Michael Moore's river of self-delusion truly does run deep and wide:
And as for Summers and Treasury secretary Tim Geithner (also not kindly treated [in the film]), Moore told the audience in a brief question and answer period that he hoped Obama had brought them on in the same way that some banks hire robbers to help them guard against future theft: "Maybe that's what Obama's doing — he hired the people who robbed all the money to help him get it back. That's the optimistic version."
Noticing that the audience seemed lukewarm about the president, Moore rushed to add that the election was the best day of the last decade of his life and said, "Instead of us piling on him, he needs our support."
Look, I could talk about battered wives and cities in Sweden and so on, but it would just be cruel. This is a cry for help, people. Would someone please get this man the psychotherapy he so desperately needs?
VOLTAIRE WEIGHS IN: Coincidentally (maybe a little too coincidentally), I read this just last night:
"Oh, Pangloss!" cried Candide, "though hadst not guessed at this abomination; it is the end. I must at last renounce thy optimism."
"What is this optimism?" said Cacambo.
"Alas!" said Candide, "it is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong."
The Distant Ocean 
Sweden?
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Stockholm syndrome?
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We have a winner!
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Noel murray gave his newest documentary a C+: http://www.avclub.com/articles/toronto-film-festival-09-day-4%2C32832/
I do agree Moore should’ve focused the teabaggers too, just to get another perspective: he seems to root for the working class, but is also oblivious to how the economy has taken its toll on them. He’s in favor of Obama while the extremist, yet strugging working class loathe him.
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Noel murray gave his newest documentary a C+
To be fair, that’s the AV Club. It’s more about what’s fashionable than it is about what’s good, and Murray’s review doesn’t deviate from the pattern.
As for Moore and Obama, I’ve been assuming that this next film is going to have a rather conspicuous, Obama-shaped hole in it, in much the same way that Fahrenheit 9/11 showed a rather obvious lack of John Kerry during all the Democrats-vote-for-war scenes. Fahrenheit 9/11 was still a good, enjoyable polemic, but it was also a reminder that Moore was pulling a few of his punches when it came to Democrats – and rather consciously so, I think, since 2000 and the Nader-blaming that ensued.
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Um, no, Murray, I thought, had a pretty good defense his view in the comments following the article.
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…a rather conspicuous, Obama-shaped hole in it…
That’s a good way to put it, and I’ve been assuming the same thing. Personally I felt 9/11 had a rather conspicuous Israel-shaped hole in it.
I rarely agree with AV Club reviewers (though that’s mainly for fiction reviews, not non-fiction), so I’ll have to see for myself. It’s certainly a bit hard to believe Moore is “snide” in this film, since that’s not at all his shtick. And Murray’s main complaint seems to be that Moore doesn’t recognize that the average American now is a spittle-flecked right-winger rather than a trade unionist—which I think says more about how successful health care industry astroturf campaigns have been at penetrating his worldview than anything else. Funny how easy it is for a few screaming right-wingers to redefine the “average American”, and how nurses on strike or protesting farm workers don’t also prompt that kind of redefinition, isn’t it?
I think SteveB had it right over at ATR:
Steve, your royalty check is in the mail.
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Does anyone have any solid demographic information on the Teabaggers? Are they really “working-class”?
I recall when Rush Limbaugh was first famous, early to mid 90s maybe, many people assumed that his audience was blue-collar, working-class, hard-hat types, and said so. But then I saw an article about him, quite a positive one, in a magazine called Entrepreneur. It reported that the average (mean? median) income of his audience was $53,000 a year. Which, by an entertaining coincidence, was the number being reported at the time as the average income of your American gay men, to prove that we were all elitist, wine-drinking, cheese-loving elitists. I believe it also reported that most of his audience had at least some college, maybe even a bachelor’s degree? In short, people rather like Limbaugh himself, and he’s no Joe Sixpack.
The impression I get is that the same applies to the Republican hardliners who lined up for McCain-Palin rallies in the summer of ’08, and are now screaming at Obama. (Just as they and their elders did at Clinton.) Are they average Americans? Are they working-class? I dunno. But let’s not make assumptions. I’m not so sure that it’s SteveB’s stereotype taking to streets, though apart from that his analysis of the media reaction seems good enough. More likely, though, media people recognize the teabaggers as “average Americans” because they are like the media people themselves: basically white middle-class types with at least a smattering of college, but not terribly bright outside of specific technical realms (I bet a lot of them got their college in engineering and business programs), and so they’re very anti-intellectual.
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“Personally I felt 9/11 had a rather conspicuous Israel-shaped hole in it.”
John, you think Israel was behind 9/11?
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Nope, not at all; I’m just saying that leaving out any significant mention of U.S. backing for Israel in a documentary about 9/11 was a glaring omission (which I’d guess Moore did intentionally in order to keep the film’s appeal as broad as possible). In my opinion Hijacking Catastrophe was a far better and more thorough film, and still worth seeing now if you haven’t.
(And I actually meant Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11…sorry for the confusion.)
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Okay, just curious. I apologize for my assumption.
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When people say that ‘they know where the bodies are buried”–I always think, “well then, lock then up!””
We cant very well lock people up if the president keeps appointing them.
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