Christopher Hitchens on Michael Moore...

[fenderfour]

Big fat stupid

[graupel]

Nothing hypocritical about wanting folks to see your opinion by going to your movie. For him to do extensive interviews would risk over saturation in the media so that folks would believe they have heard the story already and not feel the desire to see the movie. Like him or hate him by his movie, but to attack him because he is fat or likes hot dogs is just a diversionary tactic for someone that doesn't want to address the content of his movie.

[markinore]

If you like Hitchens's comments on Moore so much, you'll probably love what he said about Reagan just after his death:

 

Not Even a Hedgehog

The stupidity of Ronald Reagan.

 

Not long ago, I was invited to be the specter at the feast during "Ronald Reagan Appreciation Week" at Wabash College in Indiana. One of my opponents was Dinesh D'Souza: He wasn't the only one who maintained that Reagan had been historically vindicated by the wreckage of the Soviet Union. Some of us on the left had also been very glad indeed to see the end of the Russian empire and the Cold War. But nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

 

Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature.) Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched. Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. Ronald Reagan professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you." Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

 

There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.)

 

One could go on. I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard. His reply was that maybe his staff had, and maybe they hadn't, but what about the leak of the Pentagon Papers? Thus, a secret theft of presidential documents was equated with the public disclosure of needful information. This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.

 

The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.

 

However, there came a day when Mikhail Gorbachev visited Washington and when the Marriott Hotel—host of the summit press conferences—turned its restaurant into the "Glasnost Cafe." On the sidewalk, LaRouche supporters wearing Reagan masks paraded with umbrellas, in mimicry of Neville Chamberlain. I huddled from dawn to dusk with friends, wondering if it could be real. Many of those friends had twice my IQ, or let's say six times that of the then-chief executive. These friends had all deeply wanted either Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale to be, presumably successively, the president instead of Reagan. They would go on to put Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen bumper stickers on their vehicles. No doubt they wish that Mondale had been in the White House when the U.S.S.R. threw in the towel, just as they presumably yearn to have had Dukakis on watch when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I have been wondering ever since not just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power, or the latest Republican at any rate.

 

Sen. John Kerry waited until the first week of June 2004 to tell us that he met Ahmad Chalabi in London in 1998 and that he didn't care for him then. That makes six intervening years in which the senator could have alerted us to this lurking danger to national security. But something kept him quiet. One must hope that that something wasn't the tendency to pile on. Cheer up, though. At least this shows that Kerry has no pre-emptive capacity.

 

Hitchens does have some legitimate criticisms of Moore, most notably the fact that the Bush family's links with Saudi Arabia do not prove that that was the reason Bush let the Saudis out so quickly after 9/11. In my opinion, all world leaders tend to stick together, and I think President Al Gore or John Kerry would have let them out as well. Many of Hitchens other criticisms ("Moore is fat" is a valid debating point?) are simply ad hominem arguments. Perhaps Hitchens, who is witty and incisive, takes umbrage at the success of someone who may be less well read, less urbane, less, well, English than he is.

 

Moore has done interviews, most recently on the CBS morning show, where he made that flatulent bitch interviewing him look bad.

[RobBob]

For him to do extensive interviews would risk over saturation in the media so that folks would believe they have heard the story already and not feel the desire to see the movie. Like him or hate him by his movie, but to attack him because he is fat or likes hot dogs is just a diversionary tactic for someone that doesn't want to address the content of his movie.

 

Jeezus, you sound like you work for that fat fuck.

[ashw_justin]

Moore is like every other negative critic---knows the way, but can't drive the car. I'm no fan of GWB, but it sickens me to listen to Michael Moore shamelessly claim that his disparagements are based on unbiased and accurate material.

 

I'll tell you why he won't do interviews---he can't stand the scrutiny. The women hosting The View were able to put him on tilt in about three minutes in an interview on Bowling for Columbine awhile back. He was unbelieveably defensive, and came off looking like a childish brat.

 

Funny how he spends all his time making films that patch together unflattering cuts of his targets, yet he can be goaded into looking like a blithering idiot without editing or entrapment. That's why he won't do interviews. He's a fucking hypocrit.

