WHAT A WONDERFUL COUNTRY WE LIVE IN!!!!

[gchsajs]

I know right? Were did nationalism go to?

[PVVikeFan]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: raider13</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: buckeye_fan</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: raider13</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Im not saying anything about this country, I love it
I just think the Healthcare system is all to hell and the Iraqi war is nonsense, I support our troops %100, but not the cause...I just know the healthcare here isnt what it should be at all</div></div>

Someone is a Michael Moore fan. </div></div>

You are ddang right, I wish he'd run for president..Id sure vote for the guy</div></div>

You gotta be kidding I know.
There is no way somebody could be stupid enough to even think about voting for somebody like that. You may as well vote for Hanoi Jane. Both are traitors.

[R13]

Traitior? you kidding me...he has brought more truth to the US ppl than pretty much any president....he's the only person I know that actually knows what he's talking about so I think you are the one that has to be kidding

[Ironlung]

Maybe you should do some research. I don't lean to either side of the political spectrum, but that last piece of horseshit he put out that you're spouting as truth and the 21st century bible has been torn to shreds as being nothing but half truths and lies by mulitiple news and media outlets. He got pissed off in (if I'm not mistaken) a CNN interview where they confronted him with lies from the film with actual facts and evidence and he walked out of the interview on live television.

[imported_ndn10]

Directions to Canada

he is you a solution...

[R13]

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Ironlung</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Maybe you should do some research. I don't lean to either side of the political spectrum, but that last piece of horseshit he put out that you're spouting as truth and the 21st century bible has been torn to shreds as being nothing but half truths and lies by mulitiple news and media outlets. He got pissed off in (if I'm not mistaken) a CNN interview where they confronted him with lies from the film with actual facts and evidence and he walked out of the interview on live television. </div></div>

Id like you to show me this, because I havent heard anything....but No I love this country...I was just commenting on the healthcare, Im using that amendment that Im proud of having

[Ironlung]

Should a 400 lb man advise us on the evils of over-consumption?
Should the resident of a million-dollar apartment claim to be a poster boy of the working class?
Should a person who thought that Enron was a great investment, that Ralph Nader, Wesley Clark and John Kerry would win, and that North Korea's Kim Jong was changing for the better, advise us on ANYTHING?
Michael Moore is a paradox. A millionaire who boasts of wealth as proving his value -- "I'm a millionaire, I'm a multi-millionaire. I'm filthy rich. You know why I'm a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do. That's pretty good, isn't it?"

He lives in a million-dollar apartment, and boasts of that as well. "I walk among them. I live on the island of Manhattan, a three-mile-wide strip of land that is luxury home and corporate suite to America's elite..... Those who run your life live in my neighborhood. I walk in the streets with them each day" (Michael Moore, Stupid White Men, p. 51). For vacations, he keeps another million-dollar beachfront house in Michigan.

He sends his child to a private school -- no sense associating with the working class -- and has some trouble associating with them himself. The New York Post reported on a tantrum he threw in London: "Then, on his second-to-last night, [Michael Moore] raged against everyone connected with the Roundhouse and complained that he was being paid a measly $750 a night. 'He completely lost the plot,' a member of the stage crew told the London Evening Standard. 'He stormed around all day screaming at everyone, even the 5 pound-an-hour bar staff, telling them how we were all con men and useless. Then he went on stage and did it in public.' At his last appearance, staffers refused to work or even open the theater's doors." NY Post, Jan. 8, 2003.

He supplements his meager income with speaking tours. No more $750 gigs; on his 2004 pre-election tour he charged Utah Valley State College $40,000, Xavier $25,000, and University of New Mexico $35,000. Not bad for an hour or two's work.
Ah, the joys of capitalism....
One of his former associates summed him up: " You would think that he's the ultimate common man. But he's money-obsessed."

And ....
His major themes are his status as the spokesman of the working class, the evils of capitalism, and the selfishness of (all other) Americans.

It would be easy to denounce Moore as a hypocrite. Many conservatives denounce him as a leftist, when in fact the serious left, the thinking left, generally finds him appalling. He is the latest in the modern breed of Limosine Leftists -- individuals who, while personally they share the values of 19th century robber barons, find it flattering to adopt a thin veneer of leftism as a pose, in the same manner they pick a flattering hair style or gown. (A left-leaning critic of Moore summed up the situation very nicely: Moore's appeal lies in his giving wealthy, over-educated, whites an opportunity to laugh at working-class whites.)

