Whatever the question, the answer is Bush. The message of Moore's film is: Get rid of Bush this November and all the bad stuff will go away. That's why its starting point is the 2000 election and the Florida recount. On the face of it, dimpled chads don't seem to have much to do with Afghanistan and Iraq. But, for Moore, this is where it all began, and this is where it will end: Topple Bush, and the world will once again be full of happy smiley people as it is in the slow-motion scenes of laughing children gaily flying their kites in idyllic Saddamite Iraq.
...This is the real difference between those who see the big picture and those who insist there is no big picture to see, that Michael Moore's small hick picture is the answer to everything. In the days after September 11, the fringe Left were fond of lecturing us that we needed to address the "root causes." Well, they got tired of that. If it's a choice between some big socioeconomic geopolitical root cause or Dick Cheney, they'll take Cheney.
Which is a great pity. I look on 9/11 as the sudden revelation of the tip of a vast iceberg. It's all been there under the surface for some time, but we never grasped the size of it. At one level, it's about the mainstreaming of the fringe. ... I mean that troublesome groups on the far horizons of the superpower can now strike at its heart.
...MAYBE IT was just a freaky one-off; maybe now that they've done it they'll leave us alone as the Spaniards have bet. But almost every technological advance works to the terrorists' advantage: an old-fashioned European army Belgium's, say is incapable of projecting itself to Saudi Arabia; but a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia, through now humdrum innovations like e-mail, cell phones, and automated bank machines, can easily project itself to Belgium. Then add nuclear technology, which has slipped the bunkers of the great powers to seep piecemeal through the murkier chancelleries.
Beyond that, consider the broader sea in which these currents course. Not all Muslims are al-Qaida supporters, but they don't have to be. If just one percent is generally sympathetic, that's enough for a vast global support network.
....we're living through a period of extraordinarily rapid demographic and cultural change that broadly favors the Islamists' stated objectives, a period of rapid technological advance that greatly facilitates the Islamists' objectives, and a period of rapid nuclear dissemination that will add serious heft to the realization of their objectives. If the West, and I use the term in the widest sense to mean not just swaggering Texas cowboys but sensitive left-wing feminists in favor of gay marriage, is to survive, it will only be after a long struggle lasting many decades.
Nailed It!
Outstanding even by the usually high Steyn standards!
Mark Steyn PING list is maintained by Pokey78. I just could not contain myself :^)