Michael Moore: Cheap-Shot Messiah
It must be wonderful to be the smartest guy in a world of morons, the only honest person left on earth, the last great truth-teller in the universe.
On Good Morning America yesterday, Michael Moore took time out from promoting The Word on health care in America, to lecture Chris Cuomo on the failure of “the people in this building†and the rest of the media to prevent the war in Iraq. To his credit, Cuomo was having none of it.
Deconstructing Michael Moore is difficult because his heart is usually in the right place, but his judgment and journalistic ethics are off on some other planet. Documentaries are journalism, not audio-visual polemics, and he has erased the line between them.
Jon Stewart, no defender of MSM, was on point as usual when he told Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on “Crossfire†that they were partisan hacks: “You should be doing debate, which would be great, but you’re doing theater.â€
Moore is purporting to enlighten, but despite his pretensions, he is doing theater. He may give audiences vicarious satisfaction in dramatizing the idiocies of our health care system, but he isn’t telling them anything new and he certainly isn’t making any positive contribution to the debate over improving it. He is, however, making money and getting a lot of attention for himself.
Analyzing the media’s share of the blame for the war in Iraq is important, as Bill Moyers showed in “Buying the War,†but taking smug cheap shots is something else.
When Moore blithely blamed his hosts for the death of 3500 American soldiers and Cuomo challenged him to be careful about such sweeping assertions, Moore’s answer was “I don’t have to be careful.â€
That says it all. Moore has made his reputation and millions of dollars by aspiring to be the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. But his visions have been, to put it kindly, cockeyed.
Cross-posted from my blog:
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27 Responses to “Michael Moore: Cheap-Shot Messiah”
While Moore is Leni-esque, he was smack on about the media complicity and joy-riding.
MM is the Republican Party’s most prolific swing vote deliverer.
MM is the Republican Party’s most prolific swing vote deliverer. And at least Jane Fonda was attractive.
Sorry, Robert, but Moore was right about virtually all American journalists not doing their job when it came to the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq.
No Moore was not right. He was guessing. He guessed right.
The United States had come off successful excursions into Bosnia and Afghanistan where the west was greeted as liberators. In Afghanistan they still ARE.
Iraq should have fallen along the same lines. In fact after Bush Sr. encouraged them to rebell against Saddam and then failed to give them support they were crushed. Literally.
History will show that everyone was fooled by Iraq. That All the terrorists in the world chose to take a stand in Iraq and not Afghanistan. Had the USA not attacked IRAQ we would be having this discussion about Afghanistan because all the terrorists would have shown up in Afghanistan instead.
The true error in all this was to assume that we could bring democracy to Iraq. The interesting thing is that by attacking IRAQ we have given Afghanistan the opportunity to become a democratic nation, because the insurgents really don’t care about Afghanistan all that much with the prize of Iraq in the crosshairs.
That is a GOOD thing.
I’m not sure what journalists were supposed to do to stop the war. Are journalists now supposed to be advocates? Blaming the media is stupid. And I agree with everything this post says on MM.
Since when has Bush let the media dictate his actions? He does what he wants when he wants. The media certainly could have highlighted things after the war started about why it was started and how it was being handled to affect the ’04 election but thats it. Nothing would have stopped the invasion of Iraq after 9/11, lets be honest here.
Entropy,
Journalists were supposed to verify the claims made by the U.S. government, or at least be skeptical of them.
Journalists also failed to ask the big questions:
What are the consequences of failure?
What does a post-invasion Iraq look like?
Why is the rest of the world so skeptical?
Instead, journalists essentially acted as “advocates” for the government’s position.
For frak’s sake, Someobody. Just because you were stupid about it and other people weren’t doesn’t mean that the situation was impossible to analyze. Moore himself may have been a stopped clock, but it was pretty obvious to lots of people that Iraq was virtually doomed to disaster. Just ask General Shinseki, who was fired for having a brain.
Somebody:
Afghanistan is a narco state w an American puppet in charge. The minute we show a moment’s relaxation, the Taliban will retake it, and that means terrorists will have another state, because we wasted all our efforts on Iraq, toppling a rather pedestrian dictatorship, and creating one of the few things worse than a totalitarian state- an anarchistic one.
Thus, we’ve lost on two fronts rather than winning an eminently winnable one in Afghanistan. Plus, the poppies mean that not only does terrorism get funding, but so do all the great organized crime orgs about the globe. Osama bin Laden, meet Tony Soprano.
Yeah, Somebody- that’s real good!
cosmoetica nailed it, I think. Just my two cent’s worth. The poppies, isnt that ironic that the poppy is
the flower of Nepenthes, amongst the Greeks, the narcoremedy for taking the anger out of a man who’d been to war,
to make him ‘forget’… that the same juice of the same flower is used to finance war.
dr.e.