But enough on Michael Moore as a person. Let's examine his output.

A consistent theme can be found throughout his work, and that is a theme of deception any time it is useful. Moore fixes upon a conclusion and, when the data do not exist, simply invents them.

Bowling for Columbine

A look at Bowling for Columbine (my main analysis to date). In producing his Oscar-winner, Moore altered history, misled his viewers, and edited the footage and audio in such a way as to reverse the meaning. In one case, he took a speech of a person he desired to target; the problem was that the speech was in fact conciliatory and mild. So he spliced in footage from another speech, cut out paragraphs, and spliced the beginning of one sentence to the ending of another. In another, when he wanted to criticize a political advertisement, but it wasn't as pointed as he wanted, he spliced together two different political ads, then added titling which was in neither.

Stupid White Men

A short review of his perhaps autobiographical Stupid White Men. Here we learn such shocking things as -- 200,000 Americans are dying of Mad Cow Disease and no one knows it; Bush secretly stole the election by having Florida bar convicted felons (which Moore maintains were great Gore supporters) from voting; Nader did the Demos a big favor by running in 2000; Enron is a great investment. Okay, Mike.

Dude, Where's My Country?

Another of his books --Dude, Where's My Country, (page still under construction.) In this tome we learn "There is no terrorist threat," (p. 95) and Richard Nixon was the last liberal President, (p. 193). (Even more amusingly, in chapter 8 Moore pledges to contribute the limit to whichever Democrat has the best chance of winning (p. 162) and then in chapter 11 tells the reader that the Democrats are "professional losers," that "Democratic Party leaders have told me something they will not admit in public -- that they have basically written off 2004; that they see little chance of defeating George W. Bush" (p. 204) and that they might as well run Oprah Winfrey. (p. 206).)

Fahrenheit 911

A page on Moore's planned Fahrenheit 911 (in preparation).

Musings on the Cult of Moore

A very deep question: Moore is unquestionably popular. Is this a clue as to an interesting but dangerous cultural/emotional development?

Some Notes on Moore's resume' -- a native of Flint? Not quite....

Does Moore have a few fan -- Osama bin Laden?

Second Amendment Documentary

Not really on-theme -- but I'm working on my own documentary, an honest treatment of the Second Amendment and the American right to arms. It will show details many do not dream exist. For example, the fact that the 14th Amendment (perhaps the most important Amendment of them all -- without it, States would be free to violate any provision of the Federal bill of rights) arose directly out of post-1865 State attempts to disarm the returning black Union veterans.

[Ironlung]

Unfairenheit 9/11
The lies of Michael Moore.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 21, 2004, at 3:26 PM ET

One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.

Nonetheless, it seems that an answer to this long-felt need is finally beginning to emerge. I exempt Al Franken's unintentionally funny Air America network, to which I gave a couple of interviews in its early days. There, one could hear the reassuring noise of collapsing scenery and tripped-over wires and be reminded once again that correct politics and smooth media presentation are not even distant cousins. With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note has been struck. Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified. Something"?I cannot guess what, since we knew as much then as we do now"?has since apparently persuaded Moore that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama is suddenly so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a dangerous "distraction" from the fight against him. I believe that I understand the convenience of this late conversion.

Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about Afghanistan, and makes them in this order:

1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group.

2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment in the United States.

3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests.

4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape.

5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely risible in that its non-army was purely American.

6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar" film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.)

It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point. Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all"?the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002"?or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending. And these are simply observations on what is "in" the film. If we turn to the facts that are deliberately left out, we discover that there is an emerging Afghan army, that the country is now a joint NATO responsibility and thus under the protection of the broadest military alliance in history, that it has a new constitution and is preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election, and that at least a million and a half of its former refugees have opted to return. I don't think a pipeline is being constructed yet, not that Afghanistan couldn't do with a pipeline. But a highway from Kabul to Kandahar"?an insurance against warlordism and a condition of nation-building"?is nearing completion with infinite labor and risk. We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular left"?like the parties of the Iraqi secular left"?are strongly in favor of the regime change. But this is not the sort of irony in which Moore chooses to deal.

