Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Who's going to be the first Republican to demonize Jon Stewart?

"Michael Moore is an irresponsible provocateur..."

I'm sorry Dave, but what the fuck does responsibility have to do with anything? How do you politely, and responsibly tell people that their president is an incompetent lying crook not quite up to the job? How was he being irresponsible? Were there riots in the streets because of the film, and deaths? Does he show a pattern of selectively using information to distort things? If so, please provide some evidence of this because I have looked and have not found any.

And anyway, why do you feel the need to inform your audience that George Will is a bit off in his assessment of MoveOn? This insect has no credibility. Is anyone under the illusion that he is anything other than a right wing hack? I actually read George Will and other fascist pundits like Tucker Carlson and Dave Brooks frequently, and I can say with authority that they're all totally full of shit. I'm mean they're execrable.

So back to Moore. In one breath you acknowlege that Moore tells "truths", and in the next attack his credibility by calling him an irresponsible provocateur. When is it irresponsible to tell the truth? Or maybe you meant that he sometimes uses information selectively to manipulate and deceive sometimes? But this would be odd behavior for someone who also tells "truths" So is he a liar or a truth-teller, because generally people are not both.

I have a few thoughts about the whole idea of "responsibility". Since you allege that Moore is an "irresponsible' provocateur, I ask you to consider who the resonsibile people are. George Will comes easily to mind as a figure of bow-tied responsibility, if not respectability. Having gone to an Ivy league school (Princeton in his case, not Harvard or one of the other ones) and all, he certainly comes across to me as an establishment figure. No one would ever rush to call him irresponsible, would they? It is always people who presume to have a lot of importance who are concerned with responsibilty. They have so much at stake, and they tend to be, as I have observed, very concerned with appearances.

YOu do yourself no favors my fried by putting distance between yourself and Moore. There is nothing so wonderfull about being responsible. To say someone is responsible is just a way of saying they don't rock the boat.

He's been known to make charges without adequate support. Sometimes he makes charges with lots of evidence. Either way, he frequently tells the truth. And sometimes he says provocative things that aren't true but are well worth saying.

You would think that a vibrant democracy would take as a matter of pride the range of opinions it embraces

And precisely to which vibrant democracy are you referring? Certainly not the U.S. of A. which, when considered from the anti-environment of the rest of the world, could hardly be considered a vibrant democracy. It is only barely (and nominally) the latter (e.g. black-box voting, practical abrogation of the constitution's bill of rights), and hardly the former (e.g. control/cowing of the mass media, apathy in the face of the Downing Street Memos, no outcry against a smirking and smug President who, it seems, may have led the country into a clearly illegal war).

Held up against other examples from 20th century history, today's America would rank right down there with the worst of the lot, I'm afraid. This is neither gloating nor schadenfreude; it is a sad realization of reality. While there is still hope, the available mechanisms for hope among a somnambulant nation are few.

Or, to put it another way, when the titillation of sexual peccadillos induce an extensive examination of a sitting President, and the current military circumstances that are costing thousands of American lives, and billions of dollars (let along the tens of thousands of non-American lives) do not, what you do NOT have is a vibrant democracy.

Dave,

You haven't pointed to any evidence of the untrue things that he has said, and you certainly haven't made a case that he has said untrue things willfully out of an intention to deceive or manipulate--something that, if it were true, might be fairly labeled as irresponsible. Does that mean that everything that he's ever said is 100% accurate? Possibly not, but is it fair that Michael Moore be the only living thing who we hold to this standard? The real question is whether he distorts information to manipulate people, and I don't think he does. The simple fact is that people get angry when you tell them things they don't want to hear. It makes no difference whether it's the truth or not. I mean, Moore was playing with elemental forces when he made Fahrenheit. He showed Wolfowitz slathering his hair with his own spit for god sakes! He showed a frozen Bush sitting on a chair looking like a total moron before a classroom full of children while thousands of Americans were perishing. Even I, a person who expects zero from Bush, was a bit stunned. And to think that these were the men the American people looked to in their moment of greatest fear and vulnerability since WWII for protection against one of the most powerful forces of evil the world has ever known! That's heavey.

