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.
Not to mention… is he serious??? Derrr… the terrorists who flew the planes into the World Trade Center et al learned to fly in this country, one of them to a flight school a mere hour’s drive from where I live. Does Moore think that every pilot of every plane he flies in had to join the Air Force to learn how to fly that 727? And Bin Laden wasn’t “on dialysis in a cave” on September 11th 2001, he was living pretty as a “guest” of the Taliban, then in power in all of Afghanistan. I usually don’t say this, but if Michael Moore were to tragically die in a flaming car wreck, I wouldn’t cry much, unless it was a real nice car.
Bill Maher lost me a couple of months ago when he went off on a rant about Southerners. Looking down his elitist nose, he ridiculed the language, dress and culture. Living in Nashville, this offended me personally, and it got me to thinking that the vaunted tolerance of which many liberals speak is merely self-serving lip service. Imagine publicly ridiculing the language, dress, culture and intelligence of say, the ghetto or Muslims or even Jews? Maher and Moore are polarizing birds of a feather.
While it is a legitimate question to ask if Moore’s tactics are helpful, calling him a liar is innacurate. Every time he’s been accused of a lie, it has turned out he told the truth after all. He expresses strong opinions strongly, and backs them up with the facts that led him to the conclusions he presents, all the while admitting that what he is saying is part of a dialogue, and should not be taken as a forgone conclusion. When he is speculating, he admits it, so how that equates to paranoid conspiracy rambling is a mystery to me. While I’ve disagreed with many of his points, his main point is usually correct.
I don’t feel sorry for apologists for the Bush regime getting ganged up on during a talk show, when they are defending someone who has said that Americans should “watch what they say”.