He is a regular guy! No, wait. He’s not. He’s not an egomaniac! Oh. Maybe he is.
Michael Moore connects with foreign journalists quite well. They publish long, lavish, semi-coherent pieces lauding his latest “documentary” effort Bowling For Columbine. Stephanie Bunbury of the Sydney Morning Herald is no different.
Wherever you went at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, one film was being discussed: Bowling for Columbine. “Columbine” as in the Columbine High School massacre. “Bowling” as in what the murderers did before they opened fire on their classmates. Film as in a mad, furious, funny documentary about America’s gun culture by Michael Moore, the lumbering scourge of stupidity.
“Columbine” as in a rather sleepy little Colorado burg where people have had to heal the wounds of having their children murdered and go about their daily business. “Bowling” as in what the murderers didn’t do before they opened fire on their classmates. “Film” as in mad, furious, lying, unfunny ”documentary” about America’s...er, something or other. Most of us aren’t convinced that it has anything to do with guns or culture.
And surely I’m not the only one that thinks that perhaps Stephanie should have done a rewrite of the “lumbering scourge of stupidity” line.
Moore, too, was everywhere in Cannes, an overweight, regular Joe in a baseball cap talking to whoever would listen.
No matter where Michael Moore is, he’s everywhere; particularly in small rooms and buffet lines. And in that same sentence lies another problem: too many people confuse Moore with a “regular Joe.” He’s not. He’s a multi-millionaire. A very poorly dressed and slovenly millionaire, but a multi-millionaire nonetheless.
And hey, guess what? Even good old Stephanie, though fooled by his rank tennis shoes and unkempt hair, concedes the point:
He is now a millionaire, based in New York among the smart set, but back then he made $US99 a week.
After telling us that he is a regular Joe and then immediately telling us he’s a “millionaire,” Stephanie pulls another quick one:
He may well also be an egomaniac, although he professes to be puzzled when he reads that: “Clearly, I am a person who suffers from a lack of ego. I mean, if I felt better about myself I wouldn’t look this way.”
I don’t get it. Sorry Steph. Blew that one right past me. He does have a penchant for being compared to a round, jolly Idi Amin however.
The humour, the wildcard approach, have done the trick once again. Bowling for Columbine has set another record for documentary audiences for Moore. “[The film’s backers] can’t understand it,” Moore said recently. “They tried to get me to change the title. And it turns out all the predictions were wrong. And I knew that they’d be wrong, because I feel like I have a sense of where people are in the country.” Most Americans, he points out, did not vote for Bush. They are worried, too, by the craziness of everything. “It’s just that they got lazy.”
They weren’t the only ones who got lazy, you truth-bending gunsel.
So, yet again we have another writer spewing forth Michael Moore’s lies and distortions without bothering to check their veracity. Most recently it was a columnist for a college newspaper. This time it’s a writer for the Smoky Mountain News named Hunter Pope, who has written a fawning review of Bowling for Columbine. I’ve debunked in previous posts much of what Pope has written here, but there are a few points I want to address.
Before you roll your eyes, or accuse Moore of being anti-gun, digest these facts. 1) Moore is a lifetime member of the NRA and was a champion marksman as a teenager. He even thought about running for president of the NRA against Heston, but he became consumed with �Bowling.�
This is truly one of the most amazing non-facts that gullible writers throw forth with great abandon. The fact is that anyone can be a member of the NRA. Take a look at the NRA membership page. Anyone, for $35, can become a member of the NRA. There’s no oath you have to take, no positions you have to agree to adhere to. And, for $750, you can become a Lifetime Member of the NRA. So, when Moore says, “When I was a kid I won a marksmanship contest, and I’m a lifetime member of the NRA,” he gives the viewer the impression that he’s been a card-carrying member his entire life, when all he has done is pay his $750. Since his audience is undoubtedly going to be comprised of non-NRA members, this distortion gives him a great deal of cach� with those who pee themselves at the sight of a firearm.
2) Three quarters of the movie was finished before 9-11.
I fail to see what significance at all this has. It seems to be just like the many non-facts that Moore pads his films with, leaving the viewer to fill in the holes in his logic.
3) Countries like the UK, Switzerland, Germany, and Canada show the same amount of violent movies as the U.S.
That’s not true. The UK and other countries routinely edit violent scenes out of films. When I lived Scotland as a teenager there was a big deal about the number of “kills” that were edited out of the Rambo films.
