Mikey on Oprah again

Well, I didn’t get to see it.  My Tivo, or rather the Comcast cable that feeds it, blacked out the channel it was recording on.  I assume some weird syndication rule kicked in.  I didn’t find out until last night when we sat down to watch his sales pitch for Super Special Free Magical Health Perfection For All Run By The Same Government That Can’t Get Anything Else Right But Will Somehow Magically Do This One Overwhelmingly Massive Thing Absolutely Right.

Damn, that is an unwieldy name.

Anyway, if you saw it, please comment...or feel free to write up a post-length entry and I’ll post it for you.

Ah, That Island Paradise

I was innocently basking in the wonderful sight of Cuba’s UN delegation flouncing out of the room because Bush said some mean wotten things about Pappa Fidel, when Reason brings this nonsense to my attention. It’s a long scientific paper (and behind a firewall in any case) but the abstract is something that will make Michael Moore drool. We’ll be sure to see him crowing about this soon.

Cuba’s economic crisis of 1989–2000…

Whoa whoa whoa! Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Economic crisis of 1989-2000? An eleven year economic crisis?! That’s impossible on the Island Paradise. Note the year it started. 1989. The year communism fell and Fidel stopping getting handouts from the Commies. So, in a very real sense, they have been in an economic crisis since 1959.

Anyway, resuming our discussion:

Cuba’s economic crisis of 1989–2000 resulted in reduced energy intake, increased physical activity, and sustained population-wide weight loss.

Most people call that “starvation”, but I’ll let them stick to the technical terms.

The crisis reduced per capita daily energy intake from 2,899 calories to 1,863 calories. During the crisis period, the proportion of physically active adults increased from 30% to 67%, and a 1.5-unit shift in the body mass index distribution was observed, along with a change in the distribution of body mass index categories. The prevalence of obesity declined from 14% to 7%, the prevalence of overweight increased 1%, and the prevalence of normal weight increased 4%.

Add the numbers to see what they’ve left out—the population of underweight people increased at least 2%. As a commenter at Reason pointed out, the Jews lost a lot of weight during the Holocaust, too. I would add that so did the Ukranians during Stalin, the Irish during the Potato Famine, Africans during various civil wars, Cambodians under Pol Pot and . . . Christ, I can’t go on with this. You get the idea.

During 1997–2002, there were declines in deaths attributed to diabetes (51%), coronary heart disease (35%), stroke (20%), and all causes (18%).

Of course, we always believe numbers that come out of Communist countries. Like the way the Soviets used to claim they had suburbs. Granted, some of those suburbs consisted of log cabins and mud huts, but ... they were suburbs! Those people were below the urb. In many cases, six feet below it.

Not reported? How much of an increase there was in death by suicide and starvation. Note carefully that the overall death rate dropped less than the death rate from stroke, heart disease and cancer - so something must have increased. For most people, you’ve got to live a while before you get a stroke, heart disease or cancer. I have no doubt that the millions of Africans murdered during the Congo War had decreased rates of stroke, heart disease and cancer as well.

An outbreak of neuropathy and a modest increase in the all-cause death rate among the elderly were also observed.

Hmm. So just one decade of this back-breaking-labor-and-starvation plan has already shorted and worsened the lives of Cuba’s seniors. That’s nice.

These results suggest that population-wide measures designed to reduce energy stores, without affecting nutritional sufficiency [!!], may lead to declines in diabetes and cardiovascular disease prevalence and mortality.

So there you have it. Michael Moore was right. Cuba has pointed the way! All we need to do is reduce ourselves to such abject total poverty that our 15-year-old daughters are prostitutes. We need to all quit our computer jobs and go to manual labor (all except Mikey of course. Every Golgafrinchan paradise needs documentary film makers). We need to all get the food literally ripped out of our hands ... and we’ll all be healthier!

I think Michael, for opening the discussion of how wonderful Cuba’s healthcare system is, deserves, at minimum, a Nobel Prize. I’ll see if they have a category for fatuous self-importance.

I’m going to go off on a tangent here, but one I think is critical to how we think about socialized medicine. If we get MikeyMooreCare, forced diets will be coming, one way or another.