Absolutely. Hussein had, and had used, weapons of mass destruction (and ballistic missiles) in the past, and was continuing to play games with the rest of the world about what he was doing with them after the first Gulf war. Even the critics of the war frequently expressed concern about the use of WMDs if Hussein were to panic in the end.
We were over-confident, it has been proven.
The terrorists in Iraq, maybe. The terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan definitely care, as does Iran.
So many of them already see themselves as such, and are, for liberal causes and positions. Many more act as such without realizing or admitting so.
The critics are saying they didn’t do enough.
I wonder if FAIR, whose name is a lie, will claim that this (liberal media takes issue with a radical’s more outrageous behavior, especially an attack on that liberal media) is the latest example of “conservative bias” in the “corporate right-wing media” [sic].
Incidentally, Moore’s heart is usually in the wrong place. That is, if he’s serious and sincere. The only question is to what extent he actually believes in what he says and does, and to what extent it is fake and merely a means of generating controversy and income (as is wondered about, say, Noam Chomsky or to a lesser degree, Ann Coulter, for example).
Cosmoetica,
Sorry, but 90% of that comment is just, well, untrue. First of all, the US no longer runs the operation there, NATO does. Secondly, if you think Karzai’s government, which consists of a lot of hardened former fighters and warlords, are US puppets, then you really need to read some Afghan history. Third, the Taliban are not as all-powerful as is commonly portrayed. Saying they could easily “retake” Afghanistan is simply absurd. Fourth, please explain a “pedestrian” dictatorship as opposed to mere simple dictatorship. Fifth, the opium is a problem, but do you really expect Afghan farmers to change overnight to crops that don’t pay as much and are more difficult to grow? Besides, the Taliban get a fraction of the drug money they did when they controlled Afghanistan.
Chris,
Journalists were advocates for the war? You must have spent all of 2002 watching Fox News.
Entropy,
NY Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS…
Chris, I’ll give you a few examples:
NYT, Feb 18, 2003 THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE MILITARY; War Planners Begin to Speak Of War’s Risks
NYT, Oct 22, 2002: The Price of Stability
Oct 17, 2002: THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE U.N. DEBATE; Bush Garners Little Support At U.N. for an Attack on Iraq
Too long to quote, but this article basically quotes a bunch of experts and regional leaders who basically predict most of what has come to pass.
NYT, Feb 23, 2003: Power and Leadership; The Real Meaning of Iraq
Just a couple of quote from a lengthy OP-ed opposing the war.
I found those in a 30 second lexisNexis search just on the NYT. The arguments were made – the press did it’s job and gave the contrary views by its own editors and experts from around the world. Is it the fault of the press that the people did not listen?
Entropy,
What page did those stories run on?
Chris,
Here they are in order:
1. Page 1
2. Editorial section, page 31
3. Page 1
4. Editorial section, page 10
The two editorials naturally did not appear on page 1.
Nice try though.
It’s great that we have someone with Lexis Nexis access… Now, Entropy, just for the sake of balance, could you run a 30 second search and see how many OP-Eds favored the war?
That would give us a real ‘apples to apples’ comparison and we’re half way there with the four articles you’ve found… this is getting interesting.
* oooops *
I said:
Now, Entropy, just for the sake of balance, could you run a 30 second search and see how many OP-Eds favored the war?
What I meant to say was:
Now, Entropy, just for the sake of balance, could you run a 30 second search and see how many articles / OP-Eds in the NYT favored / supported the war?
SteveK,
I’ll I did was search the NYT for 6 months preceding the war using 3 keywords – “Iraq” “Occupation” “Chaos” and then skimmed some of the results to find those quotes. It is by no means a complete list of what is available, and to be fair, the two front-page articles were lengthy and were not entirely negative – rather they seem to provided balanced coverage of the topic – as good journalism (as opposed to the editorial sections) does.
I did a quick search over the same time period using “iraq” “invasion” “necessary” and skimmed the op-ed results. There was one guest op-ed piece advocating invasion by former CIA analyst Ken Pollack, but I found several others against it, including guest contributors Warren Christopher, Jimmy Carter, and a couple of former Clinton officials. There were a couple that look fairly neutral – they thought Saddam had to go, but questioned the timing, lack of allies, etc. The only truly pro-war one I found was the Pollack oped.
To me this is really a surprise as it was clear the NYT editorial staff was against the war. Still, my quick searches are obviously not a scientific sampling. It would be interesting if someone took the time to really read everything for the six months prior and do a complete analysis, but it’s something I certainly do not have the time for.
