Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man
by David T. Hardy
and Jason Clarke
Posted on 06/26/2004 12:32:28 PM PDT by bdeaner
CONSIDERING THAT I'm writing this from inside the bunker of what many regard as the Alliance of Neocon Warmongers, it bears mentioning that Michael Moore and I have one surprising trait in common: We both believe that the war in Iraq was ill-advised, ill-planned, and ill-executed, an apparent failure bordering on unmitigated disaster, that was never in our best national interest. Around our office over the last two years, I've made these arguments to colleagues, open-minded types who, after they put me through my water-boarding/naked pyramid sessions, say they'll take it under advisement. And I make the disclosure now so that readers will not be confused. I do not trash Fahrenheit 9/11 because it's a piece of antiwar propaganda. I trash Fahrenheit 9/11 because it's an offal-laden piece of junk.
It is proof, as if we need more, that Moore doesn't make art, he makes fudge. Since fact-checking his work has become a near full-time cottage industry, it is worth remembering that in his debut film Roger & Me, his indictment of heartless General Motors, he was caught fudging evictions, showing people getting bounced onto the street who'd never been GM workers. In 2002's antigun screed, Bowling for Columbine, he fudged his tear-jerking closer. While hectoring Alzheimer's-ravaged NRA mascot Charlton Heston, he related the heart-tugging tale of a mother whose 6-year-old son, largely unsupervised because of oppressive welfare-to-work laws, found a gun in her house and killed one of his classmates. Moore failed to mention that the family member Mom entrusted him to was running a crackhouse out of her home, that the gun had been left on a mattress, and that she'd admitted beating another son while sitting on him after duct-taping his hands, feet, and mouth. Not exactly a model of responsible parenting, gun ownership, or filmmaking.
As has become my custom at Moore screenings, I began by scratching hash marks in my notebook, counting his conspiracy theories. Not only does this train the mind, but it distracts me from laughing inappropriately and disturbing fellow filmgoers. But in Fahrenheit 9/11, I quickly abandoned counting for cackling. By the time the opening credits rolled, Moore had already explained how George W. Bush rigged the 2000 election by stealing votes from black people, as well as fallen back on his shopworn class-war claptrap to imply that Bush was out of touch with the common folk, since on September 10, 2001, he "went to sleep that night in a bed made with fine French linens." (The next day's terror victims doubtless slept on burlap.)
The intro credits are accompanied by creepy acoustic guitar runs--third-world atrocity music--which play under a montage of our leaders/war criminals sinisterly readying themselves for television appearances. There's Dick Cheney getting his rake-over fluffed. There's Tom Ridge diabolically laughing. There's Paul Wolfowitz smoothing a cowlick with spittle. They smile. They have make-up applied before going on TV. Bastards!
From there, Moore offers a full hour's worth of Bush-centric conspiracies so seemingly random, disjointed, and pointless that one's ticket stub should come with a flow-chart and a decoder ring. In my line of work, when you hear this strain of rhetoric, it's usually from a man in a sandwich board touting the apocalypse or Mumia's innocence, pushing stacks of literature at you while standing on the wrong side of a police cordon. It doesn't typically come from someone whose premiere is attended by half of respectable Democratic Washington, and whose film won the coveted Palme d'Or prize at Cannes.
Moore never passes up a chance to make Bush look like a lightweight, smirking chimp. In fairness, Bush provides more than enough source material. There's Bush, to the strains of the Go-Go's "Vacation," casting fishing lines and speeding away in golf carts, with Moore informing us that the president spent 42 percent of his first eight months in office on vacation. There's Bush in a grade school classroom photo op, sitting shifty-eyed and paralyzed for a full seven minutes after being told the second plane smacked into the World Trade Center, while a teacher reads My Pet Goat. (As a friend of mine says, "Maybe he just wanted to see how it ended.")
Moore uses Bush's momentary inaction as a device to ask what he was thinking, which, to paraphrase Moore's answer, was how to cover his tracks. This allows us passage into the paranoid labyrinth of Moore's mind, which is illustrated by news footage and a string of experts (Moore spends less time physically on screen than in any of his other films, a fact which recommends it, comparatively speaking). He never fabricates out of whole cloth. Rather, Moore the filmmaker takes a perfectly reasonable proposition (our government generally, and the Bush family specifically, have been too solicitous of the Saudis), while Moore the fudgemaker throws entire trays at the wall, never overtly making allegations that amount to anything, but crossing his fingers that some of it sticks.