He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke, Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that"?as you might expect"?Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration. So, that's another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic "key to all mythologies."

A film that bases itself on a big lie and a big misrepresentation can only sustain itself by a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods, beefed up by wilder and (if possible) yet more-contradictory claims. President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is that about, by the way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars?) But the shot of him "relaxing at Camp David" shows him side by side with Tony Blair. I say "shows," even though this photograph is on-screen so briefly that if you sneeze or blink, you won't recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or at least with this prime minister, is not a goof-off.

The president is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, on a golf course, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the president on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm. More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse. The other half would be saying what they already say"?that he knew the attack was coming, was using it to cement himself in power, and couldn't wait to get on with his coup. This is the line taken by Gore Vidal and by a scandalous recent book that also revives the charge of FDR's collusion over Pearl Harbor. At least Moore's film should put the shameful purveyors of that last theory back in their paranoid box.

But it won't because it encourages their half-baked fantasies in so many other ways. We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation." (In fact, Iraq's "sovereignty" was heavily qualified by international sanctions, however questionable, which reflected its noncompliance with important U.N. resolutions.) In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then"?wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003. I remember asking Moore at Telluride if he was or was not a pacifist. He would not give a straight answer then, and he doesn't now, either. I'll just say that the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once. (Actually, that's not quite right. It is briefly mentioned but only, and smarmily, because of the bad period when Washington preferred Saddam to the likewise unmentioned Ayatollah Khomeini.)

That this"?his pro-American moment"?was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible. Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled"?Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more"?the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way: He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist "security" headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as "threatening," even if one was narrow enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported"?and the David Kay report had established"?that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.)

Thus, in spite of the film's loaded bias against the work of the mind, you can grasp even while watching it that Michael Moore has just said, in so many words, the one thing that no reflective or informed person can possibly believe: that Saddam Hussein was no problem. No problem at all. Now look again at the facts I have cited above. If these things had been allowed to happen under any other administration, you can be sure that Moore and others would now glibly be accusing the president of ignoring, or of having ignored, some fairly unmistakable "warnings."

The same "let's have it both ways" opportunism infects his treatment of another very serious subject, namely domestic counterterrorist policy. From being accused of overlooking too many warnings"?not exactly an original point"?the administration is now lavishly taunted for issuing too many. (Would there not have been "fear" if the harbingers of 9/11 had been taken seriously?) We are shown some American civilians who have had absurd encounters with idiotic "security" staff. (Have you ever met anyone who can't tell such a story?) Then we are immediately shown underfunded police departments that don't have the means or the manpower to do any stop-and-search: a power suddenly demanded by Moore on their behalf that we know by definition would at least lead to some ridiculous interrogations. Finally, Moore complains that there isn't enough intrusion and confiscation at airports and says that it is appalling that every air traveler is not forcibly relieved of all matches and lighters. (Cue mood music for sinister influence of Big Tobacco.) So"?he wants even more pocket-rummaging by airport officials? Uh, no, not exactly. But by this stage, who's counting? Moore is having it three ways and asserting everything and nothing. Again"?simply not serious.

Circling back to where we began, why did Moore's evil Saudis not join "the Coalition of the Willing"? Why instead did they force the United States to switch its regional military headquarters to Qatar? If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other's pockets, as is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian scene with Arab headdresses replacing top hats, then how come the most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in Baghdad? The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq's recuperated oil industry might challenge their near-monopoly. They fear the liberation of the Shiite Muslims they so despise. To make these elementary points is to collapse the whole pathetic edifice of the film's "theory." Perhaps Moore prefers the pro-Saudi Kissinger/Scowcroft plan for the Middle East, where stability trumps every other consideration and where one dare not upset the local house of cards, or killing-field of Kurds? This would be a strange position for a purported radical. Then again, perhaps he does not take this conservative line because his real pitch is not to any audience member with a serious interest in foreign policy. It is to the provincial isolationist.

