Michael Moore: Still Crazy After All These Years

Six years after the launch of Operation: Iraqi Freedom, one of the war’s most extreme critics, film-maker Michael Moore, claims that most Americans now stand with him. Is he right? Two weeks ago, Moore wrote a column titled ‘Why I'm Not Now and Have Never Been the Democrats' Rush Limbaugh.’ “What I have believed in,” Moore proclaims, “and what I have stood for in these past eight years … these are all things which the majority of Americans believe in too. That's why in November the majority voted for the guy I voted for.”

On the other hand, there is one way in which Moore does imagine himself to parallel Limbaugh: Like Rush, he sees himself the star of the show. “The days of using my name as a pejorative are now over,” writes Moore, as he dubs himself the “spokesperson for the liberal, majority agenda.”

Moore is certainly a “spokesperson” for an agenda, but it is neither of the liberal mainstream or the American majority. It is far-leftist and on the fringes of political and social opinion where those too liberal for even em>Mother Jones magazine< find themselves. Perhaps no issue better reveals the radicalism of Michael Moore than his stance on the post-9/11 war on terror. Moore’s homepage still features a commemorative caption that reads:

After six years of killing Iraqis, Americans are more concerned about economic crisis.

Not freeing them. Not keeping the Iraqi people safe from tyranny. NoÑwe’ve been over there killing them, that’s all.

It’s been almost five years since Moore wrote this gem:

The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush?

Nor was Moore any more supportive of the campaign in Afghanistan. “[D]o not declare war and massacre more innocents,” Moore demanded on 9/14/01. And while Americans were unfurling their flags and clenching their fists in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, he could only think of his own idea of injustice:

Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes’ destination of California – these were places that voted AGAINST Bush! Why kill them?

This comment has since been removed from his website’s archives.

Even his attempt to portray himself (unlike Rush for the GOP, he says) as his party’s bridge to the general electorate is flimsy. To prove that the Democratic Party has embraced him to win over the people, Moore cites sitting in the VIP box with Jimmy Carter at the 2004 DNC just two years before they won Congress. And even though Moore was notably nowhere to be seen or heard in the run-up to the 2008 general election, he still uses Obama’s victory to gloat that it somehow proves, “the American people agree with me,” unlike Rush Limbaugh.

Besides, one wonders: Why would Michael Moore even want Americans to agree with him? As he himself told a British newspaper in spring 2004,

They [Americans] are quite possibly the dumbest people on the planet…

The New York Times also reported the following from that spring:

''That's why we're smiling all the time,'' he told a rapturous throng in Munich. ''You can see us coming down the street. You know, 'Hey! Hi! How's it going?' We've got that big [expletive] grin on our face all the time because our brains aren't loaded down.''

Moore is many things. But no number of consecutive Democratic victories could ever make him the spokesman of the American majority. His country, including much of his party, will always know him as, more or less, what the film Team America popularly dubbed him in 2004: “a giant socialist weasel.”