Scum With Tits

There’s an interesting little point/counterpoint in my local birdcage liner about the upcoming slate of Iraq War-themed films, and how they are inevitably going to be left-wing and anti-war.  The liberal, arguing in favor of the anti-war films, writes the following.

“Grace is Gone” concerns a road trip taken by a man (John Cusack) whose wife has been killed in Iraq. In light of the right’s brass-knuckles treatment of antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan, I expect no end of jokes will be made at the expense of this film by the ever-sensitive Ann Coulter and her ultra-scrupulous confederates.

Readers of this blog know that I think Mann Coulter is a vulgar, vile, disgusting transvestite who has done as much to sully the name of conservatism as anyone else the last few years, but in this case I’l taking her side.  The “brass-knuckles treatment of antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan” was/is entirely deserved, because Cindy Sheehan put herself in that position.  To argue that “the right” is hostile towards anti-war mothers of dead soldiers, I’d like to see another mother this “brass knuckles” approach was used against.  I’m sitting here and I can’t think of the name of another single anti-war mother, even though they inevitably exist.  Why is that?  If the right was so “brass knuckles” in its approach, wouldn’t the ground be littered with the corpses of the poor, harmless mothers of dead soldiers, struck down in their prime by the right-wing hit machine?  Their names should be household, but they aren’t, because ONE NAME decided to hog all the press for herself. 

Let’s take a look back to my first post on the subject of the treatment of Cindy Sheehan, from 8/11/05, when she was really starting to make a name for herself.

By holding herself out as the hood ornament for the anti-war left, Sheehan has certainly opened the door for legitimate criticism of her motives and beliefs.  You won’t find anyone more supporting of that than me.  But all too often I have seen a real degree of contempt for the woman creep in to what should otherwise be legitimate comments, and I think that’s absolutely fucking shameful.  This woman lost her son, and while you are and should be free to discuss her recent political activism, cut the woman some slack in the other areas.  I think some of the things she has said and done recently have been absolutely disgraceful and I have said as much, but I’m not going to attack the mother of a wounded soldier.

Let me put it this way.  As Jim rightfully wrote earlier today, the real focus here should be Casey and his sacrifice for a cause he believed in.  That being said, this is the woman who gave birth to Casey; who breast fed him, and wiped his behind, and taught him to walk, and pinned his corsage on his prom tuxedo, and loved him for every year of his life.  I have no doubt that Casey loved his mother in return.  No matter how much he might have disagreed with his mother on certain political views, I don’t doubt for a second that if Casey could read some of the things that “patriotic Americans” have said about his mother he would be absolutely devastated, and were he here in person there’s a whole lot of people who would find themselves knocked on their asses by him.

Have some fucking respect.

I meant every word of that then, and I stand by it now.  It was only when “Peace Mom” began badmouthing the mothers of dead soldiers who happened to disagree with her anti-war political views that I decided she had lost any inherent respect the mother of a dead soldier deserves.  If Sheehan wasn’t prepared to show proper respect to her contemporaries, then I sure as hell wasn’t required to show any to Sheehan.  But before Sheehan was belittling pro-war mothers, and hobnobbing with Huga Chavez and America’s enemies, there were many of us on the right who felt that, as the mother of a fallen soldier, she was worthy of the highest levels of respect.  It’s just a shame that there are so many people out there who think that only mothers who hold an anti-war stance are worthy of this fundamental decorum.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of a fallen US soldier.  She is also a traitorous anti-American scumbag, who deserves every bit of criticism she receives from the likes of Mann Coulter.  Both of them are filth.

45 million. 17 million. It’s All Good

Mark Steyn breaks down the 45 million uninsured:

So, out of 45 million uninsured Americans, 9 million aren’t American, 9 million are insured, 18 million are young and healthy. And the rest of these poor helpless waifs trapped in Uninsured Hell waiting for Hillary to rescue them are, in fact, wealthier than the general population. According to the Census Bureau’s August 2006 report on “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage,” 37 percent of those without health insurance – that’s 17 million people – come from households earning more than $50,000. Nineteen percent – 8.7 million people – of those downtrodden paupers crushed by the brutal inequities of capitalism come from households earning more than $75,000.

