The time has arrived for, as Time magazine called it, my “magnum opus.” I only had a year of Latin when I was in high school, so I’m not quite sure what that means, but I think it’s good.

Well, I took two years of Latin in high school, so I can tell you that magnum opus means “the largest piece of shit Michael Moore has ever squeezed out”.  It would appear that we are indeed seeing the ultimate encapsulation of Michael Moore’s trashing of the American way of life; a piece that fuses his ignorance of politics, violence, healthcare and manufacturing into one sizzling cowpat of economic idiocy.

Many early critics and viewers have called it my “best film yet.”

The film’s current rating at Rotten Tomatoes is 73% with an average rating of 6.6.  That’s passable, but hardly remarkable. Both Sicko and Fahrenheit rated higher.  I don’t see any reviews claiming it’s his best ever.  As we will see later, the only critics claiming this is Moore’s best film ever are talk show hosts.

It’s going to make some of you angry and I believe it’s going to give most of you a new sense of hope that we are going to turn the sick and twisted mess made by the last president around.

Turning his mess around will be our current President, who has continued corporate bailouts and voted for TARP.

I’m gonna show you the stuff the nightly news will rarely show you. Ever meet a pilot for American Airlines on food stamps because his pay’s been cut so low? Ever meet a judge who gets kickbacks for sending innocent kids to a private prison? Ever meet someone from the Wall Street Journal who bluntly states on camera that he doesn’t much care for democracy and that capitalism should be our only ruling concern?

The first tale on this list of woe is a unionized employee.  The alternative to the furloughs hitting American would be bankruptcy.  I guess Michael would have him completely on the street.

The second story is indeed a tragedy—one that as incited particular anger here in Pennsylvania.  But it has nothing to do with capitalism.  It has to do with corrupt and evil people who abused the judicial system.  Does Michael think that judges in communist/socialist systems or more or less corrupt?  Is he perhaps familiar with China?  Just because there is money-grubbing involved does not make it “capitalism”.

The last is not particularly interesting.  I can find you a dozen liberals who don’t care much for democracy or the Constitution.  Michael Moore, for example, sees no need for Constitutional restraint on the federal government and has little regard for democracy when it goes against him.  And then there were the celebrities who threatened to leave America if Bush was re-elected.

You’ll also meet a whistleblower who, with documents in hand, tells us about the million-dollar-plus sweetheart loans he approved for the head of Senate Banking Committee—the very committee that was supposed to be regulating his lending institution!

He’s talking about Chris Dodd.  I’m no fan of Dodd, but it’s looking like these allegations are garbage.  When the HuffPo calls you a lair, you might want to take their concerns under advisement.

And you’ll learn, from the woman who heads up the congressional commission charged with keeping an eye on the bailout money, how Alan Greenspan & Co. schemed and connived the public into putting up their inflated valued homes as collateral—thus causing the biggest foreclosure epidemic in our history.

Really?  How did they connive this?  Thought control medications in our food?  Hypnotism?  Jedi Mind Trick?  It is true that the Federal Reserve made the crisis worse by keeping interest rates artificially low.  That’s a genuine beef that Moore and I share.  But no one forced people to treat their homes like cash machines.

Moreover, the high-end bankers lost astonishing amounts of money and almost destroyed their own companies with their own stupidity.  They were hit hard by the collapse of mortgage-backed securities and it was that financial crisis that nearly brought the system to its knees.  Now I have no sympathy for a rich banker who’s a lot less rich; not when there are people losing jobs and homes and health insurance.  But to blame “Alan Greenspan and Co” for this crisis is to assume that they cut off their nose to spite their face; that they deliberately lost billions of dollars so that could cackled with glee when the little guy was thrown out onto the street.

No one on the banking industry wanted the foreclosure crisis, not when they had so much money riding on the mortgage-backed securities.  What they did was stupid, short-sighted and often vile.  But it was not deliberately destructive.  Banks lose enormous amounts of money when a home if foreclosed on.  They only make money when people keeping paying their mortgages, which is why many of them have been willing to re-negotiate the loans rather than foreclose.

