Michael Lacey On The Two Lame-Asses Running For President
200 million people in this country, and we have these two losers running for head of state? Here's an excerpt from Lacey's take on it:
Every four years I endure a presidential campaign that leaves me estranged, feeling like an illegal, a mojado, in my own country. The choleric isolation is worse this year because of the choices and the consequences. Here stands the morbidly irresolute John Kerry. And over there is George W. Bush in all his bantam banality. In the corner wetting himself is the ascetic conspiratard, Ralph Nader.These are not my countrymen.
When asked who I will vote for, I shake my head in disgust and reply, "Yo soy Mexicano."
Friends and colleagues expect me to vote for John Kerry. But they misjudge me. Kerry does not deserve to be president. In the weeks leading up to the first debate, he could not protect his own combat medals and Purple Hearts from the pranks of a draft-dodging college cheerleader and his allies on the Swift Boat controversy. How the hell will Kerry protect Americans from the razored tactics of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?
I do not feel that Kerry or Bush is competent to lead us through a religious war waged by terrorists.
With nearly 3,000 Americans dead in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., I wanted Osama bin Laden's blood. With another 1,000 soldiers fallen in Iraq -- and the inevitable pictures of slaughtered innocent civilians -- I also longed for a vigorous, honest examination of how we got here. Instead, the president fought the 9/11 Commission tooth and claw. His opponent is no better. As a jibe, flip-flopping hardly captured the number of stiff-limbed sentiments Kerry expressed on Iraq. Kerry adopted so many positions on the war that when viewed side by side, the sheer number of clumsy policies gave one the same queasy feeling as looking at a photograph of Mia Farrow and her brood of Third World kids.
And in some ways we got the leadership we deserved. There is a willful ignorance amongst voters that is staggering in scope. In mid-September a poll found that 42 percent of Americans still believe, despite all of the contrary evidence, that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11 attacks.
Lacey recommends digging into The 9/11 Commission Report ($8 at Amazon). He says it reads "like a noir thriller," and he's right. It's fascinating stuff. Lacey goes on to spill the beans on self-proclaimed friend of the working man, Michael Moore:
I met Michael Moore in 1980 when he stopped at the alternative press convention en route to his new job as editor of Mother Jones. He had yet to make a movie. But he was the same sleazy, self-absorbed liar that he is today.He attacked the editors and publishers present for daring to publish Best Of guides to their cities. Moore considered Best Of issues a sellout. This is, of course, typical leftist dogma that goes something like this: Best Of issues are a wet kiss to businesses and advertisers when what you should be doing is showing how THE MAN is keeping poor people down.
The fact is that Best Of guides, when executed with integrity, act as a practical guide to a bewildering urban landscape. Yes, you identify your favorite Mexican food joint, and the owner of that establishment feels kindly toward the newspaper. Certainly. But the other 200 restaurants that sell burritos and that didn't get selected bear a grudge. And no matter what advertisers might think, it is the single most popular issue of the year with readers and represents less a sellout than a break from the other 51 issues of doom and gloom.
But Moore's simple-minded, clenched-fist rhetoric isn't what bothered me.
This clown had just folded his newspaper in Flint, Michigan. All of his writers, editors, salespeople, circulation staff and business support were left to fend for themselves without so much as a severance package to see them through while he dashed off to the job at Mother Jones in San Francisco (Mother Jones would show him the door before his cup of coffee had a chance to cool). Perhaps if he'd paid attention to the needs of his staff, took care of business and published the occasional Best Of, his paper would still be alive.
Instead, he begged money off liberals. He had musicians like Harry Chapin do fund-raising concerts. The problem was, his rag was never good enough journalistically to sustain the charity.
When he wore out his welcome in publishing, he turned to movies and proved himself a natural.
-- Every single fact that I state in Fahrenheit 9/11 is the absolute and irrefutable truth," claims Moore. "Do not let anyone say this or that isn't true. If they say that, they are lying."
In fact, Moore's movie begins with a forgery that would shame even Dan Rather. The film is so filled with lies, distortions and half-truths that sorting out the truth is a cottage industry on the Web.