Moore's intention was simply to show the president for what he really is: an incompetent stooge. I don't think he had any way of knowing what affect those images would have on people who had understandably looked to Bush for leadership, guidance and clarity in the aftermath of 9-11. Thinking about it now, however, it is not difficult to understand why so many were angry at Moore after seeing Fahrenheit 9/11. He made people feel foolish for trusting such a buffoon in the first place. And after folks got over their shame, they did what people usually do when they feel they've been tricked: they got mad. Unfortunately this anger was not always directed where it actually needed to go, and Moore wound up being maligned pretty badly. But just because he stirred things up doesn't mean he acted irresponsibly.

Now that there can be no doubt that we were lied to by Bush and his cohorts, now that thousands have died and many thousands more injured for life, do we really have an obligation to act responsibly, whatever that means?

I don't think so. You write that because Moore is an irresponsible provocateur it is "understandable" that George F. Will might confuse him with an extremist. But George F. Will apparently has no excuse for confusing the people who comprise the MoveOn organization with any extremists. Oh really? Well, I'm here to tell you that by undermining Moore's credibility, you enfeeble your entire argument against George F. Will's glib, automatic labeling of all opposition to inane and positively injurious conservative policy as "extremists".

MoveOn and Michael Moore were in cahoots during the last election cycle in a fairly big way. Do you remember the MoveOn house party that was convened immediately after Fahrenheit 9/11 opened? You know, the one where Moore talked to those gathered at the houses across the country over an internet connection? Moore didn't just show up in the studio. All this was carefully orchestrated between Moore and the folks at MoveOn. Obviously there was a working relationship there, and MoveOn's decision to have Moore address an audience that numbered in the millions constitutes in some way, I would say, an endorsement of Michael Moore and his art. So if Moore is irresponsible, then I guess you would have to say that MoveOn is too. That's what George F. Will, the fatuous, dishonest, evil, bow-tied insect who types for the Washington times, would argue anyway.

Jeez, Daniel,I say one critical thing about MM and you act as if I think he's the devil and that I love Bush, etc. Since my whole point was to criticize George Will, why do you act as if I'm supporting GW? Why are you so incredibly thin-skinned about MM? This whole rant your on strikes me as weird.

Dave,

Why should I let it go? You made a charge, and I challenged it. I don't think that's particularly weird. I understand that the thrust of your argument was against the inanity of Will, but it was at Moore's expense. The intention may have been to seem reasonable, but I just don't think that you can effectively criticize Will on the extant matter by giving any ground. In fact, as I think I have demonstrated, when you undermine Moore, you undermine your whole argument since Moore and MoveOn have worked quite closely together in the past.

Furthermore, I think that it is rather facile to characterize Moore as irresponsible when there are people who really do play fast and loose with facts, who really are trying to manipulate folks for one reason or another whose names are never slapped with derogatory lables like irresponsible.

I just don't think progressives need to apologize for Moore. The reason, by and large, that people hold him in the esteem that they do has not so much to do with the relative honesty of his work as it does with the incredibly sophisticated and well financed smear tactics that the Right uses to marginalize dissenting voices. The Right has perfected the mechanism of the smear. The fact that they use it often and with great skill, I don't think can be disputed. The fact that their "message" about Moore clouds how even progressives perceive him is distressing to me.

So am I a little over sensitive? Perhaps so. It's not like progressives have an endless parade of great champions with the name recognition of Michael Moore. If you level a charge against one, be prepared to defend it.

I didn't say that Moore is always irresponsible or that everything he says his wrong. Quite the contrary. So, of course he and MoveOn agree sometimes. I agree with Moore more than I don't.

As for defending my "charge," let me ask you this, Daniel: Are you willing to admit that Moore has sometimes edited in deceptive ways, speculated wildly, or thought inconsistently? If not, there's no point in my listing the well-known examples.