I have already said that Moore's film has the staunch courage to mock Bush for his verbal infelicity. Yet it's much, much braver than that. From Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding and hidden disclosures, such as the capitalist nature of American society, the existence of Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," and the use of "spin" in the presentation of our politicians. It's high time someone had the nerve to point this out. There's more. Poor people often volunteer to join the army, and some of them are duskier than others. Betcha didn't know that. Back in Flint, Mich., Moore feels on safe ground. There are no martyred rabbits this time. Instead, it's the poor and black who shoulder the packs and rifles and march away. I won't dwell on the fact that black Americans have fought for almost a century and a half, from insisting on their right to join the U.S. Army and fight in the Civil War to the right to have a desegregated Army that set the pace for post-1945 civil rights. I'll merely ask this: In the film, Moore says loudly and repeatedly that not enough troops were sent to garrison Afghanistan and Iraq. (This is now a favorite cleverness of those who were, in the first place, against sending any soldiers at all.) Well, where does he think those needful heroes and heroines would have come from? Does he favor a draft"?the most statist and oppressive solution? Does he think that only hapless and gullible proles sign up for the Marines? Does he think"?as he seems to suggest"?that parents can "send" their children, as he stupidly asks elected members of Congress to do? Would he have abandoned Gettysburg because the Union allowed civilians to pay proxies to serve in their place? Would he have supported the antidraft (and very antiblack) riots against Lincoln in New York? After a point, one realizes that it's a waste of time asking him questions of this sort. It would be too much like taking him seriously. He'll just try anything once and see if it floats or flies or gets a cheer.

Indeed, Moore's affected and ostentatious concern for black America is one of the most suspect ingredients of his pitch package. In a recent interview, he yelled that if the hijacked civilians of 9/11 had been black, they would have fought back, unlike the stupid and presumably cowardly white men and women (and children). Never mind for now how many black passengers were on those planes"?we happen to know what Moore does not care to mention: that Todd Beamer and a few of his co-passengers, shouting "Let's roll," rammed the hijackers with a trolley, fought them tooth and nail, and helped bring down a United Airlines plane, in Pennsylvania, that was speeding toward either the White House or the Capitol. There are no words for real, impromptu bravery like that, which helped save our republic from worse than actually befell. The Pennsylvania drama also reminds one of the self-evident fact that this war is not fought only "overseas" or in uniform, but is being brought to our cities. Yet Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is everything.

Moore has announced that he won't even appear on TV shows where he might face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times of June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself against attack. He'll sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or his pet. Some right-wing hack groups, I gather, are planning to bring pressure on their local movie theaters to drop the film. How dumb or thuggish do you have to be in order to counter one form of stupidity and cowardice with another? By all means go and see this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the conversation.

However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that "fact-checking" is beside the point. And as for the scary lawyers"?get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let's redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let's see what you're made of.

Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It's only a movie. No biggie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver Stone. It's kick-ass entertainment. It might even help get out "the youth vote." Yeah, well, I have myself written and presented about a dozen low-budget made-for-TV documentaries, on subjects as various as Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie theaters. So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (...), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised. At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage.

Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ...

And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

[Ironlung]

June 18, 2007
Kyle Smith on Michael Moore's 'Sicko'
Tuesday's New York Post features my review of Michael Moore's "Sicko," a film that will be released in theaters on June 29 but has already been released nationwide, on many Web sites, free, with Moore's blessing. What follows is a greatly expanded, much more detailed version of the one-star review I wrote for the print edition of The Post.


Michael Moore's latest documentary "Sicko"? is an urgent bipartisan plea. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Yankees and Red Sox can surely all agree, says Moore, that our health care system ought to be run by Fidel Castro.
The silliness of Moore's oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative either; it's a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole. (I'll be writing more on Moore on my blog, kylesmithonline.com).

Even Moore does not believe what he says, and his films don't bring about change-"?union membership did not skyrocket nor corporate downsizing trickle off after "Roger and Me," there was no movement towards banning guns after "Bowling for Columbine," and John Kerry did not have to fill out any change of address forms in 2004. Moore's documentaries are mere political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or an eighth Stooge. I will pay him the honor of treating him with his own meds. How else can I deal with a film that calls Hillary Clinton "sexy"?

The bulk of "Sicko" is given over to the stories of Americans who got the run-around from health insurers. These people were told they didn't qualify for benefits because the requested procedures were too experimental or because of pre-existing conditions. The most absurd example of several is, perhaps, that of the woman who says that after she received benefits, the check was stopped because she had previously suffered an undisclosed yeast infection.