At the start of the movie, Moore trots out the conspiracy theory that Bush stole the election in Florida. Never mind that a six-month-long probe by a consortium of media that included the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN contradict Moore.
As the film opens, a newspaper from Bloomington, Illinois, the Pantagraph, is flashed on the screen. Dated December 19, 2000, the headline over the story reads: "Latest Florida Recount Shows Gore Won Election."
But there was no such story in the Pantagraph on December 19. There was no such story ever in the Pantagraph.
On December 5, there was a letter from a reader alleging that Gore won, and that letter had a headline, "Latest Florida Recount Shows Gore Won Election."
So Moore cut and pasted a headline on a letter to the editor. He blew up the letter's headline, then ran that headline under the newspaper's logo to make it appear as if it were the headline on a news story.
At least Dan Rather was duped by forged documents; he didn't create forged documents.
Moore's distortions are more clever than his lies.
Bush is infamously captured at a dinner of elegant swells telling the obviously idle rich, "I call you the haves and the have-mores. Some call you the elite; I call you my base."
One cannot help but think of Bush, what a smug puissant.
But this is just Moore's class warfare meant to seduce an audience whose members suspect that they have not been invited to the country club.
The film footage is, in fact, from a charity dinner with a tradition of having speakers mock themselves and the audience. Rather than breaking bread with robber barons, Bush was helping to raise more than a million dollars for the medically indigent. Al Gore attended the same dinner on October 19, 2000, and he also lampooned himself: "The Al Smith Dinner represents a hallowed and important tradition, which I actually did invent."
Instead of actually looking at the president's foolish tax policies, which purport to create jobs by giving refunds to the rich, Moore prefers to fuel the fantasies of the bobbleheads who thrill to his documentaries.
I think playing to the prejudices of boobs coarsens the discussion.
Standard election procedure, these days.
(via Romenesko)
Now, now Ö let's not forget out classics !
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
L'Amerloque at October 8, 2004 4:45 AM
So wait...it takes Romenesko to get you to read New Times?
I feel so unloved.
LYT at October 8, 2004 10:26 PM
Actually, Mr. Pouty, I read your review of Shaun Of The Dead yesterday, utterly unprompted! I just happened to see Lacey's piece first through Romenesko's site, and I'm a practitioner of ethical attribution, so there!
Amy Alkon at October 9, 2004 8:51 AM
Sharp and bloody is this guy's knife. Thanks for finding it for some of us who don't have the time to. If there's one overriding benefit of the blog world, it's the blowing the cover off of spinners, liars, windbags, and miscreants of all shapes and sizes. That is, after you've sifted through all the spinners, liars, and windbags of the blog world. Independents are growing in numbers from those fleeing both parties. They should have a box of clothespins near each voting booth for all those needing to hold their nose while they vote. Or else I'll just vote Libertarian.
Two or three elections back, there was this Libertarian running for Secretary of State (CA). In the official booklet he had written that if elected, he promised to do everything in his power to abolish the position of Secretary of State. He went on to show how the office was substantially superfluous since the duties involved were all duplications of other bureaus and departments within our state government.
He got my vote that year.
allan at October 9, 2004 9:23 AM
There's something a little weird about saying the 9/11 report reads "like a noir thriller." I love Micky Spillane as much as the next drag queen, but the commission report is far more chilling than any work of fiction out there. I assume Lacey's referring to the first chapter as the "thriller," where they piece together the events of that morning in agonizing, appalling detail. The chapter after that gives a textbook summary of Islamic fundamentalism that hasn't a bit of noir about it. The thing that was weird for me were the face shots of the hijackers. Two or three of them were total babes: Big dark eyes, long lashes, high cheekbones -- very Dondi-like and, quite frankly, very fuckable.
Lena Cuisina at October 9, 2004 8:11 PM
LYT -- Did you like Shaun Of The Dead? I did -- but I like almost every movie I see (I'm dumb that way). Leener
Lena Cuisina at October 10, 2004 10:02 AM