A road map of the activist left brain

National Post ^ | September 29 2003 | Elizabeth Nickson

[knighthawk]

Harvard University did an extraordinary thing for a supposedly august institution, which means, I suspect that its reputation is going the way of The New York Times. It gave a fellowship to the third-rate comedian, left-liberal Clinton apologist, Al Franken, who largely tours the rubber chicken circuit. For his class in "journalism," Franken would have 14 Harvard seniors research a book for him on "right-wing propaganda," which he would style up so that it was funny, or rather "funny." Franken did, and produced Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) A Fair and Balanced Look at The Right. Because he borrowed a trademark phrase "Fair and Balanced," Fox News took him to court, and the ensuing publicity pitched Franken to the top of the bestseller list where he languishes, crowing loudly.

Published this month too, is Salon.com typist (and Clinton apologist), Joe Conason's Big Lies, The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts The Truth. Big Lies has travelled not so far up the list, since it's without the lawsuit publicity, the free Harvard labour, or, God knows, any humour whatsoever. However, it is marginally more damning, since it is not just about how Al Franken went around green rooms and ballrooms and bars, confronting and playing gotcha with the Big Feet of the American right-wing.

All to be expected. The success of the right in throwing out quick-paced, short, funny, searing indictments of liberal wrongs has been so extraordinary as to approach divine intervention. One after another "surprise bestseller" has travelled up and up and up the U.S. lists: Slander, Treason, Parliament of Whores, The Savage Nation, The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad, The Completely Ridiculous in American Life, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, The Book of Virtues, The Death of Common Sense, How Law is Suffocating America. It's hard to understand how the publishing industry paid its bills before right-wing polemic came along. This successful assault has caused some very real damage to the dominance that liberal thinking has enjoyed over the chattering classes for the past 50 years.

But there is a bigger gorilla in the ring, a gorilla all the above, right and left, hope to emulate, in success, at least. He's more powerful than the above-cited authors put together and his most popular work, topping the rental lists at your video store and mine, is Bowling For Columbine, Michael Moore's fictitional documentary about violence in Amerika. Moore plans his next film, called Fahrenheit 9/11 to be released in October 2004, with the express purpose of downing Bush.

So it's payback time.

Sorta.

Bowling For Columbine is a supremely useful road map of the brain of the activist left, the left that steers our federal Liberal party, the Democratic party in the States, the Labour party in Britain, and the European Parliament: Crude, irrational, and ugly, convinced of its own self-righteousness, it hews to a way of thinking that is still fighting the Wobbly class war of the dirty thirties and has only glancing associations with reality.

What dread hell it must be to inhabit those minds full-time. So, to cheer us up, let's take a quick look at just how Moore made his Academy Award-winning "documentary." Can I remind you that documentaries are supposed to be based on facts? And that this documentary was awarded all over the world, including at the Toronto Film festival, where our elites sucked up to Moore as if he were Jesus Christ himself?

First of all, the speeches Moore shows as real speeches are pastiches of sentences uttered by Charlton Heston and others, in Heston's case, in five separate locations over a period of three years. The opening scene where Moore opens a bank account and gets a gun, was rehearsed for a month in the bank, and staged, according to K.S. Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute. The bank employees were afterwards furious afterwards. In fact, you cannot open a bank account and immediately get a gun.

Lockheed Martin does not make missiles at the factory near Columbine and hasn't for 30 years, as Moore charges.

The NRA did not arrive at the location of every school shooting days after the event and hold rallies, and Heston did not say what Moore shows him saying, on those days.

The NRA and the KKK are not twinned organizations at all. In fact, the NRA worked to outlaw and fight the KKK.

The case Moore makes for the welfare-to-work program causing the death of the six-year-old in Flint, Mich., has been exhaustively documented by Mike Dunnagan of HardyLaw.net, among others, as completely false. The murderous six-year-old's mother was making more than $1,200 a month, with free health care, free child care, rent subsidies and food stamps. She was evicted from a house where the rent was $300. The uncle's house where she stashed her child was the neighbourhood crack house, filled with guns.

The comparisons made to Canada are odious, and based on skewed statistics. Canadian officials state that the scene where Moore enters a Canadian Wal-Mart and buys as much ammunition as he wants is "staged or illegal."

Incomes in Michigan urban areas, with the exception of the city he uses, have gone up in the past 10 years, rising more than 20% in places like Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids.

Columbine sets a new bar in left-wing rhetoric. Deeply disturbing, if true, it is not. Yet, in Canada, his position on the Bush presidency is the position of most people who rent videos. At Cannes, Columbine received a 13-minute standing ovation. In Berlin, London and Paris, Moore is called "the people's filmmaker." His work is so corrupt that when it is revealed, it'll set back the cause of the liberal left for a decade. Or will it? If ill-founded science can be enshrined in law like Kyoto, all truth is up for grabs. Apparently, today, the loudest voice wins.

enickson@nationalpost.com

[knighthawk]

Ping

[facedown]

The NRA did not arrive at the location of every school shooting days after the event and hold rallies,...

No kidding.

[wastoute]

Nothing new here. Stalin did crap like this for decades. He died an old man. As the redneck on the radio says every morning, "Wake UP, America!"

[Vindiciae Contra TyrannoSCOTUS]

A road map of the activist left brain

Contains innumerable detours to the left, filled with circle/slashes on RUSHtane, the petrol which causes most to drive on the right side of the road.