Final (more or less) Moore

Mark Steyn today reviews the Michael Moore "documentary".

Midway through the picture, a "peace" activist provides a perfect distillation of its argument. He recalls a conversation with an acquaintance, who observed, "bin Laden's a real asshole for killing all those people". "Yeah," says the "pacifist", "but he'll never be as big an asshole as Bush." That's who Michael Moore makes films for: those sophisticates who know that, no matter how many people bin Laden kills, in the assholian stakes he'll always come a distant second to Bush.

I can understand the point of being Michael Moore: there's a lot of money in it. What's harder to figure out is the point of being a devoted follower of Michael Moore. Apparently, the sophisticated, cynical intellectual class is so naïve it'll fall for any old hooey peddled by a preening opportunist burlesque act. If the Saudis were smart, they'd have bought him up years ago, established his anti-Saudi credentials, and then used him to promote the defeat of their nemesis Bush.

Hmm. Maybe they don't need to. Stick him in a headdress and he looks like King Fahd's brother. All I'm saying is connect the dots.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan fisks William Raspberry's op/ed about the movie.

What matters is not veracity, good faith, cinematic excellence, but attitude. And Raspberry even invokes anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan as the model! And who exactly is the "devil" in Farrakhan's "discourse"? The Jews! And this, according to Raspberry, is a valid model for Michael Moore to follow. Hello?

And notice the point of this attitude: not that Bush has been wrong in his judgments; not that he has botched a war; not that he has ruined the economy; not that he has pursued any particular policy with which a reasonable person might disagree. The point is that Bush "is a devil." A devil? Like, er, Satan? And this is what nice, educated people believe but "cannot bring themselves to say"? This is not an argument. It's literal demonization--a defense of losing one's sense of fairness and rationality.