Their teens are depressed just like their U.S. counterparts.
According to who? (Another non-fact not supported by anything other than pure speculation. But hey, it sounds great, doesn’t it?)
Canada has 7 million guns in 10 million households and their death total due to gun violence was 165.
According to the Canadian Department of Justice 22% of all Canadian households own a firearm, compared to nearly 49% for the United States. Of those Canadians who own a firearm, the vast majority (95.1%) own a long gun—a shotgun or rifle. Only 12% of gun owners owned a handgun, which is the preferred weapon of criminals due to its concealability. Canadians are also more likely to own a firearm based upon where they live. People living in small towns are more likely to own a long gun (33.6%) versus those living in a large city (1.2%).
Since the majority of America’s gun violence takes place in our large cities by criminals with handguns, comparing rates of gun homicide with a country where most gun owners own long guns and live in rural areas does not make a lot of sense.
Switzerland law requires a gun in every household and their death total was 80.
Everyone in Switzerland is part of a citizen militia. Perhaps the secret to the gun problem is to make every person in the United States part of a militia, arm them with an M-16, and train them in its use? Somehow I don’t think Moore, nor the rest of the hysterical anti-gun left, would go for that.
The U.S.�s death toll was over 11,000.
You might want to compare the populations of the US and these other nations, as well as how they tabulate their gun homicide rates. (Here’s a hint: in America, anyone who dies because of a gunshot, for any reason, is considered a gun homicide. Therefore criminals who shoot each other as part of doing business are included in that number.)
�As exploitive as television usually is, no network or station played those tapes,� Moore told Peter Howell of the Toronto Star. �Why is that? My only answer is that what�s scary about those tapes is the normalcy of them. It looks like any bunch of suburban kids in any suburban high school and, wow, that�s just too close to home. We like our monsters to look like monsters.�
Actually I think it just might have had a little to do with class, a characteristic that Moore has demonstrated time and time again that he has none of.
The author continues to repeat Moore’s lies ad-nauseum. I am never astounded by the willingness of liberal journalists (a redundant distinction to be sure) to accept everything that comes out of Moore’s mouth without the slightest effort at critical thinking. Refuting Michael Moore is as easy as typing a few keywords into a Google search, but having journalistic integrity is obviously not as important as spreading the left-wing agenda.
So who wants to send a dictionary to SpongeMike Squarepants?
Websters defines documentary when used as a noun as a documentary presentation (as a film or novel) . The word documentary, when used as an adjective is defined as 1 : being or consisting of documents : contained or certified in writing , and 2 : of, relating to, or employing documentation in literature or art; broadly : FACTUAL, OBJECTIVE . The emphasis is theirs, not mine.
The movie awards season officially kicked off Wednesday with the National Board of Review’s announcement of the drama “The Hours” as its movie of the year....
...Filmmaker Michael Moore was also honored for Best Documentary, for his exploration of the gun culture in “Bowling For Columbine.” Pedro Almodovar’s “Talk to Her” won the Best Foreign Film honor.
So can we stop pretending that it’s not a documentary now? And can we start taking the “facts” presented in this film to task for accuracy? Or is the Moore-friendly crowd over at the DNC issuing talking points right now that say everyone should ignore the fact that it’s presented as a documentary, but in reality is nothing more than a letter to the editor?
Most web browsers have an auto-complete function for their address field, whereby typing the first few letters of a web URL will enable the browser to guess the rest of the address. After you have visited this site one time, you will most likely be able to return simply by typing M-O-O in your browser.
Michael Moore is interviewed in the Australian press, and Tim Blair is there to sift through the BS.
MICHAEL MOORE is a compulsive liar. In an interview with Australian’s Good Weekend Saturday newspaper insert (no link available), the burger Bolshevik makes this typically indefensible claim:
There has been a blackout on me since September 11. I’ve only been on two (American) TV shows, 90 per cent of the papers have not reviewed the book � yet I’ve sold more copies than any other non-fiction book in America this year.
Maybe that’s because Moore has appeared on at least five American TV shows to promote his book, including Politically Incorrect, the Daily Show, Crossfire, Tim Russert’s CNBC program, and Fox’s Hannity and Colmes. CNN gave his book a positive review, and ABC News ran an item on the problems Moore had getting his book published.
