The Democratic Leadership Council has an excellent review on its website of Michael Moore’s overheated, paranoid rambings:
Clearly, the author’s imaginative powers far outstrip his reporting or analytical skills. Consider, for example, his riff that bounds from showing a Bush family business connection with the bin Laden family (true) to the suggestion that 9/11 was not merely the work of 15 Saudi Arabian terrorists and four others, but the work of the Saudi Arabian Air Force (not true). Moore asks Bush:
“Who attacked the United States on September 11 — a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friends, Saudi Arabia? … You do not get this skilled at learning how to fly jumbo jets by being taught on a video game machine at some dipshit flight training school in Arizona. You learn to do this in the air force. Someone’s air force. The Saudi Air Force? What if these weren’t wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed on to a suicide mission? What if they were doing this at the behest of either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi royal family? … Why do you refuse to say, ‘Saudi Arabia attacked the United States!’?”
When Moore has his facts right — on, say, the troubled state of U.S. public education — he still undermines his message by presenting it in a shock-jock tone, like the Howard Stern of print. “A nation that not only churns out illiterate students BUT GOES OUT OF ITS WAY TO REMAIN IGNORANT AND STUPID should not be running the world …,” shouts Moore in Stupid White Men.
Via Mr. Reynolds.
Moore was on Bill Maher’s show on HBO tonight, along with a woman who used to be Prime Minister of Canada and California congressman David Dreier, the chairman of the Schwarzenegger campaign and one of the most decent people in the entire political system. Maher, Moore, and the Canadian spent nearly the entire show taking cheap shots at Dreier by way of showing their seething hate for President Bush, and wouldn’t let him get a word in, even to answer their loaded questions. Maher is no great piece of work himself, but I’ve never seen him sink so low in his entire career (and I’ve been watching him since he was on Comedy Central) so I have to put a large part of the blame on Moore.
The half-truths, untruths, conspiracy theories, personal attacks and cheap shots Moore peddles are having a corrosive effect on our entire political dialog in this country, and somebody needs to put this sadistic bastard in his place, so I applaud the DLC for taking the first step with this review. Their interest in taking Moore down a notch is clear — if he has his way, the Democrats will be the party of Carter instead of the party of Clinton, an irrelevency at the fringes of politics incapable of winning an election for dog-catcher.