The insinuation is that Bush had to keep us scared, with color-coded alerts and a citizen-terrorizing Patriot Act, to distract the country from his tangle of conflicts of interests and to build sentiment for invading Iraq. Moore mentions that the Taliban visited Texas while Bush was governor, over a possible pipeline deal with Unocal. But Moore doesn't say that they never actually met with Bush or that the deal went bust in 1998 and had been supported by the Clinton administration.
Moore mentions that Bush's old National Guard buddy and personal friend James Bath had become the money manager for the bin Laden family, saying, "James Bath himself in turn invested in George W. Bush." The implication is that Bath invested the bin Laden family's money in Bush's failed energy company, Arbusto. He doesn't mention that Bath has said that he had invested his own money, not the bin Ladens', in Bush's company.
The family members who had disowned Osama were mainstays of American business, to the point that they were members of the nefarious Carlyle Group, a fact Moore naturally mentions, along with the fact that George's daddy was a member, too. One of the Carlyle Group's investments was United Defense, maker of Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Moore says September 11 "guaranteed that United Defense was going to have a very good year." See it all coming together? Moore tells us that when Carlyle took United Defense public, they made a one-day profit of $237 million, but under all the public scrutiny, the bin Laden family eventually had to withdraw (Moore doesn't tell us that they withdrew before the public offering, not after it).
At their own request, the bin Laden family was quickly shuttled away after 9/11, back to Saudi Arabia. Moore finds it suspicious, as well he should. Who would be stupid enough to let that happen, without working them over for a good couple of weeks? Actually, according to a May interview he gave to The Hill, it was Richard Clarke, Bush's former counterterrorism adviser and the new patron saint of Bush-bashers. Moore makes use of him in the film, though he manages not to mention Clarke's role in the departure of the bin Ladens.
Here, if we're going to play connect-the-dots, a few questions are in order. For starters, are we really supposed to believe that 9/11 and the ensuing wars were a collaborative profiteering scheme between the bin Ladens, the Bushes, and defense contractors? Furthermore, will Moore's DVD director's cut elucidate Bush ties to the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, and the Freemasons? Who knows? Who cares? Moore doesn't seem to, as he speedily moves on, making another tray of fudge.
When Moore takes us to Iraq, on the eve of war, he shows placid scenes of an untroubled land on the brink of imperial annihilation. With all the leisurely strolling and kite-flying, it is unclear if Iraqis are living under a murderous dictatorship or in a Valtrex commercial. In Moore's telling of the invasion, the shock-and-awe is less high-value-target/smart-bombing, more Dresden/Hiroshima. According to the footage that ensues, our pilots seem to have hit nothing but women and children. If Moore's documentarian gig were to fall through, he could easily seek employment as an Al Jazeera cameraman.
This is, it nearly goes without saying, his downfall as a storyteller. In his unctuous morality tales, everyone is assigned black and white hats. The white hats mainly belong to the oppressed people of Iraq, subject to our soldiers' midnight raids under the jackboot of occupation, and to other victims of the administration, such as the poor, underemployed people of Flint, Michigan (Moore's obsessively referenced hometown), who serve as helpless recruiting chum for Bush's killing machine.
The black hats (administration types) seem to be motivated solely by world domination and the desire to steer no-bid contracts to Halliburton. There is no allowance for moral ambiguity, or what would've been even more interesting, misguided moral clarity--the possibility that Bush made a bad judgment call, but did so for the right reasons (security concerns, the elimination of a brutal despot, and the liberation of his people).
One of this film's only pure moments occurs when Moore spends time with the mother of an American soldier who died in Karbala. The mother is a conservative Democrat from a family with a long military history. She used to rage at war protestors, but since losing her son, she seethes at the administration who sent him to his death, crying almost animally, "I want him to be alive . . . and I can't make him alive." (But even this is sullied by Moore's smarmy, gratuitous insistence to her that "yeah, it's a great country," an obvious inoculation against charges that he hates America.)