In other words, if they fall off the roof, they can write a check. Indeed, the so-called “explosion” of the uninsured has been driven entirely by wealthy households opting out of health insurance. In the decade after 1995 – i.e., since the last round of coercive health reform – the proportion of the uninsured earning less than $25,000 has fallen by 20 percent, and the proportion earning more than 75 grand has increased by 155 percent.

Steyn is being a bit glib. Several of these groups overlap. There are millions of uninsured poor and middle class people.

But his general point is correct. I’ve read the Census report on the number of uninsured. They freely admit that the numbers have larger error bars and that only half of the “uninsured” are uninsured for more than six months. I myself, bouncing from great academia insurance to great academia insurance, have been “uninsured” twice in the last five years—for a couple of days. The universal coverage crowd just takes the worst number and claims that every single person in that group is scrabbling around for healthcare.

I wonder if the DVD of Sicko! will include an interview tih some 25 year-old making $100k a year who has decide to go uninsured. Don’t hold your breath.

Doctors Behind Bars

There’s one place in America where people are given 100% medical care provided by the state.  Every single medical need they have is provided, free of charge.  So I think it’s reasonable that we look at this system to provide some insight into what government-run healthcare in America would look like.  What is this system I refer to?  Why, the prison system, of course

Now, before we begin, let us not forget that this is a point Moore has made himself a number of times.  He made a huge deal after the capture of Saddam that the dictator was getting the type of free medical exam that American citizens couldn’t get, and in Sicko he took 9/11 victims to Gitmo to try to get the same level of care that the terror suspects held there were receiving.  So before you Mooreons attack me for an unfair comparison, remember that your lord and savior has been making this point for years.

As many as one in six deaths of California prison inmates last year might have been preventable, according to a study of medical care in 32 state lockups that will be used to help rebuild the troubled system.

One inmate, who reported extreme chest pains in the middle of the night, died of a heart ailment after waiting eight hours to see a doctor.

Another who complained for days of severe abdominal pain died of acute pancreatitis after medical staff did not believe his pleas were credible.

A third died after a two-year delay in diagnosis of his testicular cancer.

And an asthma patient died after failing to receive steroid medication for two days following transfer from a county jail.

The report, released Wednesday by the court-appointed receiver in charge of healthcare for the state’s 173,000 prisoners, revealed a broad pattern of delays in diagnosis, poor inmate access to doctors and tests, botched handling of medical records, and failure of medical staff to recognize and treat dangerous conditions.

Officials said some lapses led to disciplinary actions against doctors and nurses.

There were 426 deaths in 2006, including 43 suicides, and the study examined 381 of them.

Eighteen deaths were found to be preventable, meaning better medical management or a better system of care would have prevented deaths. An additional 48 were found to be “possibly preventable,” meaning better medical management of a system of care might have prevented death.

Of the deaths considered preventable, six were from asthma, which receiver Robert Sillen said he intended to make a priority for reforms.

“The leading cause of [preventable] death being asthma is unconscionable, and it is evidence of systemic problems and problems with individual clinical judgments,” Sillen said in an interview. “Adults in 21st century California should not have asthma as a primary cause of death.”

Now, be honest.  This could very easily be a report about the Canadian or British healthcare systems.  You could swap “NHS” for “prison” and end up with damn near a verbatim report.  If your goal is to provide 100% coverage to everyone then socialized medicine is for you.  If your goal is to provide the best quality coverage to the maximum number of people, we can all see just how wonderful the government is at providing 100% healthcare.

The Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky is alleged to have said, “The way society treats its prisoners characterizes the level of its civilization.” I will leave it to the reader to determine to what degree proponents of 100% government-run healthcare are interested in a just and fair civilization.

Update by Lee: From a commenter at my main blog.

Get Me Outta Here!

I hate to pick on someone who has cancer. But when you support a system that denies people the privilege of getting what your wealth allows you to get, you’re relevant:

Liberal MP Belinda Stronach, who is battling breast cancer, travelled to California last June for an operation that was recommended as part of her treatment, says a report.

...

