, "I got caught up in my new lifestyle" (see "Jack Osbourne From Rehab: 'I Got Caught Up In My New Lifestyle' ").
"Does Hollywood still think Ozzy Osbourne is funny now that he's shipped his underage son off to drug rehab?" Dole asked in his weekly point/counterpoint segment with former President Bill Clinton. Clinton denied ever having seen "The Osbournes," but said that Republican budget cuts to after-school programs were doing more to "hurt our effort to keep kids drug-free" than any reality show.
Never ones to take a biting comment laying down, the Osbournes responded on Tuesday (May 6). "It's ridiculous that they should frame [Jack] as a national issue," Kelly Osbourne said in a statement to MTV News. "You don't go to rehab just because you're someone's kid, and it was Jack who had the balls to check himself in."
She reserved most of her ire for Senator Dole, adding, "P.S. You're a twat."
