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Michael Moore’s “Sicko” Fantasy
By Kyle | May 27, 2007
An Entertainment Weekly cover story on Michael Moore’s upcoming documentary “Sicko” reveals that Mr. Moore is a fan of Cuba in general and its health-care system in particular: he calls CastroCare “the best in the third world.” Isn’t that a little like calling a gulag the finest in the archipelago?
It’s often strangely difficult to try to pin down exactly what point Moore is trying to make, apart from getting you to hate all the things he hates. His interviewers come from the pool of red-carpet zombies who ask fashion models about what’s on their iPods, so they don’t ask followup questions or tease out the implications of his arguments. For instance, I asked him a question at a preview screening of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a large chunk of which was devoted to implying (without actually saying) that President Bush not only knew about the 9/11 plot in advance–remember the scary plummeting approval-rating chart that Moore used to get across the idea that the president was desperate for an issue to save his popularity?–but probably planned the whole thing with the Saudi government (cue lots of shots of the Bushes palling around with the Saudi royal family). The question I asked was this: Do you think President Bush knew about 9/11 in advance? Moore said, flat-out, “No.” In so doing, Moore deflated a major portion of his movie.
“F9/11″ was typical Moore in that he managed to get across a general revulsion without actually making a single valid point; the two images that people talk about from that movie, again and again, are completely lacking in substance. There’s Wolfowitz sticking the comb in his mouth; there’s the President hesitating for a few minutes while he was reading a book to the children. As liberal critic Armond White wrote in the New York Press, the President was obviously suffering an understandable moment of anguish. Moreover, it was the decisions he made over the following 15 months, not 15 minutes, that will be assessed by history. The minutes he spent with the schoolchildren don’t amount to even a footnote in the history books, much less a scandal.
Here’s the strange thing about Michael Moore as a beacon of conscience or spokesmodel for the great shapeless blob of lefty rage (an eloquent liberal case against Moore has been made here by Daniel Radosh): often, he clearly doesn’t believe what he’s saying, and, in the words of Ned Flanders on the Bible, believing in him requires believing lots of stuff that contradicts the other stuff.
Despite the message of the new film, in which Moore apparently stages a stunt visit to a Cuban hospital to show us how much better things are for Cuba’s sick, if Moore has a health crisis the words on his lips are going to be “Mount Sinai,” not “Havana.” Hasn’t the Moore/MoveOn.org nexus–the MooreOn crowd–been arguing for 40 years that our heartless capitalist embargo on peace-loving Cuba is starving their babies and old folks, crippling their hospitals, ruining their lives? (In the 90s, they said the same things about Saddam’s Iraq; then “F 9/11″ did a pirouette, portraying sanctions-lashed Iraq as a merry playground of twittering birds and happy children.) Similarly, “Bowling for Columbine” unfavorably compared Clinton’s America (years into a prolonged period of plummeting crime rates) with Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR–but also argued that South Central L.A., Ground Zero of the gun epidemic, was totally safe. Don’t forget the concluding argument of “Bowling for Columbine”: Moore, after ridiculing the ideas that video games or Marilyn Manson videos were the root cause, wound up blaming the massacre on the presence of a Defense Department factory in the town. In other words, the bombing of Slobodan Milosevic inspired the kids to massacre their classmates. In an interview with EW after he won the Oscar for making this argument, Moore claimed both that he wasn’t actually booed (it was all a conspiracy to manipulate the sound levels, you see–pretty fast-developing plot, since the ceremony was broadcast live) and that the booing was no big deal because it’s all part of our grand tradition of free speech–no, wait, he didn’t make that argument at all. He said the boo-birds, far from exercising their right to express disgust, were trying to deny him his Constitutional right to free speech.