“Belinda had one of her later-stage operations in California, after referral from her personal physicians in Toronto. Prior to this, Belinda had surgery and treatment in Toronto, and continues to receive follow-up treatment there,” said MacEachern.

...

“In fact, Belinda thinks very highly of the Canadian health-care system, and uses it when needed for herself and her children, as do all Canadians. As well, her family has clearly demonstrated that support,” MacEachern told the Star.

Well, of course the system is good . . . until you get really sick. Read the comments, which are expressing sympathy for her and describing this as a personal matter. I agree, it is. I agree, she should seek out the best care she can get. I don’t have any issue whatsoever with Ms. Stronach doing whatever she can to battle her breast cancer.

My issue is not with her at all. It’s with the Moore-ons and socialists. If we had a Candian-style system in this country, Belinda Stronach might be dead. And no matter how liberal she is, I think she—I think everyone—should have the opportunity to seek out the best care they can get without the government looking over their shoulder worrying that it’s not cost-effective. Yes, some people, like Ms. Stronach, will get better care than the rest of us. But that will happen no matter what system do we have. Which would you rather play a bigger role in the quality of care you get: your money or your political connections?

(PS - I’ll post on Hillarycare II: The Search of the Whitehouse soon.)

Less Moore? Captain Mike’s Fake Humility

"Captain Mike” is receiving some pretty bad reviews.

...Okay… so let’s be honest. The reviewers are recounting it the same way they would a blind date with
a 300 lb., man-hating megalomaniacal neo-nazi butch lesbian with poor personal hygiene and a penchant
for biting.

Latest round-up of opinions about “Captain Mike Across America”

The TIFF festival has come and gone, and nearly all of the reviews of Moore newest film seem to be in. I’ve taken the latest sampling from both professional critics and personal blog accounts and collected them here for your perusal. Personally, I think the compiled end result of all these reviews is utterly fascinating.

Blogging for AOL

In an effort to help Manufacturing Dissent’s coming release on DVD, I agreed to post once in a blue moon (they’re very flexible) at AOL’s Manufacturing Dissent blog.  Well...tonight, in a matter of a couple of hours, the activity has blown up.  Anyone care to pop over and help a brotha out?  Too.  Many.  Moore-ons!  :)

If Always, You Don’t Succeed, Try Eternally Again

One of the truly wonderful things about government is that failure is literally not an option. If an effort fails, it was just underfunded. So naturally, when an injection of 43 billion pounds fails to improve Britain’s NHS, it responds by . . . wait for it . . . demanding more money.

The money poured into the NHS has failed to produce a more efficient service, or to reduce unhealthy lifestyles.

As a result even more cash will be needed in the future, says a new review by Sir Derek Wanless.

It was published yesterday, five years after his review for the Treasury paved the way for the extra £43.2 billion that the Government has since spent on the NHS.

To put this in perspective, accounting for differences in population and per capita spending, this would be the equivalent of pumping about $400 billion into the US system. I would be willing to bet that if $400 billion were poured into our evil for-profit healthcare system, there would be measurable improvement.

Digging deeper, we see classic government. The various Sir Humphreys talk mostly in high-falutin’ goals and double-speak. Mostly, they do what every agency does when it comes to justifying its existence: tout inputs. They’ve hired more nurses, more contractors, more GPs and spent lots of lots of money. But, in a rather refreshing change, they actually acknowledge the failure of all this money to produce measurable outputs, such as, you know, better health care. (Governments never measure outputs; it’s too embarrassing).

They also ominously drop a few more hints of the health-police state to come:

“Government simply cannot afford to be the passive observers of unhealthy lifestyles, only intervening when chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease or lung cancer are already well established,” he will argue. “Public health issues must be elevated to the top of the national agenda by a Department for Health which takes an even more active role in encouraging healthy lifestyles.”

Translation: pouring money into our socialized system hasn’t worked, so we’ll have to use the iron arm of the law to make Britons healthy.

Moore takes a big hit from the Irish

This is, by far, the harshest critique of Moore and “Captain Mike Across America” I’ve seen. To do it justice, I’m republishing it here in it’s entirety.

