Saturday, June 23, 2007

Sicko (the movie maker, not the movie)

Predictably, the liberal media is making a big deal out of the release of Sicko, the latest pile of bullshit from Michael Moore. No, I haven't seen the film. So how do I know it's bullshit? It's from Michael Moore, that's how.

Michael Moore knows jack-shit about national security, yet managed to make millions on Fahrenheit 9-11, and he knows even less about medicine, pharmaceutical R&D and health care insurance, yet moonbats by the millions will go see this movie. After all, it's Michael Moore and he speaks truth to power, right?

But nobody can so thoroughly demolish a bloated sack such as Moore in the way Christopher Hitchens can, so I'll leave it to him. Here's a piece he wrote about Moore for Slate three years ago: The Lies of Michael Moore

My favorite part:
Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States

And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.
I can't wait to see Hitchens dismantle Sicko.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm still waiting for Hitchens to come out of hiding and answer this...

http://tinyurl.com/2xnw6h


Hitch gets his ass kicked good.

Eric said...

Surely you're not suggesting that Michael Moore is intellectually superior to Hitchens?

Hitch probably will never answer that because he'll never see that obscure site, just as he'll never see this obscure one.

Anonymous said...

Hitchens is an impressive speaker and often worth listening to, but on the topic of Iraq and how to defeat global terrorism, the facts have long since abandoned him.

His attitude seems to be, 'if they want a fight, then bring it on!'. This approach cannot possibly work. We need to be smarter.

It's a shame because I used to like Hitchens. He is not a man of faith, but he has still allowed religion to blind him.

Eric said...

Military medical care isn't socialized medicine. It's routine preventive and corrective maintenance of a weapon system.

Anonymous said...

the most interesting thing about this movie to me was nothing to do with the healthcare industry, but the simple point made about midway through the film that America has become a bunch of pacifist burying their head in the sand, going into $150k+ debt, per child, for basic college, more for post grad, and and being so in debt, at 22, that you can never say two words to speak out against anything in fear of loosing your job/house/marriage/friends.

That is fascism, that is fear of life, fear of freedom. That is my fear.

What this has reminded us all, is that we have no rights, not god given, not government given, none.

We have a set of temporary privileges, and not one thing more. The can and will be taken away, at any time, at the leisure of the government.