>Subject: Re:
>Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 18:06:43 +0800
>
>I gave you Sen. Byrd because I thought you, being a Rush Limbaugh fan might have
>been amused. But if you prefer, I can refer you to "Stupid White Men" by Michael
>Moore, (the same who won an academy award for Colombine) for a more humorous assessment
>of our current president.
>By the by, you really should try to come to Japan. There are a lot of like-mind people
>whom you might enjoy meeting!
>
>Carolyn
My reply:
"Carolyn,
Do you bring anything but slurs and cant to this debate?
I am amused in the sense that progressive people do not hesitate to cite unadorned racists when it suits their purpose. You must not be aware of Byrd's 'White Nigger' outburst two years ago:
"There are white niggers. I've seen a lot of white niggers in my time. I'm going to use that word. We just need to work together to make our country a better country, and I'd just as soon quit talking about it so much."
If you think Rush Limbaugh is a racist (or more precisely, if you heard from fellow 'progressives' that Rush Limbaugh is a racist and accepted this without question) it might surprise you to learn that two of his guest hosts are black scholars who know better:
-Dr Walter E Williams of George Mason http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/
TIP: Williams' Amnesty & Pardon at http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/gift.html makes a great gift for the guilt-addled white lefty hand-wringing set.
-Dr Thomas Sowell of Stanford http://www.tsowell.com/
Neither man has any patience for the niggling (hey can I say that?) pinheads who've never listened to Limbaugh but seem to know all about him. Why don't you tune in on streaming audio at rushlimbaugh.com and have a listen? I won't tell anyone.
Of course I could be wrong, and you could be referring to Paul Shanklin's "Dueling Bozos" parody of Robert Byrd, which got a lot of play on Limbaugh's show a few years ago. But I don't think so.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/parody.guest.html
Michael Moore is a phony and not worth my time.
- He tackles complex issues like violence and poverty and attempts to explain them with dime-store psychoanalysis - "America's obsession with guns" and so on. I think you see through this.
- He is very sloppy. Even the title of his best known work is a classic Moorean screwup. 'Bowling' gets its name from the report that Klebold and Harris had gone bowling that morning. Later investigation showed that report to be false. But Moore's research is, well let's just call it superficial, and his fact-checking is limited to bouncing his stuff off fellow travelers over a latte at an upper West Side organic-shade-grown-fair-trade-coffee house. When confronted with the resulting errors in his books and films he grows very indignant and accuses his questioner of dwelling on trivia.
- He pretends to champion the common folk but in reality has only contempt for them. Have you noticed how all the people in his work are either helpless victims, poltroons or complete idiots? If you're not a convenient stereotype, Moore doesn't want you.
- He is personally brutal to interviewees and his own staff.
I recently heard Moore described as the token funny man for an increasingly humorless Left. I think that's perfectly captured, don't you?