By Brian Carnell

Monday, January 13, 2003

This week there were a couple of amusingly odd observations about America's number one stupid white man, Michael Moore.

Writing for TomPaine.Com, Richard Blow used Moore as a launching pad for an article wondering why Left wing authors are excluded from American mass media. Blow wrote,

Michael Moore has a problem: Nobody wants to put him on television. "IÂ’ve been on a total of two network shows in nine months," the lefty filmmaker and author recently told The New York Times. "WhatÂ’s going on with that?"

ItÂ’s a fair question. After all, MooreÂ’s book, Stupid White Men, has spent months on bestseller lists. His film "Bowling for Columbine," is the most explicitly political film in recent memory. Its concluding interview with Charlton Heston reduced one of AmericaÂ’s leading gun fanatics to a state of embarrassing, self-incriminating incoherence -- and not, as his apologists insist, because Heston has AlzheimerÂ’s.

Richard Blow has a problem -- he took the inveterate liar Moore at his word. Moore's two network claim that he has been shut out is easily debunked by a quick Lexis/Nexis search. As weblogger Tim Blair noted back at the beginning of December when Moore was trying to sell this line of nonsense,

Maybe that's because Moore has appeared on at least five American TV shows to promote his book, including Politically Incorrect, the Daily Show, Crossfire, Tim Russert's CNBC program, and Fox's Hannity and Colmes. CNN gave his book a positive review, and ABC News ran an item on the problems Moore had getting his book published.

A Lexis-Nexis transcript search turns up almost two dozen separate media appearances by Moore promoting Stupid White Men in 2002. Yeah, that's some media blackout.

Meanwhile, cartoonist Tom Tomorrow ripped humorist James Lileks for this line about Moore that Lileks posted on his web site,

I donÂ’t hate Michael Moore, I pity him - heÂ’s going to die in 15 years of a massive coronary on a cold tiled bathroom floor, awash in the blasts of his emptied bowels, his autopsy photos posted to The Smoking Gun's new 3D holographic photo section.

To Tomorrow, this is way beyond the pale,

Wow, is that ever a coldblooded piece of prose.

I understand that a lot of right-leaning bloggers have a particular fixation on Michael Moore--but this is really disturbing, even within that context.

You know if this was anyone but Moore, I might agree with him, but Tomorrow can't possibly be serious here, can he? This is Michael Moore we're talking about. This is not Noam Chomsky or even Katha Pollitt we're talking about. This is Michael Moore who in Downsize This used the murder of German tourists in Florida as a source of "humor,"

On the other hand, it is ironic that right there in south Florida are thousands of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Is it right that those Jewish men and women who fortunately survived the Germans' slaughter should have to be reading menus written in German to accommodate their new "neighbors"? I don't think so.

I have a solution. We all know that Florida is infamous for German tourists being murdered there. I do not believe this phenomenon is the result of gang-related violence. I think it's payback time. One by one, the survivors are getting their revenge. Somebody with a sense of justice has armed the elderly residents of Miami Beach, pointed them in the direction of Fort Meyers, and let them loose to even the score . . . What were these Jerries thinking -- that the Moskowitzes were going to "live and let live," and "turn the other cheek"? Obviously these Germans forgot about the tote board.

I say arm every bingo player south of Fort Lauderdale and let's celebrate the real end of World War II. So -- RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, KLAUS! And Happy 50th Anniversary!!

And how did Tom Tomorrow express his displeasure with such "cold prose"? Why he devoted a strip to defending Moore from his critics (and, in the process, distorting the actual argument made against Moore's particular brand of hypocrisy).

Sources:

Why Aren't More Liberals On Television?. Richard Blow, TomPaine.Com, January 8, 2003.

Michael Moore is a compulsive liar. TimBlair.Blogspot.Com, December 1, 2002. Downsize This! Michael Moore, 1996, pp.81-2.

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