 

If he was good at debate and interviewing then he wouldn't be making movies, he'd be babbling on Crossfire or some other bullshit shit-flinging festival.

 

He makes movies. That's how he communicates his ideas. The View women, just as all other talking heads, are paid to talk, and they're pretty damn good at it...

 

I mean shit, it's not like he's running for president!

[Ireneo_Funes]

Justin's right. Moore's a filmmaker, not a politician, and he can promote or defend his movie however he wants. It doesn't make him a hypocrite if he's selective about who he gives an interview to.

 

And Off White pointed this out already, but Hitch isn't even close to "liberal" these days, if he ever was. He's a guy who gambled a big part of his reputation on the belief that going to war with Iraq was justifiable and a good idea...and probably isn't feeling very smug these days. He justly calls into question Moore's intellectual honesty, but anyone who's ever read Hitchen's practically slanderous "No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulation of William Jefferson Clinton" will know that the pot's calling the kettle black here.

[Skeezix]

Did you actually read the story you linked?? It seems to make my case that Moore is nothing but a wind-bag propagandist.

 

Make that extremely successful wind-bag propagandist whose latest film is shattering attendance records and causing neocon Bushlovers to panic as the tide of anti-Bush sentiment washes over the nation.

[JayB]

From this week's Economist...

 

"DURING the first three years of the Bush administration the White House rolled over liberal America relentlessly. George Bush began with surprise on his side: the Democratic Party never expected a “compassionate conservative” with a doubtful mandate to morph into a fiery apostle of tax cuts. After September 11th, he benefited from the instinct to rally round the flag. And then he had the Democrats' fear of being seen as wimps when it came to dealing with Saddam Hussein.

 

But liberal America is no longer willing to be rolled over. Bookshops are piled high with Bush-bashing tomes. Democrats in Congress have more fire in their bellies than they have had in years. John Kerry has already raised more money than any presidential challenger. George Soros is pouring millions into Democratic think-tanks and pressure-groups.

 

This liberal counter-insurgency has its own pudgy Che Guevara. From the moment Mr Bush “stole” the election from Al Gore, Michael Moore launched fusillades against “the thief in chief”. “Stupid White Men”, whose publication was delayed by September 11th, went on to sell around 4m copies worldwide. Mr Moore is the perfect antidote to dreary diatribes in the Nation, a man who believes there is no contradiction between left-wing politics and popular entertainment.

 

“Fahrenheit 9/11” is Mr Moore's harshest blast against Mr Bush yet. The film has already garnered the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival (along with a 20-minute standing ovation). It made $24m on its opening weekend in America.

 

It must be said that, as cinema, the film is not up to the standards of “Roger and Me”, Mr Moore's anti-capitalist documentary of 1989, in which he stalks Roger Smith, the General Motors suit who had closed a plant in Mr Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan. Nonetheless, it gathers some fascinating footage. Mr Moore's vicious wit scores points, as in the scenes of Paul Wolfowitz slobbering saliva over his comb and John Ashcroft warbling a patriotic ditty. His portrayal of the attack on the World Trade Centre—sound only against a blank screen as the planes hit the towers—is a stroke of genius. And Mr Moore can spark genuine outrage even amongst Republicans: what on earth was the White House doing shuttling the bin Laden family out of America straight after the terrorist attacks?

 

Yet “Fahrenheit 9/11” is unlikely to change anybody's mind. Mr Moore takes too many cheap shots. Wanting to accuse the president of stupidity and idleness, but also of shrewd and unceasing efforts in the cause of evil, he keeps contradicting himself. He lashes Mr Bush for spending too much time on holiday, and then shows him hobnobbing with Tony Blair at Camp David. (Maybe, just maybe, they were discussing affairs of state.) He presents Saddamite Iraq as a land of jolly weddings and kite-flying children. He flirts—or appears to flirt (his method is to insinuate not assert)—with deranged conspiracy theories. Can he really be implying that the White House, and the sinister forces it strives to serve, were glad that September 11th happened?

