Friend of the friendless

Michael Moore is back out there, rousing his rabble and flogging his product (and in public!). Some excerpts:

It appears that the Bush administration will have succeeded in colonizing Iraq sometime in the next few days.

Right! Didn’t you see all those double-wide house trailers being offloaded in Umm Qasr, full of white Texas Christians, ready to colonize the depopulated Iraqi nation?

This is a blunder of such magnitude — and we will pay for it for years to come. It was not worth the life of one single American kid in uniform, let alone the thousands of Iraqis who have died, and my condolences and prayers go out to all of them.

Reserve your condolences for the folks still not liberated, Mike. The folks in Baghdad, Basra, Nasiriyah, and elsewhere, dancing and cheering and waving US and Iraqi flags, seem to think the effort was quite worthwhile.

What I am most concerned about right now is that all of you — the majority of Americans who did not support this war in the first place — …

Never mind that the majority of them seem to in the final place — even in San Francisco.

… not go silent or be intimidated by what will be touted as some great military victory.

Yeah. No military victory to be seen here. Move along.

Moore goes on to recount how proud he was to have won the best “documentary” Oscar, and how everyone (except a handful of spoilsports up in the cheap seats) gave him a standing ovation.

[…] And they were honoring a film that states the following: The first Gulf War was an attempt to reinstall the dictator of Kuwait; …

As opposed to the new invading dictator. Certainly the Kuwaitis were just as vehemently opposed to the UN invasion of Kuwait as the Iraqis seem to be opposed to the US invasion of Iraq.

… Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons from the United States; …

You mean these weapons?

… and the American government is responsible for the deaths of a half-million children in Iraq over the past decade through its sanctions and bombing.

Never mind that the sanctions and bombing were authorized with the imprimatur of the United Nations. Never mind the billions Saddam spent on palaces rather than food, during that same sanctions regime. Never mind the food warehouses found stuffed full of undistributed food. The “half a million Iraqi children” number is simply bogus; sanctions have done damage, all right, but not in that range, and not solely at the hands of the American government.

Which means either that Moore is deluded, or lying, or simply doesn’t care what he says, as long as it boosts sales of his books and movies.

Which, it seems, is what’s happening. Moore gloats about how more people have ordered Bowling for Columbine at Amazon than Chicago, and how he’s gotten funding for more documentaries, and how his books are best sellers, and all that jazz.

[…] I tell you all of this because I want to counteract a message that is told to us all the time — that, if you take a chance to speak out politically, you will live to regret it. It will hurt you in some way, usually financially. You could lose your job. Others may not hire you. You will lose friends. And on and on and on.

Funny. I really don’t hear that from “pro-war” people. I tend to hear it from anti-war folks who chime in about how they feel that it’s “dangerous” out there, that dissent is being quashed. “Help! Help! I’m being repressed!”

But, as Moore points out, he’s the darling of the media. And, he hastens to add, the Dixie Chicks’ sales and concert tickets are doing just fine.

They have not been hurt at all — but that is not what the media would have you believe. Why is that? Because there is nothing more important now than to keep the voices of dissent — and those who would dare to ask a question — SILENT. And what better way than to try and take a few well-known entertainers down with a pack of lies so that the average Joe or Jane gets the message loud and clear: “Wow, if they would do that to the Dixie Chicks or Michael Moore, what would they do to little ol’ me?” In other words, shut the f— up.

Which is why, of course, Moore’s doing so well. The media is being maniplated by its sinister masters into saying that dissent is being quashed so that dissenters will be scared — you can trust Moore in this, because Moore’s book is on the NY Times best seller list, and his movie won an Oscar, and is popular at Amazon, and he’s getting his old TV show back, and …

[…] Don’t be defeated by polls that show 70% of the public in favor of the war. Remember that these Americans being polled are the same Americans whose kids (or neighbor’s kids) have been sent over to Iraq. They are scared for the troops and they are being cowed into supporting a war they did not want — and they want even less to see their friends, family, and neighbors come home dead.

Wait. I thought the majority of Americans opposed the war. Now the majority supports it — but you can’t trust those numbers, because all those Americans are being manipulated by fearmongers, which they weren’t before, despite the efforts of Dubya to manipulate them with fear, which seems to be working now (so don’t trust these polls) but wasn’t working before (so do trust those polls).

This is not the time for the majority of us who believe in a peaceful America to be quiet.

It’s never time for Moore to be quiet, evidently, regardless of how much some of us would like a bit of peace.

Ah, well.

(via Andrea)