His First Amendment right, in other words. That would be the amendment directly preceding the Second Amendment, which Charlton Heston cited as the reason he owned guns. Like or not (I don’t, particularly), the Second Amendment is always going to be there. Moore had no answer for Heston’s argument, so he did what he always does: change the subject; smear. A New Yorker profile of him four years ago was a great example: an audience member is shown asking Moore why he travels with bodyguards. Moore replies, “Why are they assuming that? Because they’re black?” Change the subject, smear. You’re a racist if you think Michael Moore’s black friends are bodyguards! The New Yorker story added that, of course, the three hulking men who accompany Moore everywhere are his bodyguards.
In this week’s EW piece, the interviewer raised the point that in Moore’s beloved Cuba, documentarians (and journalists, and novelists, and poets, and songwriters, and everyone else who dares to express a state-unsanctioned thought) are promptly disappeared by the Castro regime. Unwisely, the interviewer didn’t state this as a fact but as a notion put across by Fred Thompson, the actor/ex-senator/undeclared presidential candidate. This gave Moore his opportunity for swivel-and-smear:
[Sighs] It makes him look ridiculous, commenting on something he hasn’t seen. But what’s really ridiculous is that he admitted in The Weekly Standard to having boxes of Cuban cigars, and with each box he helps to financially support a regime that he’s saying is a brutal dictatorship. [Thompson has admitted to nothing, though in his article, Standard senior writer Stephen F. Hayes noted boxes of Montecristos in the former lawmaker's office.] I think the American people are smart enough to understand that this is a guy trying to win the Republican primaries and saying, ”The way I’m going to appeal to the base is to go after Michael Moore.”
So here’s Moore’s argument when accused of hypocrisy: so what? Others are hypocrites too! If Thompson hasn’t been to Cuba and witnessed firsthand what the Castro regime does to dissenters, he’s not entitled to mention it! if Thompson hasn’t been to Auschwitz, Auschwitz didn’t exist! All those Cuban exiles and their testimony just don’t count.
May 31st, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Great post.
As for smoking Cuban cigars. I don’t look at it as helping their economy. I think of it as ‘burning their fields’.
May 31st, 2007 at 9:30 pm
I worked with Michael Moore many years ago on his show “TV Nation” (still the best thing he ever did IMHO). I’m not one of his acolytes, just someone who worked with him firsthand on a few small things. He’s certainly not a perfect person and he has a large ego, but less so than many other creative people I’ve worked for. At heart he’s a 1960s liberal and his films are a cinematic version of the old radical idea of direct action, dealing with subjects that others ignore. He’s not the news, and he doesn’t pretend to be.
“Bowling For Columbine” is a kaleidescopic look at violence in America. In case you haven’t heard this is a genuine problem, as exemplified by Virginia Tech and, well, Columbine. To say that he was directly blaming the defense industry for that particular event is either thick-headed or deliberately misleading - the point is we as a society are desensitized to violence, on every level, and it’s not Marilyn Manson’s fault. Unlike Defense Department contractors, he’s not making a profit from killing people.
As long as we’re fact-checking everything, how exactly has MoveOn.org or Michael Moore been arguing about anything for 40 years? Oh I see - they’re part of a “nexus”. Evidently making excuses for Castro is such a pervasive problem it requires an inexact, even kaleidescopic, criticism.
June 1st, 2007 at 12:14 am
So, Dark One, you agree that Mr. Moore is making excuses for Castro but you find fault merely with the way I expressed the idea? It would seem that we aren’t very far apart. As you point out, Moore is very much a “60s liberal,” and blaming the woes of Communist Castro on the U.S. embargo is a classic building block of ’60s liberalism.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:05 am
Dark one:
A. If we are desensitized to violence on “every level” — why is MM excused. Don’t we all bear some responsibility? And wouldn’t folks who pen violent and sadomasochistic lyrics bear a little more than others?
B. What’s wrong with DOD contractors making a profit from “killing people,” if the people involved are the enemy? It’s the Department of Defense, right? And which contractors are you talking about? Blackwater and other security firms? Companies that produce munitions and jets, etc? Should folks who work for and/or hold stock in such companies feel badly about it?
