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The guys in Aerosmith want a role in the Bush administration.

“I’m gonna ask Bush if he can make us ambassadors of rock ‘n’ roll,” the rock group’s lead singer, Steven Tyler, told USA Today recently. “Hey, Dubya — how about dubbin’ us?” lead guitarist Joe Perry said.

The guys from Aerosmith were probably just kidding about serving in government. But rock stars like to think of themselves as something more than airheads who know some good guitar riffs and wear tight leather pants. They crave respect and power in politics. And, with Barbra Streisand sending Congressional Democrats instructional memos on public policy and U2 lead singer meeting at length with Secretary of State Colin Powell, anything can happen. But if their track records are any indication, keep them far away from public policy.

At one of the very first “MTV Music Awards” shows in the late ’80s, Aerosmith’s Tyler uttered expletive deleteds at “Senator Jesse Helms who helps me sell a ton of records” for Helms’ alleged censorship of rock music. Wrong. Helms never tried to censor Aerosmith or anybody else. That was first-lady wannabe Tipper Gore, who has since done her penance to the greasy altar of rock ‘n’ roll, and has never been heard from again on the topic.
Steven Tyler and Aerosmith as ambassadors of anything? Puh-leeze.

In Aerosmith’s autobiography, “Walk This Way,” Tyler brags that, at a concert in Seattle, he got parents of a 14-year-old female fan to sign her over to him as her guardian. Tyler, her new “guardian,” got her pregnant and made her get an abortion. What a guy!

His daughter, movie star Liv Tyler, is the result of his sleeping around with Playboy Playmate Bebe Buell. Tyler abandoned her, forcing her to raise her daughter by herself and lying that rocker Todd Rundgren was her father. The rock group’s self-absorbed, drug-induced haze of an autobiography is the story of snorting plaster from a wall. Of uppers, downers, assorted other pills, heroin, coke, multiple sex partners, and multiple out-of-wedlock kids. The only West Wing these guys should come into contact with is the one at the asylum some of them once checked into.

And there’s U2’s Bono. The lead singer of the Irish rock group got an hour meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell to talk about debt relief for developing countries and AIDS. A rock star talking about AIDS relief. Isn’t the rock-star lifestyle what causes it to spread?
As for debt relief, Bono wants the U.S. to forgive the debts owed to us by all developing Third-World banana republics, where many of the leaders squander our billions acquiring the latest Gulfstream Jet or Bentley for their collection. Kinda like the way rock stars, like Bono, squander their own fortunes. This is our tax money that Bono — not even an American citizen — is talking about. Would he loan millions of his money to others and then forgive the loans? Doubtful. But leave it to Powell, caught up in the trappings of celebrity, to entertain something even Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright did not.

Powell told Bono he was glad the singer was using his fame “to work on something good,” a State Department official said. “Bono replied, ‘Our audience is smart and aware.'” No, his audience was starstruck. How many non-rock stars, who are actually taxpaying American citizens, would get an hour-long audience with the secretary of state? Count them on zero fingers.

And politicians’ desire to be involved with celebrities is not your old-fashioned Nancy Reagan-Michael Jackson partnership. In those days, guys like Jackson were satisfied making innocent guest appearances in Mrs. Reagan’s “Just Say No” to drugs campaign. Today’s celebrities, are more diabolical and ridiculous. And so are the pols that hang with them.
The Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call, on Sunday, released the text of a three-page Barbra Streisand policy memo directed to congressional Democrats. The arrogant Streisand repeated the absurd charges that the Republicans stole the presidency by disenfranchising blacks and elderly Jews. And the ridiculous allegations that the Republicans will take us back to the days before civil rights.

Hey Babs, the election is over — and you lost. Get over it.

Sorry, but as a Jew, I understood quite well how to vote for Bush on my ballot. And so did my senior citizen dad. No one watched your silly pre-election propaganda on “The Rosie O’Donnell Show.” They don’t want to hear it now, either.

Streisand also defends the indefensible — Bill Clinton’s outrageous pardons of drug-dealers, a child molester and a billionaire tax-evader who traded with the enemy. She has an interesting — and warped — sense of justice. But it’s typical of Hollywood. And will she still be attacking the oil industry when the power goes out in her ritzy Malibu digs?
It’s as asinine as actor George Clooney attacking the Gulf War, after he made a mint starring in a movie about it (“The Three Kings”).

May he and Babs be blessed with $5 tanks of gas. Thank G-d, Streisand’s days of imposing her views on our government — through carefully timed Lincoln Bedroom pillow talk when Hillary was away — are over.

In the days before the aptly-initialed BS mistook herself for a public policy wonk, Omar Sharif starred with Streisand in “Funny Girl” and “romanced” her. Sharif got it right when he said, “I think her biggest problem is that she wants to be a woman, and she wants to be beautiful. And she is neither.”

Now she wants to be a policy expert. And she’s not that either.