There is no way to know whether this claim is true because Moore's style is to present whatever information he likes without checking it. He told "Entertainment Weekly" "absolutely not," when asked whether he felt any need to get the other side of the story. So, over time, his work rusts out from within as the facts eat away at it. The central idea of "Bowling for Columbine," for instance"?that the killers were subconsciously driven to their actions by the presence of a weapons manufacturing plant in Littleton---turned out to be not only conceptually insane but literally untrue. The plant did not make what Moore called "weapons of mass destruction" but rather space launch vehicles for TV satellites. "Roger & Me,"? which presented Moore as unable to secure an interview with the GM chief Roger Smith, was also a 90-minute lie: Moore did talk to Smith, a fact revealed by Ralph Nader.


One Los Angeles woman in "Sicko"? says her daughter died because her insurance company told her to take her daughter to a different hospital than the first one she went to, and there are several other similarly grim tales. Moore is smart enough to know that a depressed audience is an absent audience, so he mixes the genuinely sad cases with ones that are just dopey, such as the one about the young six-foot beansprout rejected for coverage because he was underweight.
Regardless of whether any particular claim in "Sicko" is true, no one doubts that lots of insured and uninsured Americans face health-care crises. So far, Moore is master of the obvious. We all hate insurance companies and red tape, and we all want to improve the system. Where do we go from here?

To France, Britain and Canada, says Moore, who presents each of them as a health-care paradise. But lots of people in those countries have health-care nightmares of their own. Here's how easy it is to lie by anecdote: Say I wanted to make a film about gay black Republicans who live in Chelsea. I find ten of them, make a film about them, and you walk out of the theater thinking: Wow, so many gay black Republicans in Chelsea! The six years it took me to find these ten guys will go unnoted.

All three countries are edging away from how Moore portrays them. Moore knows that in France, where he praises not only the health service but limits on working hours, expansive unemployment benefits and the country's three preferred forms of exercise"?street-marching, banner-hoisting and strikes"?a new conservative president was just elected by promising to cut back on such nonsense. (According to Moore, if you need a babysitter or help with the laundry, the French government will send a trained professional right over.)

Everywhere he looks, Moore finds French happiness. But this phrase is as close to an oxymoron as French rock. In a poll, 85 percent of the French recently said their country is heading in the wrong direction. Right direction? Nine percent. In France in 2003, 15,000 mostly elderly hospital patients died in an August heat wave--because hospitals lack air conditioning and doctors were on vacation. The French parliament blamed the health care system. That's five times 9/11's toll, all of it preventable, all of it unlamented by Moore.

Moore knows that in Britain, where National Health Service spending has more than doubled since Tony Blair was elected, with little to show for it, there is a two-tier health system: the smart set carry private insurance, which Moore wants to outlaw in the U.S. The cliché in London (check out this story and this one) is that the well-shod go to the same doctor as the suckers on the National Health Service. The difference is that private clients get treated right away while the NHS losers wait two years to get their strep throat looked at.

Moore glosses over wait times, hoping his audience is too stupid to notice. He asks a handful of Canadian patients how long they had to wait to see the doctor. Oh, 20 minutes, 45 minutes, everyone says. So if Moore finds five people who didn't have to wait, there's no waiting for anybody! "To any Canadian who has ever been forced to go to emergency, this would seem unbelievable,"? writes Thomas Malkom, a vehemently pro-Moore columnist for Canada's paper The Star. The Canadian Supreme Court struck down a law forbidding private insurance in a 2005 decision, ruling that "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care" The decision resulted from a Canadian case in which a man waited a year for hip-replacement surgery, and Canada has started down the road of privatization. Check out the Canadian movie "The Barbarian Invasions" (which is, like "Sicko," a fiction film) for a view of how Canadians view their system: agonizing waits; trips across the border to Vermont to get access to modern technology; fetid facilities modeled, seemingly, on an American one"?the Confederate field hospital in "Gone with the Wind."