C. You realize the plant in Littleton builds rockets that launch weather satellites, right?
D. Did you just defend Moore by accusing someone else of “deliberately misleading?” Kettle, Pot is on line 2.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:22 am
Having traveled to Cuba myself (legally), I’ll be extremely curious to see how Moore portrays things there.
Meanwhile, I’ll leave the board with this: If the kind of stuff that happens in Cuba on a regular basis happened on a wide scale in the US, Moore would be making a documentary a year for the rest of his life.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:58 am
>Moore, after ridiculing the ideas that video
>games or Marilyn Manson videos were the root
>cause, wound up blaming the massacre on the
>presence of a Defense Department factory in the
>town.
A charge made especially ridiculous by the fact that the plant in question isn’t a DOD facility and in fact makes commercial rockets used for launching communications satellites.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:37 am
“Bowling for Columbine” also blamed the violence on the US air campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, which was commanded by one General Wesley Clark.
In early 2004, Michael Moore endorsed General Wesley Clark, the “butcher of Bosnia” and contributor to Columbine, for president.
June 1st, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Michael Moore is a douche. Who cares what he says?
June 1st, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Moore does what most everyone on the far-left fringe does. He plays to his audience’s emotions.
The neo-cons don’t like to share this arena (which they employ by summoning the evangelical special interests), and it really shows. I find it entertaining, because at the worst, Michael Moore is very much a reflection of themselves. He’s willing to employ the political tactic of intellectual dishonesty. Going after “hearts” first, in order to engage the “minds”.
Both sides of the aisle are doing it. And I’m sure at least 50% of Americans will love the newest documentary by Moore. The others will be curled up in front of Sean Hannity, soaking up the pissed-off reactions. It’s all theater. And all of America will be watching.
June 4th, 2007 at 2:34 am
“- the point is we as a society are desensitized to violence, on every level”
The truth is that about 70% of murders in the US are committed by minorities, whereas the white majority has similar or *lower*crime rates than Europe or Canada.
Why this is the case would make an interesting moving. But we can safely rule out any hypothesis about a generally high American crime rate, since it is a phenomenon particular to African Americans and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Hispanics.
If it were something in the “culture†you should have the same crime rate in New Hampshire and Montana that Liberal Moore ignores (and even ridicules) this core fact about crime in America, which makes most of his reasoning meaningless.
In 2004 D.C had 36 murders per 100.000, Porto Rico 20,4, Louisiana 13, New Mexico 9.
Dick Cheney’s Wyoming had 2.2 murders per capita, Iowa had 1.5 murders per capita, New Hampshire 1,3.
Notice a pattern here? Michel Moore didn’t.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/US_States_Rate_Ranking.html
June 4th, 2007 at 9:09 am
Um, Tino, I should just point out that it should be 2.2 murders per 100,000 in Wyoming, etc. If it was 2.2 murders per capita, everyone would be dead twice.
Just sayin…
On the topic, though. I was visiting some friends when Moore’s F9/11 came out and they were encouraging me to go see it. “It will open your eyes” they said. Of course, the film does nothing of the sort. But it *feels* like it does, and that is good enough for lots of people. Of course, when I argue, people get mad at me for being “too logical.” Problem is, going all moist and dewy over Moore’s latest “victims of society” just means we’ll end up making stupid mistakes and generating new victims. For which America will then, again, be blamed in a Moore documentary.
June 4th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Moore seems a little thin, someone get him a sandwich STAT.
This “champion of the poor” has never been poor and is now a multimillionare. All because he made “documentaries” that told people exactly what they wanted to hear. Now all you good liberal lemmings should go make him richer.
June 5th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Writing from the Canadian West Coast: One thing that bothers me about the F9/11 movie (among many) was how Moore portrayed Bush as he was sitting in front of the children when he recieved news of the attack. Imagine if the cameras had been on me that morning. I stared at the TV for more then 15 minutes groggily drinking a cup of instant coffee trying to figure out what i was looking at. When it finally dawned on me how serious it was; i got a bowl of porridge and then after a shower went to my seminary class. I think the pres. conducted himself in a way that was composed and dignified. I would have been more proud to have him as my country leader then guy we had up here.