There is now a foreclosure filed in the U.S. once every seven-and-half SECONDS.

Damn, we have to get those evil Republicans out of power!  Oh, wait.

None of this is an accident, and I name the names others seem to be afraid to name, the men who have ransacked the pensions of working people and plundered the future of our kids and grandkids. Somehow they thought they were going to get away with this, that we’d believe their Big Lie that this crash was caused by a bunch of low-income people who took out loans they couldn’t afford.

But it was, Michael. The subprime mortages—those made to people with bad credit—are still driving the problem.  Many can not even afford the low teaser rates before their ARMs adjust.  Banks that have renegotiated loans are finding half of them going right back into default.  The President that you hailed as a Messiah has done little to alleviate this.  In fact, his Congress continues to try to prop up the market with such ideas as the $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers.

I will grant that the larger problem was (a) a government that felt it could pressure banks into making dumb loans; (b) a banking industry that stupidly came to believe it could make bad loans and calculate the risk away and; (c) the “moral hazard” of banks being able to take dumb risks because they were “too big to fail”.  But no matter how you slice it, the loans were the heart of the problem.  We can debate why exactly such dumb loans were made.

And you want to talk about people robbing pensions?  Try Barack Obama, who skewed the automotive bankruptcies to turn the entire shebang over to politically powerful unions—at tremendous cost to the pension plans and retirement funds that were invested in the car companies and legally had priority.

So here we come! It’s all there, up on the silver screen, two hours of a tragicomedy crime story starring a bunch of vampires who just weren’t satisfied with simply destroying Flint, Michigan—they had to try and see if they could take down the whole damn country.

Yeah, the same bankers who forced Detroit to engage in stupid labor agreements and to continue to pour money into unprofitable car lines also crashed the real estate market.  They sure are powerful, those guys!  This is classic Moore—take everything that pisses him off and attribute it to some nebulous “capitalistic” Other.

Mike then runs down his press junket, lauding the people who host him as “brave”.  Uh-huh.  We all know how much Steven Colbert, Larry King and Keith Olberman hide their liberalism and hate to host shrieking left-wing nuts.  It get extra nauseous when he talks about Leno:

This man called me after seeing the movie and asked me to be his only in-studio guest on the second night of his new prime-time show. I said, “Jay, shouldn’t you be thinking of your ratings in the first week of the show? Are you sure you didn’t misdial Tom Hanks’ number (the area code where I live is 231; 213 is LA)?” He told me he was profoundly moved by this film. So I was the guest on his second show, and he told all of America it was my “best film” and to please go see “Capitalism: A Love Story.”

Jay Leno?  That’s your endorsement?  A comedian?  A comedian who inevitably says that every movie his guests are flogging is fantastic?  OK.

Incidentally, area code 231 is not the area code of Flint.  It is, however, the area code for the very white and wealthy place where MIchael Moore actually lives.

That was Jay Leno saying that, not Noam Chomsky or Jane Fonda (both of whom I love dearly).

No comment.

Nope. No comment.

Seriously.  I have nothing to say about this.

OK, comment.  Chomsky and Fonda, like Leno and Moore, are very wealthy.  And, like Moore, they spend most of their time denouncing capitalism, promoting socialism and living high on the hog.  I’m not surprised he loves them.  Red pees in a pod, those three.

The audience responded enthusiastically and, after 20 years of filmmaking, it was a moment where I crossed over deep into the mainstream of middle America.

Number of time Moore appeared on the Tonight Show: 6, including several times when he did not have a movie to flog.  Leno is not stupid.  He knows that because Moore is controversial, he’s a good guest for ratings.

He’s one helluva guy (and following the example he set with his free concerts for the unemployed in Michigan and Ohio last spring, I’ve gotten permission from the studio to do the same with my film in ten of the hardest-hit cities in the U.S. next week).

Finally.  I was wondering when the champion of the little guy was going to quit charging them $10 to see how badly they have it.

Oh, and he made me sing! Prepare yourself!

No thanks.  If your singing is anything like your writing or film-making, I’d risk melting the speakers on my TV.