Read his post, and follow the links. Tim Blair has Moore’s number.
Read it and cheer. [Warning: Obnoxious Flash ad when you click on that link.] Paul Boutin of Wired News has written about Moore’s disappearing “letter,” and this makes me happy. He even quoted me (last paragraph).
Even a hardcore Moore-basher like me would have been willing to give Moore points for credibility and honesty if he’d bothered to respond to Boutin’s requests for a statement. But evasion in the face of hard questions or conflict seems to be the modus operandi for the Left lately. Anyway, great article.
SpongeMike Sweatpants strikes again...from the past…
Ryne McClaren dug up a column from Tim Blair, originally published March 22nd, 2002.
Not much to add beyond what Ryne and Tim have already said, but this stood out:
Michael has owned two newspapers, edited magazines, produced two television series, and made several movies:
“My audience is made up of working stiffs, of people who come from the working class, and it is rare that you hear our voice in the media. We don’t own newspapers, we don’t have TV shows.”
As Tonto should have told the Lone Ranger from day one: “What’s this ‘we,’ white man?”
He’s a lying snake, and the sooner people realize it the better
SpongeMike Sweatpants is attempting to lie to you. He had a message up before the elections bragging about what was going to happen.
Dear Friends,
Well, folks, Tuesday is the day! The day that George W. gets taught a long overdue lesson. The day that we, the MAJORITY—the 52% who never elected him—get our chance to reclaim a bit of our former democracy (back when ALL the votes used to be counted).
HA! Ol’ SpongeMike was humiliated by his predictions, and has been on a rampage to erase any trace of the entry on his website. First he removed it from the front page and message section, they removed it from the site altogether and replaced it with something else.
Luckily the Internet is redundant, and Moore is an idiot. Google has it cached and others have screenshots. So...instead of stepping up to the plate and admitting he was wrong, he’s trying to sweep it under the rug, like a good little lefty. If you can’t see it, it’s not happening, right?
I wonder if Moore’s supporters will call him on the carpet for this.
By the way, I see a lot of people throw that “52% didn’t elect him” thing.
Uhh…
52% didn’t elect Gore either. The number, while a cute attempt at a jab, is meaningless. Only 48% of the voter base voted for each candidate. I remember Clinton being elected by a minority as well...anyone out there remember the number?
Oh, it just keeps getting better. Michael Moore, you are BUSTED.
Yesterday I pointed out that the links to Moore’s “Payback Tuesday” article were gone from his site. But you could still view the thing if you followed the link I had in my old rant about it, because he had only eliminated the path to it from his web site, not the article itself.
But apparently, as reader David Hines just told me, the page itself has now been removed.
This is what you see now when you follow the link that just yesterday took you to Moore’s bloviations about how America was going to teach Dubya a lesson on Election Day.
Looks like Moore’s webmaster noticed a lot of hits, or better yet, someone involved with Moore noticed all the attention from Instapundit and Tim Blair (who both kindly gave me a proper shout-out for breaking the story if this can be called a story....first Babs, now Moore - I should win an award or something).
Anyway. What you get now when you go the page that formerly contained Moore’s regrettable and hilarious “letter” about the big ol’ helping of Payback the Republicans were about to receive, is this message: “Sorry this message doesn’t exist!”
Oh, but it does. It very much exists. On my hard drive. It’s a little sumpin’ called a screen shot, which I like to make when liberals say stupid things that they’ll later regret.
You can run, you can hide, but you can’t escape my blog, Mr. Moore.
So here ya go, faithful readers and fellow Moore-watchers. I had to save it in three parts because he really rambled on and on about how you should go knock on strangers’ doors to make them vote - Democrat, of course.
Click on thumbnails to see full view.
UPDATE: Sorry, folks - the Google cache link no longer works. They’ve apparently re-crawled and the old page has been replaced. Hurrah for screen shots!
That’s the page Michael Moore puts his latest “letter to the people.” Until recently, it still contained the one entitled, “Years from now, they’ll call it ‘Payback Tuesday’.” You know, the one written on November 3, in which he said Democrats were about to trounce Republicans in the elections. Refresh your memory. [see update below also]
Well, the link to it is gone now. Not even in the archives. Nowhere to be found unless you know the page it was originally on, which I do and which is provided in the “refresher” rant I mentioned above. (This means if you follow the link I provide in that rant, you’ll see the letter I’m talking about because I saved it with its archive format URL rather than the “newest message” URL. I’m smart like that.) [see update below]
Fascinating. Sounds like a case of realizing one is a pompous, misguided ass and so removing evidence of such. Heck, I’ve done it myself. But “millions” of people supposedly read Mike’s “letters.” He should at least write something to explain himself. Nah, who cares?