Moore Graduates

I just want to add a thought to all the reviews and comments on Captain Mike being posted below. First, I think this indicates that Michael Moore has graduated to a new tier of hypocritical liberal greed. There are lot of leftists out there - Mikey’s idol Noam Chomsky being a prime example - who make lots of money publishing “books” that consist almost entirely of speech transcripts and edited e-mail exchanges. Chomsky’s post-9/11 book, published a month after the towers fell and consisting almost entirely of edited e-mails, is a prime example. Peter Schweizer in Do as I Say (Not As I Do) (a fun if not exactly insightful book) called this “multilevel marketing for radicals”.

This is essentially what Michael Moore is now doing. He is making money documenting ... himself. He is repacking appearances as though it were original content. Anything to wring a few more dollars and a little more passion out of his supporters. Maybe he needs to add a new wing to his Torch Lake mansion.

(Yes, I know he leaked Sicko! over the internet so people could watch it for free as a sign of his non-greed. As James Berardinelli argued, this just proves that Mikey is a smart marketeer. The leak generated buzz and eventual riches.)

Moore’s Slacker Uprising Tour, whatever its faults, was part of a long American tradition. American satirists, from Twain to Mencken to O’Rourke, have often made a living going around just being themselves and repeating some of their more trenchant observations. Hell, I paid to hear O’Rourke in Austin a few years ago and he repeated a lot of stuff from his books. Of course, he also spent 90 minutes answering questions, signing books and entertaining the hell out the libertarian audience.

Even legitimate political figures do the tour thing. President Clinton makes millions on the speaking circuit. Ronald Reagan honed his speaking style by touring America on behalf of GE at a massive salary, giving an ever-refined version of “The Speech”, as D’Souza called it. And I’m sure more than a little money has been made, in recent years, by selling people videotapes or DVDs of appearances.

The problem here is that Moore is trying to pretend this is original content. If he sticks to the Chomsky tactic of selling the same thing over and over again to the poor masses he claims to love, he’ll do fine. But showing it to film critics at the fricking Toronto Film Festival as though it were a genuine documentary?

Um, no.

Red Herrings

If you haven’t seen the 20/20 clip of John Stossel’s partial interview with Moore, take a moment and watch.  Stossel keeps asking him questions relating to Cuba.  Stossel shows that the data about Cuban life expectancy (and indeed, anything about Cuba) come straight from Castro’s propaganda factories.  He then asks Moore why we should trust what Cuba has to say, which is a completely legitimate point.  My quick transcript of the exchange follows.

STOSSEL:  Why believe what they say about how long they live?

MOORE:  Not to direct your interview here, but you know Cuba’s a red herring.  Let’s stick to Canada and Britain and this stuff because I think these are legitimate arguments that are made against the film and against the so-called idea of socialized medicine and I think you should challenge me on these things and I’ll give you my answer.

STOSSEL:  (Voiceover) So, next week, that’s what we’ll do.

Now, as Jim rightly asks below, if Cuba is a “red herring” then why does Moore feature it so prominently in his film?  I didn’t really get what point Moore was trying to make with the red herring remark.  It was only tonight, when watching this 60 Minutes report about the dust at Ground Zero that I figured it out.

Moore, despite his obvious love for and undying devotion to Fidel Castro and his regime, knows that Cuba is a despicable place.  Moore doesn’t want Stossel mentioning healthcare in the context of Cuba because Moore thinks that by focusing on Cuba the audience will be manipulated into dismissing the idea of socialized medicine by tying it to Fidel Castro.  In other words, don’t use the viewer’s predisposition to be opposed to Castro to attack socialized medicine.  Talk about Britain and Canada rather than Cuba, since Cuba carries a built-in negative emotional response, and Moore wants to debate socialized medicine on its own merits.

In and of itself I think that’s a completely fair point.

Tonight, though, watching the 60 Minutes piece, it dawned on me that this is exactly what Moore did when he took the 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba.  After all, according to Moore our country is littered with the corpses of people who died in the streets while evil healthcare corporations reaped massive profits.  Surely he could have taken a far more random sampling of people to Cuba with him.  Why did he take a boatload of 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba?