 

In so far as the film has a central argument, it is that the war on terror is a confidence trick. Mr Bush is not serious about homeland security, let alone about tackling bin Laden and his Saudi friends. He is simply using terrorism as an excuse for keeping the population in a state of panic while launching a grab for Iraqi oil. Mr Moore ends the film reading a passage from George Orwell's “1984” about how the purpose of war is not to defeat the enemy but to keep your own people subjugated.

 

What does Mr Moore's success at the box office say about American politics and American opinion? Plainly, it says that Mr Bush has failed to build a national consensus behind his war on terror. This is partly his own fault. Back when his job-approval ratings were at 90%, he cut taxes in ways that conspicuously favoured the rich, even as he called the nation to arms: so much for shared sacrifice in a noble cause. (In a telling passage in the film, Mr Moore innocently urges conservative congressmen to enlist their children in the armed forces and send them to Iraq; he claims only one congressional child is serving there.) Mr Bush also exploited the war on terror for partisan gain in the 2002 congressional elections. His approval ratings are now around 45%, support for the war is waning, and Mr Moore's views have moved from the margins of the disaffected to a cinema near you. You could say that the White House is reaping what it sowed.

 

 

 

The deafening silence of John Kerry

But “Fahrenheit 9/11” also has some worrying implications for the Democrats. It reminds middle America that liberal activists like to blame their own country for the world's problems. So far no prominent Democrat has seen fit to denounce Mr Moore's view that the war on terrorism is a fraud (the silence from John Kerry has been deafening). Instead, party elders including Tom Daschle and Terry McAuliffe attended the film's premiere in Washington, DC, and other Democrats have helped publicise it.

 

Mr Moore is a dangerous man to flirt with: remember how Wesley Clark's campaign collapsed when Mr Moore simultaneously endorsed the general and described Mr Bush as a deserter? Mr Moore has a long record of denouncing the United States to foreigners. The Republicans are citing him as proof of their charge that the Democrats are “a coalition of the wild-eyed”. If they have any sense, they may even steal a Moore cinematic technique: show the Democratic elite traipsing along the red carpet to see “Fahrenheit 9/11”, and then cut to a grainy shot of Mr Moore telling Britons that Americans are “possibly the dumbest people on the planet.”

 

Mr Moore is a formidable ally if all you want to do is attack Mr Bush. But the Democrats want to govern the country. With Messrs Bush and Kerry running neck-and-neck in the polls, they should be careful whom they hang out with."

[wally]

MICHAEL tells MOORE lies

[RobBob]

Justin's right. Moore's a filmmaker, not a politician, and he can promote or defend his movie however he wants. It doesn't make him a hypocrite if he's selective about who he gives an interview to.

 

No, but it also doesn't mean he's not a windbag propagandist.

 

The thing that really just irritates the piss outa me about Michael Moore is that clearly, in his own mind, he elevates himself and his own abilities up to the level of the people he's trying to ambush. It's like a small-time middle schooler attempting to put down his parents or the principal. Just listen to the title "Roger and me." Well, Roger Smith wasn't GM's best CEO, but on the other hand Michael Moore couldn't manage 3rd shift in a Dairy Queen. Moore has a juvenile's problem with authority figures, thinks he's smarter than everybody else, and he's gotten rich on playing this game only because you schmoes are willing to pay money to see the shit.

 

"Jackass" appeals to the same mindset as Michael Moore, and I like Wee Man, Steve-o, Pontius and company a lot more than Moore, because they don't take themselves seriously.

[lylabob]

Lots of ideas at play in this thread, but I'll start by saying that seeing "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "The Control Room" (documentary on Al Jazeera) in the space of three days was intense; whatever your politics, I recommend both. And while I have a beef with Moore and how cavalier he is with facts, context, chronology, etc., I value his viewpoint. I also believe that people who don't question his perspective—or question, for example, the commercial on georgebush.com of a few days back that juxtaposed images of Kerry and Hitler—are condemned to their own ignorance.