UPDATE, 11/15/02: The article is no longer there, even with my link above. See today’s post for screen shots.
A number of other blogs have been quoting this all day, and given my penchant to comment on all things relating to Michael Moore, I’ll do the same. Here’s the Mike’s Message from Sunday, Nov. 3rd.
You bet your ass we call it that, Mike. It’s payback for Jim Jeffords, and the way the Democrats have conducted their business since 9/11.
Dear Friends,
Well, folks, Tuesday is the day! The day that George W. gets taught a long overdue lesson. The day that we, the MAJORITY—the 52% who never elected him—get our chance to reclaim a bit of our former democracy (back when ALL the votes used to be counted).
Well, it looks like all the votes were counted this time, Mike, and you and your left-wing counterparts got your fat asses handed to you.
What if, on Tuesday, all of us, regardless of our political stripe, and just for the fun of it, decided to serve one big-ass eviction notice that said, you have two years to remove yourself from the premises-and you had better not damage anything on your way out?
An ironic choice of phrase, considering the vandalism that the departing Democrats from the Clinton administration did to the White House. But it looks like the electorate did indeed send this message, Mike, they just sent it to the Democrats in the House and Senate.
I think we can give Bush the Mother of all Shellackings on Tuesday.
It looks like you and your ilk got the “Mother of All Forcible Enemas” on Tuesday, didn’t you Mike?
Moore then goes on with populist get-out-the-vote crap, which isn’t worth a comment. He then makes this brilliantly prescient statement:
We will deny Bush control of the Congress next week, and then we all work to get him out of the White House in 2004. 2004 will NOT and MUST NOT be a repeat of 2000.
God, I would give anything to have been there with this schmuck last night watching the election returns. It would have been poetic.
Less...
I drop that nugget of wisdom for you as though it weren’t empirically obvious from the contents of this website, eh?
You may have read Moore’s last letter, at which I took a shot, Lee took a shot, Rachel took a shot, and many others around the blogosphere also got their $0.02 in.
Well...it seems that the shooter (who, in case you’ve been living under a rock, killed four people in Arizona on Oct. 28th) wanted us to know precisely and exactly why he did what he did. He wanted to misunderstanding, no mystery, no fat, lying hypocrite fat-cat lefties twisting his actions into a pathetic political agenda.
The killer’s 22-page letter details many things about his life, and came with a packet of documents as well. This guy wasn’t leaving anything to chance. I’m reminded of the scene in Full Metal Jacket, when the drill instructor offers up infamous killers who made miraculous shots under difficult conditions, and when he asked where those men received training, the answer, of course, was the Marine Corps. The line that sticks with he is “This goes to show what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do.”
Wow...Beltway sniper reference as well. Anyway, moving on.
This guy was *motivated*. Crazy as a loon? In some ways. Needed killin’? Yep. But, like people (with balls, that is) said after the Columbine kids did their thing, he had his shit together. There was obviously a huge part of this guy that was sick...no one climbs a clock tower and thins out the herd when they’re emotionally healthy. But there was another side to this guy, one that he felt the need to express in a twenty-two page letter.
I never wrote a 22-page anything that didn’t involve HTML and an animated GIF.
So how does this tie in with SpongeMike Sweatpants? Well, for starters, he’s pissed that the NRA is coming to Tuscon to do some last-minute voter campaigning...as though they don’t have the right, nay, the responsibility to counter his radical bastardized liberalism with some common sense. Another way it ties into Mike “Hey, I asked for extra butter flavoring!” Moore is something the killer himself wrote…
Flores recognized the world would soon be questioning his motives, and in his letter he sought to debunk some theories he expected people will float....
...Addressing Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, he said the gun control debate isn’t relevant. “A waiting period or owner registration would not have stopped me. I have a concealed carry permit but I have never brought a gun to the University, (until now).”