Thanks for running the second search… I appreciate the effort but I must say, the lack of articles / opinions supporting our invasion / intervention in Iraq surprises me.
I know I always get closer to the truth when I take the time to look at both sides with as open a mind as I can muster.
I also find that the most important part of ‘looking’ for answers is in the quality of the questions asked and the words used to asking them. When I fall short of the mark it’s because I didn’t aim at the right target.
Again… thank you.
Steve,
No problem. I mistyped above. I meant to say that I did not think it was surprising since the NYT editorial staff was solidly against the war. One would only expect a majority of the opinion to reflect this view. The straight-up journalism articles gave a mostly balanced view, imo. But again, this was a quick look, skimming articles from only one newspaper, so YMMV.
Entropy said,
June 14, 2007 at 5:51 pm:
Cosmoetica,
Afghanistan is a narco state w an American puppet in charge. The minute we show a moment’s relaxation, the Taliban will retake it, and that means terrorists will have another state, because we wasted all our efforts on Iraq, toppling a rather pedestrian dictatorship, and creating one of the few things worse than a totalitarian state- an anarchistic one.
Thus, we’ve lost on two fronts rather than winning an eminently winnable one in Afghanistan. Plus, the poppies mean that not only does terrorism get funding, but so do all the great organized crime orgs about the globe. Osama bin Laden, meet Tony Soprano.
Sorry, but 90% of that comment is just, well, untrue. First of all, the US no longer runs the operation there, NATO does. Secondly, if you think Karzai’s government, which consists of a lot of hardened former fighters and warlords, are US puppets, then you really need to read some Afghan history. Third, the Taliban are not as all-powerful as is commonly portrayed. Saying they could easily “retake†Afghanistan is simply absurd. Fourth, please explain a “pedestrian†dictatorship as opposed to mere simple dictatorship. Fifth, the opium is a problem, but do you really expect Afghan farmers to change overnight to crops that don’t pay as much and are more difficult to grow? Besides, the Taliban get a fraction of the drug money they did when they controlled Afghanistan.
Entropy: The US is in charge, just like it was during the ‘Allied’ invasion of Iraq. I see you still trust the media. Great, but reality is that the UN runs the Afghan operations like Dick Che- oops, W. runs the White House.
If you think that ‘freedom fighters’ aren’t eager to enjoy the spoils of war and let a bigger power run things while they lounge out, well, read US History and world history.
No one said the Taliban was all-powerful, but even with the US and your vaunted UN forces, they control almost half that nation. And that’s after nearly 6 years of getting pounded. If we pull out, they’ll take the country in less than 6 weeks.
A pedestrian dictatorship is a run of the mill Banana Republic sort- where a bully executes alot of enemies, but is no real threat to anyone, as opposed to genocidal maniacs like Pol Pot, the raftr of African maniacs, the Big 3 Commies- Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Hitler- folks who could affect the world’s security. The only reason anyone ever heard of Saddam was oil. Otherwise, he’d be one of those nameless African maniacs I did not mention. That’s ‘pedestrian.’
As for opium….hmm….think we might have made contingencies when we decide to invade and take over a country? But, a century of conquest- from the Philippines to Afghanistan, and we still go in with guns first, plans second.
As for the Taliban getting less drug money. This is true. So? That means the money is going to the Russian mob, the Yakuza, the American Mob, and many other drug cartels. Do you really think that organized crime has disappeared simply because The War On Drugs was dropped in favor of The War On terror? No. Org. Crime is larger and more powerful than ever- and more diverse. And since we cannot spend money on fighting it because of terrorism, it’s an even greater threat.
20 years ago, Pablo Escobar was responsible for far more dead Americans than OBL, and now there are many more Escobars who are raking in big bucks while Bushco goes around wasting time and effort in the wrong wars at the wrong times.
Yeah, ’tis a great time to be a Don! Thanks, W!
cosmoetica,
The Taliban are very bad people and I have nothing at all nice to say about them BUT but they certainly don’t like opium and they did not put up with its cultivation…
In one year they did the impossible… they all but eliminated Afghanistan’s 4,000 ton a year cash crop.
Afghanistan, Opium and the Taliban
February 2001
U.N. Drug Control says Taliban nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan.
Autumn 2001
War in Afghanistan; heroin floods the Pakistan market. Taliban regime overthrown.
October 2002
U.N. Drug Control and Crime Prevention Agency announces Afghanistan has regained its position as the world’s largest opium producer.
I know- but that was b4 the war. There was a recent PBS program/doc on the poppy biz in Afghan as well as a network report, which said the Taliban has now taken to getting its funds via the crop.
It’s called evolution.
Thanks to W the religious nuts are now drug lords.