The Declining Influence of Moore

The Telegraph is putting together a rundown of the 100 most influential liberals and conservatives in the US.  And who is that at #91?

A reviewer of Moore’s 2007 movie Sicko, about the American health system, summed up his career as being “a multimedia attempt to undo Reagan’s great achievement: persuading blue-collar factory workers and other members of the working class to embrace his heady brew of jingoism, anticommunism, contempt for government and admiration for the virtues of unfettered capitalism”.

By that standard, the university dropout from Flint, Michigan has failed miserably. But his Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) on the war on terror (the highest-grossing documentary of all time) and Bowling for Columbine (2002) about the gun lobby became the far Left’s contribution to key debates. But with liberalism now mainstream and in the White House (where Moore is unlikely to be a guest) the filmmaker’s influence seems to be on the wane.

They ranked him #7 two years ago.  I have to agree with them that his influence is declining.  Capitalism did not produce nearly the buzz and hysteria that his past movies did.  And, with a box-office take just above $14 million, it was his least successful film in the last decade.

So does that mean the end of Moorewatch?  Not when he still has so many followers.  And not when his twitter feed contains such pearls of wisdom as this:

Thank God the first troops in the surge to Afghanistan got there in time to stop a Nigerian man on a flight to Detroit.

Apparently, the idea of layered defense doesn’t make much sense to Mikey.