What’s this? You mean a new law outlawing the murder of humans with a device of any kind wouldn’t have prevented you from killin’ folks, Mr. Flores? You already knew it was illegal and you had the guns for a long time? You mean *I* shouldn’t be punished for your insanity and depression creating a completely new and unpredictable situation that feel-good legislation like gun control and “ballistic fingerprinting” wouldn’t solve or prevent?
I hate to sound like I admire the guy...he’s slime, and I’m very glad he’s dead, but c’mon here, people, this guy is fisking Michael Moore from beyond the grave, and in my book that’s worth an raised eyebrow before I spit on his memory.
If you read the letter, as I have, it paints a picture of a very aggressive, unbalanced guy who, through a series of aggressive (and perhaps threatening) episodes designed to regain his sense of manhood that being a male nursing student seems to have robbed him of, he was washed out of the program. In his letter he attempts to paint himself as a victim, and I don;t buy it. He was a jerk, and I get that from his own words.
I also get that nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, any lawmaker, politician or blowhard movie maker could say or do would have stopped him in any way.
The University of Arizona is a gun-free zone. Perhaps if it were not, things may have been different. Perhaps not. The fact is, this guy was going to “settle accounts,” as he put it...he was going to “have his day of reckoning.” We need accept it and start looking at ways to prevent this kind of activity. Yes, I believe this guy was an aggressive, abrasive jerk, but he also clearly asked for help. Did he come straight out and say ‘I need help?” No...and depression doesn’t work like that. You would think a school designed to train medical professionals could recognize the signs.
Like I said, we need to get to the root of why a nursing school failed to see a person crying out for help with a serious medical condition. We need to find out how to spot and *treat* these people before they snap and kill. We need to accept that fact that this time, society (specifically the college of Nursing in this case) *does* bear some of the burden. Robert Stewart Flores Jr. was obviously chemically depressed, and not in the “oh, I hate my life, I’m an angst-ridden teen” kind of way. He had a serious medical illness that could have been treated with medication. He didn’t see it, but medication and a few letters of apology, perhaps a hearing or two and he might have been right back in the driver’s seat, controlling his fate and getting his degree. Instead, an insular group of people who train the next generation of medical professionals ignored the signs, instead focusing on his aggressive outbursts and playing the ‘We’re scared of the man” card. UofA bears some responsibility for creating the atmosphere in which Flores thrived as a psycho...we can accept that and strive to repair it, or we can blame the gun, the NRA and Charlton Heston.
Because we all know there’s nothing Moses likes better than a good bloodbath.
I kinda hope he has a heart attack, but doesn’t die.
SpongeMike Sweatpants is at it again. He’s yelling at Heston and the NRA for going to Tuscon to support the Republican candidates that are running for Tuesday’s elections.
Here’s what Mikey has to say:
I am asking that you not go to Tucson today. Do not cause any more grief, any more pain. Let the relatives and friends of the deceased mourn. Why show up to play the role of the bully, kicking these good people when they are down, just so you can prove that you have a right to your big, bad guns? These are not the actions of a once brave and decent man. They are the acts of a coward, as no man of courage would think of picking on his fellow citizens when they are so consumed with tragedy.
See, they aren’t going there to rub things in anyone’s face. Moore is transferring his own behaviors onto Heston and the NRA. He likes to gleefully rub any minute failure in everyone’s face, and he’s the one raising the specter of a school shooting. The NRA is going for a get out the vote campaign.
Is Moore suggesting that the NRA should not be allowed to be politically active because some fucking nutbag shot someone? Of course, this plays right into the Democratic concept that no one is responsible for their own behavior...we’re all at fault for one person’s actions, and guns, the “gun culture,” and the NRA have driven people to commit murder because they want to encourage people to vote.
I saw another article that pertains to this situation...and I liked what Wayne LaPierre had to say:
NRA Chief Executive Officer Wayne LaPierre defended the get-out-the-vote event for Arizona Republican candidates, saying it had long been planned and that there was no connection between the gunman’s actions and what the NRA stands for.
“I honestly think that if a madman had driven a car into a crowd and if there was a car convention scheduled, they wouldn’t cancel the convention,” LaPierre said.
Exactly, Wayne...exactly. And it’s stuff like this that shows me why Moore wouldn’t face you with his camera.
David Brudnoy has a frank and honest review/editorial commentary on Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine.” He discusses the connection race has to gun violence in America. (Link via Instapundit)
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