NO MOORE, PLEASE

So the French love Michael Moore’s new film! Whoulda thunk it.

I’m sure in their mind they believe they’re sticking a thumb in the awful, awful Imperial American eyeball. And readers of this blog will note that I’m far from approving of our current misadventures in Iraq, or quite frankly much else of our current Administration.

However, what pisses me off about Moore is that he’s an opportunist masquerading as a thinker. His films are leftist diatribes that pretend to be humorous (sadly, the Left pretty much ran out of good humorists when Al Franken got a new job) and his latest, which essentially blames Bush for 9/11, is just obscene. I’m sorry, there’s no other word for scenes like this:

In one of the film’s most dramatic moments, we watch the president attending an elementary school class on that ill-fated morning of Sept. 11. An aide whispers to him news of the plane crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The look on Bush’s face is stunned, as any person’s would be. A clock ticks away. The president looks as though he’ll never get up from that seat. The minutes tick by.

“Was he wondering if he should have shown up to work more often?” Moore says in voice-over, this comment connecting with glimpses earlier in the movie of Bush’s frequent stays in Texas to clear brush and play golf. The president stares at the children’s book he’s holding. It’s called “My Pet Goat.”

Reading this, I’m just sort of stunned myself. What the hell did he EXPECT Bush to do, leap into the air like a superhero and swat other rogue planes out of the sky? Yeah, he was stunned. NO SHIT, sherlock. We were all fucking stunned. We’re all STILL fucking stunned, 3 years later. And I’m stunned this rancid idealogue is perverting the incendiary memories of 9/11 to leverage his own wacko conspiracy theories about, among other things, Bush spiriting Bin Laden relatives out of the US right after 9/11. When all air travel was grounded. Yeah. Uh huh. Was that before or after he warned the Jews in the towers, Mike?

Jesus. I don’t blame Moore for being what he is; a pig will, inevitably, continue to rut in mud. I do wonder at the ever-enthralled wonder of the Euro-intelligentia that sees fit to hate Western civilization in general and Americans in particular, except, of course for the Americans who do quite enough hating of their own. As Christopher Hitchens, no raving right winger himself, put it,

But speaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well, it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they\’e2\’80\’98ve taken as their own, as their representative American someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.

There’s a need for critical appraisals of our Iraqi policy or lack thereof. There’s a need for reasoned opposition to our government’s loss of direction. And there’s a need for a historical narrative of what happened to all of us 3 years ago. I haven’t seen Moore’s movie (for much the same reason I haven’t seen Mel Gibson’s splatter porn epic — many, many other things to do) but somehow, I rather doubt he’s capable of any of the above. Besides, I already saw the movie that SHOULD have won the Palm d’Or, so there.

Tell you what, Left, you can disown Moore, and we jackbooted fascists on the Right will disavow all knowledge of Ann Coulter. Deal?