One more thing: MM is an entertainer and a humorist, as well as a social critic. He gets to exaggerate and provoke. It's his job.

David, I hope you don't mind my interjecting here. I think you are wrong here. The point of your post seems to be that Michael Moore and Moveon are so different in ideological outlook or in their communication styles that they should not be lumped together and called "extremists."

I think neither are "exteremists," but I certainly see very little difference between Moore's occasional hyperbole and the folks at Moveon's. I get their emails and I believed that the sky was falling everytime they said so, I'd be a nervous wreck.

He is an "irresponsible provocateur" I think were your words that you did not qualify with "once in a great while", "all the time", "on Thursdays". Therefore I can only conclude that you meant that, in sum, he's an irresoponsible provocateur. I acknowledge that you acknowlege that he is useful at times and is not all bad, and that you agree with him some if not most of the time. But that's not the point.

The point is that you can pick through anyones words, deeds, works, and find things to be critical of and pick apart. The Right has literally made an industry of doing this to people like Moore to such an extent that they have succeeded in making even progressives repeat their talking points.

People get totally caught up in discussing picyune details that have absolutely no relevance. Here's something that comes up often: Did the film imply that the Saudis were given special treatment by being allowd to leave when flights were grounded for everyone else? I don't happen to think Moore was being deceptive on this, but who cares? The most daming footage of the film is of the president sitting like a frozen statue while people were being incinerated. For some reason people don't want to talk about that nearly as much as they do about some fine detail that really doesn't have to do with a whole lot.

And a lot of the wild speculation that he was accused of doesn't seem so wild any more in light of the downing street memo. I remember there was something in the film too about the oil company Unocal. Moore asserted that the Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests. Sounds like crazy, wild speculation, right? that was certainly Christopher Hitchens view in the withering review of 9/11 that he wrote for Slate shortly after the film was released. Well read what the irresponsible radical leftist Paul Krugman wrote in today's NYT's:

"The China National Offshore Oil Corporation, a company that is 70 percent owned by the Chinese government, is seeking to acquire control of Unocal, an energy company with global reach. In particular, Unocal has a history - oddly ignored in much reporting on the Chinese offer - of doing business with problematic regimes in difficult places, including the Burmese junta and the Taliban. One indication of Unocal's reach: Zalmay Khalilzad, who was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan for 18 months and was just confirmed as ambassador to Iraq, was a Unocal consultant."

Moore told the truth, and people aren't able to handle it. You could argue more legitimately that that is what is actually more irresponsible.

MoveOn may have started out as an organization with noble goals but it has declined quite rapidly into one of the worst partisan organizations out there. They hosted a video ad comparing the President to Hitler, spread lies about the funding levels for education, and threw out misinformation throughout the campaign. Their lead online organization went to work for the Kerry campaign which was a violation of the wall between the campaigns and 527s.

I don't think Rove has anything to appologize for. MoveOn and Moore are extremists who do nothing for the Democratic party. There's no positive message. No vision for the future. No solution to the problems people face. Just anti-Bush this and Anti-Bush that. Wow. real leadership

This is George Will the receiver of stolen property?
([Carter:] "...a very prominent news reporter was the one who took the briefing book to Ronald Reagan, and helped drill him on the things that I might say...")

George Will is nothing but a right-wing shill. Watch the Sunday AM show with Stephanopoulus and you'll see it. Or read his clap-trap on the recent SC decision giving local government the right to give private property for commercial development for revenue, and you'll know it: http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/will062405.asp

~Chip, I'm no fan of George Will's conservative viewpoint, but I would hesitate to call him a right-wing shill. My sense is that he holds views I disagree with a lot of the time, but he addreses issues with a bit more integrity and open-mindedness than your garden-variety conservative columnist.

As for his editorial about the recent SCOTUS decision, I actually think he hit on something important about the hypocrisy of conservative critics of so-called "judicial activism."