 

Re: Hitchens as faux liberal, part of the reason I admire him is that he resists those sorts of categories. He wasn't opposing liberals for opposition's sake when he came out for the war in Iraq, but was making a decision where other liberals were hamstrung by the facts that Saddam is bad but war is bad (and, to knee-jerking liberals, Bush's foreign policy should always be considered suspect or, simply, bad). Hitchens doesn't like war, he doesn't like Bush, he doesn't buy the administration's motives, but he thought the ends could be good and supporting the war expedient.

 

He justly calls into question Moore's intellectual honesty, but anyone who's ever read Hitchen's practically slanderous "No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulation of William Jefferson Clinton" will know that the pot's calling the kettle black here.

 

Hitchens lays out his personal politics (or philosophies about personal politics in general) in his book "Letters to a Young Contrarian." Below are a couple defining points, summing to idea that our decisions should not be defined by complacency, party lines, single media sources, etc. He doesn't pretend this is easy or that mistakes won't be made, but also doesn't allow that as an excuse for inactivity. Engagement is key.

 

From "Letters to a Young Contrarian":

 

We are an adaptable species and this adaptability has enabled us to survive. However, adaptability can also constitute a threat; we may become habituated to certain dangers and fail to recognize them until it's too late. Nuclear armaments are the most conspicuous example; as you read this you are in effect wearing a military uniform and sitting in a very exposed trench. You exist at the whim of people whose power does not derive from your consent, and who regard you as expandable, disposable. You merely failed to notice the moment at which you were conscripted. A "normal" life consists in living as if this most salient of facts was not a fact at all.

...

What I propose to you is a permanent engagement with those who think they possess what cannot be possessed. Time spent in arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

 

The thing that really just irritates the piss outa me about Michael Moore is that clearly, in his own mind, he elevates himself and his own abilities up to the level of the people he's trying to ambush.

 

Wouldn't it be pointless if he didn't?

[lylabob]

...who regard you as expandable, disposable...

 

Um, make that "expendable." Heh!

[johndavidjr]

A few of you are confusing the term "fact" with "innuendo." We can rest assured there are no untrue statements of fact in Moore's movie.

 

Perhaps he used facts at times to create innuendo, & this I think is what a few people have objected to. Personally it didn't bother me, as I wasn't expecting nor wanting to see a thorough history of Middle-East/US relations in a realtively brief political film.

[RobBob]

We can rest assured there are no untrue statements of fact in Moore's movie.

 

...maybe you can...

[j_b]

Re: Hitchens as faux liberal, part of the reason I admire him is that he resists those sorts of categories. He wasn't opposing liberals for opposition's sake when he came out for the war in Iraq, but was making a decision where other liberals were hamstrung by the facts that Saddam is bad but war is bad (and, to knee-jerking liberals, Bush's foreign policy should always be considered suspect or, simply, bad). Hitchens doesn't like war, he doesn't like Bush, he doesn't buy the administration's motives, but he thought the ends could be good and supporting the war expedient.

 

and somehow he makes abstraction of 50 years of empire building? hitchens is either a fool or he had a lobotomy.

 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3281.htm

[j_b]

We can rest assured there are no untrue statements of fact in Moore's movie.

 

...maybe you can...

 

well, until you provide evidence to the contrary there is no logical reason not to.

[johndavidjr]

Mr. Moore has challenged anyone to identify an untrue statement of fact in his film. Interpreting the film intelligently requires the viewer to distinghish between facts and opinion.

 

For example, this right-wing site, http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20040702.html purports to expose incorrect statements of fact in the film, but instead can merely suggest alternate views on the facts as presented....

 

BTW Fairweather, I'm dimly aware of a controversy in the mainstream press regarding Hitchens. I saw his film on Kissinger a couple of years ago(?) & found it perhaps similar in approach to that of Moore, but far less entertaining. Maybe as somebody else suggested, Hitchens is just sore his film was less successful.

-------------------------------------

[Crux]

Moore ...can be goaded into looking like a blithering idiot without editing or entrapment...

 

Yeah to that... Moore reminds me of Bill O'Reilly in so many ways. But where is the story?

 

Today's story: Vice President Cheney is still promoting on television the lie that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida had a collaborative relationship. Moore uses stories like that to justify his own no-holds-barred effort to discredit the Bush administration. That's the story.