Simple.  9/11 rescue workers come with an extremely powerful sympathetic response built in.  We all saw them risking life and limb on that pile of rubble, showing the world the best of America.  Moore wanted the audience to form a bond with his passengers, so he chose 9/11 workers.  When a brewery wants to sell beer they show guys at parties with gorgeous women.  The implied message is that if you drink this beer, women who look like this will want to sleep with you.  It’s associating two disparate items and allowing the viewer to generate the connection in their mind.  In Moore’s case, 9/11 workers were “turned away” by the evil corporate system, but they were taken care of by Cuba.  What does 9/11 have to do with Cuba’s healthcare system?  Nothing at all, but the implied message is clear:  Cuba’s socialist government will treat 9/11 heroes better than our evil free market system.

Moore could have just as easily chosen a convenience store worker from Ohio who has been denied foot surgery for two years and has to stand 8 hours a day in pain, but he didn’t.  He carefully selected the one group of people toward whom, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, you will immediately feel sympathy.  Moore wanted to use that sympathy to promote socialized medicine.  But when Stossel did exactly the same thing by using Cuba’s negative image to attack socialized medicine, all of a sudden it’s a “red herring” and not germane to the discussion.

See how this works?  See how skillfully Moore can manipulate his audience?  If he had taken a boat full of ex-cons who were being denied healthcare, small time crooks who had paid their debt to society, would you feel the same emotional pull that you do towards 9/11 workers?  Of course not.  Moore knows this, which is why he chose his passengers from a very select group, even though any group of uninsured sick people would make exactly the same point.

Moore is a master manipulator.  When he noticed Stossel tying Cuba’s healthcare system to Cuba’s government—a completely legitimate point—he tried to divert the discussion away from the undeniable truth about his idol El Presidente and the misery of life under socialism.  In his film Moore paints the healthcare debate as the evil and heartlessness of capitalism versus the purity and goodness of socialism.  Not one time does he concede that there are some things our system does much better than theirs.  It was an entirely emotional argument.  When he does Stossel’s interview, however, he wants to direct it so that it is framed solely as a healthcare debate on the merits, devoid of emotion.

As I have said on this blog before, Moore had an excellent opportunity to create a film that showed the positives and negatives of socialized and private systems, then suggest ways in which we could improve our system by incorporating some aspects of the systems in other countries.  He had the chance for his debate solely on the merits, free of red herrings.  Instead he decided to create an infomercial for socialism. 

Emotional manipulation is Moore’s stock in trade, and he’s sure as hell not going to let some reporter tread on his territory.

The British Example

Let us not forget that not only does Michael Moore advocate emulating Britain’s disaster of a healthcare system, he’s also in favor of their gun control policies, which are equally successful.

America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.

In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers, Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.

Okay, okay, so they live in a police state where the government videotapes everything that citizens do.  And not only aren’t they able to own firearms, there is no legitimate legal right to self-defense in the UK.  And they have higher rates of crime than we do.

But their healthcare is FREE!  (Even though you might have to wait a year or so to get it.)

The great divide begins around “Captain Mike”

I had been reserving judgment about how “Captain Mike Across America” would be well and truly received until it had its public screenings. So far the only people to see the film were critics and reviewers, who, as I have discussed in previous articles, have unanimously and harshly panned Moore’s newest opus. What I wanted to know is if Moore’s diehard fans would see the same flaws and problems in “Captain Mike” that the critics did - even the critics that were self-proclaimed big fans of Michael Moore and his work. The question I wanted answered was would Moore’s fans still like and appreciate “Captain Mike” despite the critical backlash?

Today we had our first answer to that question. Doc Blog, one of the TIFF 2007 blogs, describes in detail the events that occurred at the first public screening of “Captain Mike Across America”. It was, to put it mildly, a huge and unbridled success with the fans in attendance:

Ryerson theatre was filled to capacity tonight for the premiere of Michael Moore’s latest documentary Captain Mike Across America.  The crowd received Moore with the utmost admiration, as reflected by the loud applause when he entered the theatre…

Throughout the screening, the audience burst into applause and at times even motional reactions.  A woman a few seats from me cried during one of Moore’s speeches about the war and the lives lost because of it.  The energy in the theatre was palpable to say the least.  The screening felt like an instant part of Festival lore as Harvey Weinstein was in the audience watching for the first time. This continued to the end, where Moore received a standing ovation for about 2-3 minutes. His reaction was that of the greatest appreciation. He said, “This is way above and beyond what I expected.  Thank you for that very generous response.” Moore said the ovation was even longer than when he showed Bowling for Columbine here.