Critics have accused Moore of milking her grief until it moos. But on this, he deserves a pass. Anyone wishing to discuss war, either for or against, should also be prepared to seriously consider its tolls, especially the human ones. Moore being Moore, however, steps on his most effective material by following it with yet another cheap stunt: ambushing congressmen to ask if they will enlist their children to go to Iraq, as if anyone can. He finds no takers, then says he can't blame them, since who would want to give up their child? Nobody, of course. Not the parents of soldiers in Iraq, nor the parents of those who died at Normandy. But few would argue that World War II wasn't a war worth fighting.
Which is not to say Iraq is in the same class. And it is why real questions should be continuously asked, and skepticism applied. The kind of skepticism that forces leaders to account for whether they've taken the right course of action. Not the crank, grab bag of stitched-together conspiracies that encourages Moore's political opponents to be reflexively dismissive--and causes the leftish reviewer sitting next to me to say, "He infuriates me because he makes my arguments badly."
There is plenty of grist for skeptics of the war to argue that the chances of a shiny, happy democracy's flowering in Iraq reside somewhere between slim and nil. But those are still better odds than the ones on Moore's someday making an intellectually honest film.
Matt Labash is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
Talk about an oxymoron!
Actually, oxymoron is skin cream for really stupid people...like Michael Moore!
Weekends and working from Camp David were considered "vacation" when this statistic was compiled. I just thought I'd point that out before I got back to my "Saturday vacation".
Agreed. He's an excellent movie critic, but when it comes to issues of national secrutity:
We both believe that the war in Iraq was ill-advised, ill-planned, and ill-executed, an apparent failure bordering on unmitigated disaster, that was never in our best national interest.
he's a complete idiot.
Those who make such statements need to explain HOW we could fight a WOT with Al Queda finding a "safe house" in Iraq.
We know from what was found in camps and caves in Afghanistan just how badly these KILLERS wanted to get their hands on some REALLY DEADLY stuff.
Does anyone remember the video of the puppy being gassed(the bastards)?
There's little doubt in my mind that the WOT will be long and difficult, but OH SO MUCH HARDER if Saddam, Uday, and Kusay were still in power.
Other than that, good analysis of Moore's fantasy flick.
Agreed, see my post #7, you were much more succinct. LOL!
Can't argue with you there. He may be an idiot, which means that even an idiot can see through Moore's propaganda.
Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man
by David T. Hardy
and Jason Clarke
I wonder how Labash feels now with the discovery of the wmds and in the hands of terrorists. He calls the war "an unmitigated disaster" and not in our national interest but never explains why. I don't have a problem with people disagreeing with the admins explanation for deposing Hussein (which I totally agree with), but then you have to marshal your evidence for your counter argument. Merely stating something without proof is like not stating anything at all.
LaBash is a wonderful writer and follower of the Moore lies. He wrote a long, detailed story of Moore's adventures in the June 8, 1998 Weekly Standard, called "Michael Moore, One Trick Poney." Just a small sample I was going to post after hearing Mark Levin read it yeterday on Sean's show:
"But even vaster than Moore's ego is his hypocrisy. For when he bemoans "people today working longer...for less...with no job security" and says "people are frightened," he could be describing what it's like to work for Michael Moore. This is hardly news to Mooreologists. Vicious take-outs featuring Moore's ex-employees have appeared in the New York Post, Salon, and New York magazine.
War stories include everything from Moore's discouraging union membership to his not adequately paying or crediting his subordinates. To mine such material once more might seem a gratuitous rehash. Then again, so is most of Moore's work.
It is striking how many former associates--all predisposed to side with Moore--bitterly revile him. Randy Cohen, a former Letterman writer and co-executive producer of TV Nation who was fired by Moore (though he remained contractually obligated to fork over ideas), offers a typical compliment: "I despise Mike and regard him as a vile and dishonorable man, but I think Roger & Me was terrific!"
Conversations with some dozen former employees turn up such descriptions of Moore as "mercurial," "demanding," "paranoid," and a "fork-tongued manipulator" who is "totally disingenuous" and "feeds on people's insecurities." Former TV Nation staffers compare their working conditions to "a sweatshop," a "repressive police state," "indentured servitude," and a "concentration camp."
One former staffer says, "Most people hated Michael, not because he was a perfectionist, but because he was an a ---hole." A former producer, casting about for a despot appropriately "large, with gluttonous appetites--not just ruthless, but sadistic," finally compares a stint with Moore to "working for Idi Amin--without the laughs." Another staffer simply states, "My parents want him dead."