Here is Dr. David Gratzer, the Canadian author of "The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save Health Care," who believes both the US and Canadian systems are deeply flawed:

"Like most Canadians, I believed that we had the best-run health-care system in the world. Because the system was publically owned, I assumed that compassion came before profit and that everyone got good care. . .After I entered medical school, however, my view of Canadian health care changed...I trained in emergency rooms that were chronically, chaotically, dangerously overcrowded, not only in my hometown of Winnipeg, but all across Canada. I met a middle-aged man with sleep problems who was booked for an appointment with a specialist three years later; a man with pain following a simple hernia repair who was referred to a pain clinic with a two-year wait list; a woman with breast cancer who was asked to wait four more months before starting the lifesaving radiation therapy. According to the government's own statistics, some 1.2 million Canadians couldn't get a family doctor. In some rural areas, town councils resorted to lotteries: the winners would get appointments with the only general practitioners around."
Mere anecdotes? Yes, but mine cancel out Moore's. Where are the stats? Moore emphasizes life-expectancy figures in which the US slightly lags some other Western countries. But life expectancy involves many factors; two that Moore is especially knowledgeable about, obesity and homicide by firearm, are special American plagues. Here's a stat: The percentage of patients having to wait more than four months for non-emergency surgery is about five times higher in Canada and seven times higher in Britain than it is here. [see Gratzer, 171]

In his EW interview, Moore tacitly admitted that "Sicko" lies about wait times, saying, "Well, okay, let's set up a system where we don't have the Canadian wait. Let's set up a system where we take what they do right and don't do the things that we do wrong." Yes, and let's also make sure that every girl gets to be the prettiest girl in town.

Those who have mastered basic economics can skip this paragraph. Not everyone can have everything they want because there is not an unlimited supply of anything (except maybe air); that's why Canada and Britain have lotteries to determine who gets treatment. Deciding who gets what and when involves rationing, either by price or by waiting or some combination of the two. If the Mets announced that World Series tickets were free to anyone lining up in front of the Shea Stadium box office, you'd have to go get in line now. Medicare, which isn't an unlimited benefit, is by itself projected to eat up a third of federal tax revenues by 2030[see Gratzer, p. 7]. There isn't enough money in the U.S. to pay for free, wait-free top-quality universal health care. The law of supply and demand can no more be repealed than the law that all documentary films must be left-wing. Gratzer's book suggests a real-world solution: decentralization that gives patients more choice: "both failed options [HMOs and Medicare/Medicaid] share one fatal feature. They remove choices from patients and give them to government or corporate bureaucrats. Restricting patient choices in this way, flouting the laws of basic economics, has been a mistake. It's the reason why, while pocket calculators have declined in price from $500 to $5, the price of pacemakers keeps rising."

When Moore visits a British pharmacy in which all drugs cost ten bucks, what he isn't showing is who invented the drugs: evil American profit-hungry pharmaceutical firms that would effectively be shut down if there were a $10 price limit on all prescriptions. Firms spend hundreds of millions developing and testing a drug while the patent clock ticks down, only to be forced to start over if the drug is rejected by the FDA. If a drug is approved, they have only a few years to recoup costs (and the cost of all the previous failures) by charging "exorbitant" market prices because the drug will soon go generic, i.e. non-exorbitant, i.e. virtually free. The Brits freeload on American technology. Being regulated to death is the reason the once-vibrant European pharmaceutical industry has been lapped by its U.S. counterpart in the last few decades. Want your drugs invented and open-heart surgery performed by the people who gave us FEMA, Amtrak and the CIA? Does the Post Office do a better job than FedEx? I can't mail a package via the federal government without waiting in line 20 minutes--and the Post Office is the best-run federal agency.

Moore is outwardly a genial buffoon; inwardly he is an authoritarian buffoon. He lets it show in two long episodes: a straight-faced interview with the UK's infamous Commie, Tony Benn, whom Moore presents as an expert on the transformative power of socialism, and the famous-before-anyone-saw-it sequence, first reported in The Post, in which Moore takes some 9/11 rescue workers with lingering health problems to Cuba.

Moore, at a Havana hospital, says he requested that his group receive exactly the same care as any Cuban who walked in"?"and that's exactly what they got." As comedy, this statement is on a par with the sex scene in "Knocked Up," the chest waxing in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and the moment in "An Inconvenient Truth" when Al Gore tells us that the ecology's no. 1 enemy, China, is in fact "on the cutting edge" of environmentalism.

In the Cuba section of "Sicko," so many guys in white coats (don't look at the camera, guys!) scurry around Moore's patients listening to symptoms, peering at X-rays and firing up high-tech medical equipment that the scene seems to have been co-written by Groucho and Karl Marx. If Fidel himself gets this level of care, it's no wonder the guy has outlasted nine presidents.