When asked if he would do this journey again for a future election, Moore simply answered, “I hope I don’t have to.” He went on to share how the tour was tiring but also physically dangerous.  On more than one occasion, Moore’s life was endangered.  His efforts will not go unnoticed when the film gets a theatrical release.  You can certainly see why his actions are appreciated by many, many people not just in the US but in other countries as well. This film will have you and others in discussion for some time after you see it. 

Judging from this first account, Moore’s fans are responding with great fervor to “Captain Mike Across America”. This fan reaction is a complete 180 turn from the critical reaction, which was resoundingly negative. Several questions emerge now. Is this an isolated report or will more positive fan reactions to “Captain Mike” start popping up? If Moore’s fans do indeed love this new film, why did critics have such a different reaction? What are the critics seeing that Moore’s fans are not? And, perhaps most intriguingly, whose opinion will Moore dwell on the most - the fans or the critics?

Only time will tell, and I will be very curious to see how this continues to play out.

**UPDATE UNDER THE CUT**

“Captain Mike” continues to get panned by critics

Yet more bad reviews for “Captain Mike Across America” rolled in this morning. I can honestly say I haven’t seen a single good - or even a relatively neutral - review of this movie yet. Here are two more excepts from reviews for your perusal below the cut, with the second one being particularly lengthy and scathing.

John Stossel gets at Mikey on 20/20

Wow.  Moore is....delusional.  He’s a terrible actor, we all saw Canadian Bacon.  He actually believes that regular Cubans get that exact level of health care, regardless of the thousands of Cuban-Americans that tell the world otherwise, regardless of the fact that there are mountains of evidence that he’s wrong.  Weirder than that, though, is this: “Cuba’s the red herring.  Let’s stick to Canada and Britain and this stuff...” What the hell?  Why is it so heavily featured in his movie if it doesn’t matter?

Can any Moore fan explain that crazy shit?

The reviews pile in for “Captain Mike”

Well, the reviews have started pouring in for Moore’s latest opus “Captain Mike Across America”, and so far the tone has been unanimous in nature. Unanimously harsh, anyway.

A quick word about a “Captain Mike” review

In the comments to this thread, DVDGuy posted a link to a review of Moore’s new ego stroke, Captain Mike’s Giant Ego Trip And Exploration Of Paranoia And Trumped-Up Fluffery (I may have the name a bit wrong, not sure).  In that review, Todd Brown, a self-confessed Moore fan, has a lot to say, including this:

Mike?  You’re better than this.  And you’d better remember it before all of those adoring people forget why they cared about anything you had to say in the first place.

Todd?  I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but no.  No, he’s not better than this.  And to make matters worse, he never has been.  I too used to be a fan and thought Mike was fighting the good fight.  One day I woke up and realized that he was, indeed, fighting a great fight, only it was one designed to bolster his ego, cater to his paranoia and line his pockets.

Everyone should go check out Todd Brown’s review.  It’s very much something I could have written about five minutes after I saw Bowling For Columbine.

Get ready…

I just approved 200 new commenters and damn near 3/4 of them were from European countries.  Prepare for the influx of the same stupid questions and comments as have been posted for the last 5 years…

Why?  Why do I do it?  ;)

Update from Lee Because, my friend, if we don’t fight the good fight who will?  Who will stand up to the lies, distortion, and creeping socialism that is ruining our Republic?  Our elected officials sure as hell aren’t doing their job.

Either that, or we’re a couple of fat bastards who spend too much time in front of a computer arguing with people for no reason other than we enjoy it.  I prefer to think of myself as a crusader for righteousness, but in reality you and I are both like that guy from the World of Warcraft episode of South Park with a little Comic Book Guy thrown in for good measure.