Former employees tell tales of random firings, of no health benefits, of having to crank out daily story-idea quotas that often went unread. Like a surly bear, Moore required gentle care and regular feeding. He often ate in front of staffers held hostage well into the night, their stomachs rumbling as he gorged on chocolate confections and Chinese takeout.
They tell stories of Moore's fighting "tooth and nail to try to avoid paying writers in the Writers Guild"; of his threatening to fire the assistant who sent a yellow cab instead of a limo to retrieve him from the airport; of his pouting in his office for hours in the middle of shoots and making assistants cover the windows with tape so he couldn't be seen.
Haskell Wexler, one of the world's foremost cinematographers, worked with Moore on Canadian Bacon. Wexler says that Moore, who "didn't know s--t from shinola" about making feature films, chose to "maintain his adversarial view toward...everything and everybody around him." Moore seemed intent, he says, on proving his bona fides by "abusing himself gastronomically" with regular McDonald's hamburger work stoppages that allowed Moore to feel "closer to the Real People."
Wexler himself not only has won Academy Awards for films like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but also has had a distinguished career shooting left-wing documentaries, working with everyone from Jane Fonda to the Weathermen. Of Moore, Wexler says, "He's not unlike a lot of people I used to know in the left-wing movement. They love humanity and hate people."
Finding anyone not currently employed by Moore to offer unvarnished praise proves a challenge. One former staffer asks if I want the number of someone who likes him. "Sure," I say gamely. "I'm sorry," she backpedals, "I can't think of anyone." "You won't find a range of opinions," Randy Cohen confirms. "You'll find everyone has a range of anecdotes to illustrate the same opinion." Or almost. In a typically inane passage of Downsize This!, Moore's slapdash satire of the political landscape, he pens a chapter proclaiming "O.J. Is Innocent." O.J. Simpson, it would stand to reason, might be the one exception to Cohen's claim...."
index for later (too many F911 reviews to read at once !)
If that is what he thinks, then he had better get started reading the Koran and building his bomb shelter NOW. If we can't kick-start a representative, democratic government in IRAQ, the most secular, diverse, educated and "civilized" culture in the region, it will not happen anywhere in the mid east and the islamonazi radicals will shortly have it all along with the means of reaching their perverted goal; Destroying Western civilization.
And we don't have 'generations' to deal with this threat. It's upon us now. Technology is amazingly cheep today and readily available to those who would use it to kill him, his family and the rest of us as well.
Fifty years of "Foggy Bottom" diplomat compromises have only made the situation far worse just as fifty years of "slavery compromises" only made the Civil War worse. History never changes. It's an endless loop.
"There's Bush in a grade school classroom photo op, sitting shifty-eyed and paralyzed for a full seven minutes after being told the second plane smacked into the World Trade Center, while a teacher reads My Pet Goat. (As a friend of mine says, "Maybe he just wanted to see how it ended.")"
Ha ha. It's easy to Monday-morning quarterback the reaction of someone who's just been informed of the worst attack on this country in the history of the American presidency...while on-camera no less. I think he did a pretty damn good job of maintaining himself, and I'm not sure what else he was supposed to have done at that instant.
However, I guess he could have shrieked at the top of his voice and run out of the room in a panic...you know, like a "real" leader with "feelings". That would have certainly inpsired confidence in a frantic nation.
I have a short fuse with the 'unmitigated disaster' crowd. They have neither a clue about nor any respect for what or military has accomplished in Afghanistan and Iraq.
While I'm ranting about the evils of unmitgation, let me say with no shortness of pride that Uday & Kusay are no longer a problem because to the actions of some top notch soliders, one of whom used to be a little boy in my house. He was about 50 ft from the front door with his M249 helping the 502nd throw a grand house warming for the brothers Hussein.
I was grateful that 10 or 20 SS guys didn't rush the room screaming and with guns drawn, hustle the President out while the children cowered in terror. I think of those scenes from "In the Line of Duty" and "Dave".
It's too bad that a cam-cord didn't record Monica playing Bill's flute while he tried to get a Congressman to agree to sent more troops to Bosnia. The great statesman at work
You must feel very proud. I feel proud just receiving your message.
FRee Republic is a great place to meet folks like you. Thank You, you are a Great American.
FReegards
Baredog
bump
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