June 5th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Kyle Smith is on the extreme of the right wing and gets his talking pints from the RNC. Who cares what he says?
A very poor hit piece with very few facts, typical of his work, see:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/6/2/3915/30665
June 5th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Mr. or Ms. Check, I am uncertain what you mean by “talking pints.” Is this a reference to the delightful Guinness Brewery commercial? Certainly, a pint of brew can get a conversation rolling, but I get my stout from my local saloonkeeper, not the RNC.
May I point out the obvious? I assume you are in fifth grade and have not previously encountered this nugget of wisdom, but assertions do not constitute an argument. “Very poor” and “with very few facts” are mere assertions. As for the right wing charge, I draw your attention to two links to eloquently stated liberal attacks on Michael Moore. Both–one by Daniel Radosh, the other by Armond White–may be found in my post, which you evidently have not read.
As for your scathing remark, “Who cares?” Well, evidently you do, since you bothered to write in (and even do some research when you probably should have been doing your math homework). Are you calling yourself a moron? I am sorry about your lack of self-esteem. Therapy is available.
Best of luck in your continuing search for reality and I hope you are enjoying dodgeball and science fair. Careful with the egg toss on Field Day!
June 5th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Kyle, I guess my comment was little close to the bone, no need to get so upset. Of course a classic method of the right wing is to say oh look this liberal writer said this and this liberal writer said that. These comments are only used as a cover for someone on the far exteme right wing and who carries their water.
Your previous work speaks for itself, hit pieces on Al Gore and Michael Moore that have to do with politics rather then substance. Also your shoddy journalism has been shown before, for example:
http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/bwiddicombe/2007/05/03/2007-05-03_posts_kvetch22_.html
When someone works for a rag like the NY Post I expect that it is par for the course, need I go on?
June 5th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
Young Miss or Master Check, I am surprised your mother lets you stay up so late! I am less surprised by the feebleness of your response to my gibe about your lack of what your generation might call “mad [rhetorical] skillz.” I note that you rely on baseless assertion, you reply with more baseless assertion: now I am the author of unspecified “hit pieces.” Does your Social Studies teacher allow you to get away with this tactic in your papers?
It is a common tactic for the right wing to find liberal writers who agree with them? Oh, how sneaky of the right wing. What will they get up to next? Maybe right wingers should simply say, “Nyah, nyah” instead of building a case for their ideas?
Little sprout, the Widdicombe item you cite is really your most amusing attempt yet. Are you suffering from the hormonal distractions of early puberty or have bullies damaged your cerebral cortex by bouncing your skull off the monkey bars too many times? Widdicombe’s bit is factually inaccurate both literally and by implication. I did not call Michael Chabon anti-Semitic and I will buy you and the rest of your Little League team an ice cream cone if you can prove otherwise. Scurry away, young one, ransack the files, find the original material. But don’t run indoors! The Widdicombe piece also implies that I am Jewish. I accept the promotion with pride, but I am not Jewish and told Widdicombe so. To my knowledge he has never corrected the error, not that I care. (The original e-mail he sent inquiring as to my religion arrived late in the day and was sent to a spam account I seldom check, though I did spot it a few hours later. Had he simply called me instead of sending the e-mail, I would have disabused him of his misconceptions.) The idea that I am the author of some sort of hit campaign against Michael Chabon is, likewise, piffle. I reviewed the book in People magazine, which is available in your middle school library, and awarded it 3 1/2 stars out of four. Chabon is one of my favorite authors, though I have pointed out the book’s potential for controversy: ultra-Orthodox Jews might find the book’s rather cutting satire of them to be less than funny. I did not say and do not believe that controversial books can’t be good ones. When you attain the rank of eighth grader, perhaps you will come across “Huckleberry Finn,” a book that is highly controversial and yet marvelous.