You can't film anywhere in Castro's Alcatraz without government say-so, meaning the whole scene was as phony as what happens when Frank Bruni walks into a four-star restaurant, and if there is a Michael Moore of Cuba, he is in jail right now. Reporters without Borders calls Cuba the world's second biggest prison for journalists after China. But Moore solemnly reports Cuba's official health statistics, which are of course a fiction dreamed up by El Presidente, because Moore's motto is to trust no authority figure from cringing corporate spokesman on up to Washington windbags. Except dictators. Dictators, he'll take your word for it. I expected Moore to protect himself with a thin coat of disclaimer, just a line to say, "Look, I know Cuba is actually a prison nation where nobody's gotten a new car since Fredo betrayed Michael, but I'm just using this as an extreme example for ironic purposes." Instead, his irony runs the other way: He plays scare music over an image of Castro to get a laugh. I say that again: he thinks the idea that Castro is evil is so obviously ridiculous that he says it sarcastically and expects you to giggle along. Moore calls Cuban health care among the best in the world. Nonsense. Cuba is short on everything from clean drinking water and aspirin on up.

The health care industry could not ask for a more ideal opponent than Moore; the idea that US health should go to a single-payer model is held by plenty of reasonable people, but Moore is not one of them. Despite his apparent belief that he can seem moderate by narrating the film in a sing-song, I'm-talking-to-a-child-or-moron tone, the man can no more hide his Marxism than his belly. He presents not only Tony Benn but Che Guevera's daughter as voices of sanity and, through a French doctor, Moore sneaks in the Marxist slogan "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Everyone who has ever lived in a country that put this idea into practice has found that it actually means this: Give the country whatever it asks for and take back whatever it gives you, and do so without complaint or go to prison. Moore also runs lots of old Soviet propaganda footage with comical music on the soundtrack as if to suggest that Stalin was just another campy, overhyped entertainment figure--Martin Short with a mustache.

Moore has been along long enough that his ideas are starting to contradict one other; on his Web site, he once said of Al Qaeda's grunts in Iraq, "They are the REVOLUTION, the minutemen," but in this film he tries to jog around to the right of Paul Wolfowitz: He pretends to be aghast that the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay (is any other group of 380 people in the world receiving as much attention as these guys?) get top medical care. So, Mike: don't these heroes, these minutemen, deserve a doc?

Moore comes up with a few zingers, though fewer than in previous films. There's a funny montage of a Congressman making speeches on health care in which he keeps tearing up on cue and talking about how much he loves his mama. Even I laughed when, following an American north of the border to get some CanuckCare, Moore said, "We're Americans. We go into other countries when we need to." The founder of socialized medicine in Canada is described as the most important man in the country's history, "even more than Wayne Gretzky!"

Let's not give too much credit to Moore, though, for what he did about a guy who runs an anti-Moore Web site who was going to be forced to shut it down"?because of a health crisis he couldn't afford. When Moore found out about it, he anonymously sent a $12,000 check, or .0005 of the money he was paid to make this movie. An anonymous check is not actually anonymous if you announce it in a movie; then it becomes simply a bargain method for buying stories in the press that paint you as a nice guy. Moore, of course, has a Castro-ish history of suppressing dissent But he is free to prove himself a patron of the loyal opposition. He can send my check in care of the Post.

[R13]

Micheal Moore just pisses republicans off because he points out how big of a lie that Bush has been telling....that our healthcare system is really ran by insurance agencies..he just doesnt point him out..if Im not mistaken he said that Hilary Clinton was a sell-out, selling out the insurance industry to keep quiet about universal healthcare(which would prolly be one of the best things to happen to us)...he pissed them off because he showed how the government treated the heroes of 9/11(because they were "volunteer firefighters" that meant they werent on the governments watch and they wouldnt help them out)....I just think he makes a valid ppoint about it that we use universal systems all the time, our fire department, police, public library and school systems are all universal.....

I just think it would be great to have it, Im a former patient at a hospital in the US that uses it...St. Jude Childrens Hospital, they pay for everything and no child has ever been turned away because they couldnt afford it...so yes I know first hand how good that something like that would help us