Now by all means, continue to research my record while you’re nibbling your Count Chocula. I can use the Google hits.
June 6th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Relax, Kyle, no need to get so upset, you really are bent out of shape of this.
FACT you wrote a hit piece on Michael Moore, FACT you wrote a hit piece on Al Gore. Show me all the hit pieces you wrote on conservatives?
I was just calling a spade a spade or in your case you a GOP shill, if the cap fits…
I will await the links to stories you wrote critical of conservatives, of course if you cannot respond these links that kind of proves my point.
June 6th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Young Check, you semi-entity, while it is not normally my policy to kick a man, woman or worm while he, she or it is down, you seem to crave the taste of my boot. So sit quietly while I chastise you further.
How much tutelage in basic debating skills must I give you before you begin sending me checks? My postings rest completely unrebutted by you. Making a bald, unsupported claim without submitting any evidence to back it up is not an argument. Asserting that something is fact, or as you would have it, FACT, does not make it so. Mull this example while you’re enjoying your after-school cookies and milk. “FACT: rabid wolverines are devouring your cerebellum.” Of course, I would not deny that wolverines dine regularly on your tiny brain, especially since your degree of mental development suggests that you were raised in the forest; I merely state that I have no evidence this is so.
As for my alleged duty to criticize conservatives, please. You cannot overrule an argument simply by labeling it liberal or conservative. If you could, debates would be over in three seconds, wouldn’t they? My arguments either make sense or they do not. In any case, since I identified two liberal writers with whom I share common ground regarding Michael Moore, your argument has become the following: conservatives who disagree with Michael Moore are wrong because they’re conservative. Liberals who disagree with Michael Moore are also wrong because, um, why? Because they disagree with Michael Moore? Here is some homework for you. Look up the concept of “circular logic.”
Now that I’ve made the same point three times with no reason to hope that any of this is sinking in, I begin to feel as distressed as your home-room teacher must be every time you lick the paint chips off the baseboards. Do yourself a favor and seek remedial help this summer. It’s not too late to raise your I.Q. up to the temperature of the average fridge.
June 6th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
FACT. as I thought, no links. The reason why?, because they do not exist. You have never ever done a hit piece on a conservative where as it is documented you have on liberals.
Why don’t these links exist?, because you are a GOP shill and it does not fit their agenda to attack conservatives.
Maybe you want to take a while to run it past them as to the best way to respond for you as their shill to respond, you want to make sure you get your talking points right. Do you have to submit all of your reviews to them or just the ones they request?
June 6th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Little Check:
The first rule about what to do when you’ve dug yourself into a hole is, stop digging. As you keep repeating points–or should I say REPEATING POINTS?–that I have already blasted into shards, I can only assume that you continue to write out of a sweaty, desperate belief that he who gets the last word wins. You shall not, of course, have the last word. Why? Because this is my blog.
I enjoy hate mail, the crazier the better–I refer you to http://blogs.nypost.com/movies/archives/2007/03/bring_me_the_he_1.html . But my time is not unlimited. May I speak frankly? I would rather argue with people of normal intelligence or above. Henceforth, I will require that all of your comments meet one or more of the following conditions:
1. They must be interesting.
2. They must be original.
3. They must be witty.
Otherwise, I will simply delete them, and your feeble bleats will cease to pollute my blog and waste my readers’ time. A cat eventually tires of playing with its mouse.
June 11th, 2007 at 9:32 am
This is a very nice post, and I want to see how others react to this.
June 19th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
[...] they came from the firefighters. Draw your own conclusions! Moore says. (I refer you to my earlier posting (scroll down a bit), which mentions that I personally got Moore to admit at a screening of “Fahrenheit [...]
July 4th, 2007 at 8:30 am
You may find these links of use….
…Roseanne Barr link…
http://www.roseanneworld.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3537&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15
http://michaelwestfall.tripod.com/id17.html
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/05/18/the-american-conservative-worker/
http://www.newmediajournal.us/guest/m_westfall/04142007.htm