Porcine Sicko Smackdown

Great editorial from IBD on the latest hit piece by bloviating Michael Moore.

Less Of Moore

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, May 22, 2007 4:20 PM PT

Hypocrisy: Propaganda filmmaker Michael Moore is wondering where America's soul has gone. He could get the answer by engaging in a little bit of introspection.

Moore is being feted and toasted at the Cannes Film Festival for his latest manipulative movie "Sicko" just as he had been for "Fahrenheit 9/11." Imagine that: Garnering applause at a snooty international event for anti-American movies.

Naturally, the media treat Moore as if he's a serious person making serious movies, which lets him explain his higher motives in creating an opus with a schoolyard title.

"I'm trying to explore bigger ideas and bigger issues, and in this case the bigger issue in this film is who are we as a people?" Moore told reporters after a press screening.

"Why do we behave the way we behave? What has become of us? Where is our soul?"

Speaking of "soul," the real soul-destroying problem we have in this country comes from a cadre of hostile culturati who harbor malice for the virtues that made America strong and proud. Moore is mainly an ego-driven opportunist, but he fits in neatly with the sneering elitists since he speaks their language so well.

The elitists — who are always on the left — trade in lies, half-truths and disinformation. They're anti-capitalists (except when it benefits them). Their goal is to undermine our American tradition of free men, free markets and individuality that has served better than any other system in history. They dreamily long for progressive (or more precisely, statist and socialist) policies to regiment human behavior. They are nostalgic for a time that never was in this country but regrettably was in the Soviet Union.

The elitists' rejection of our time-honored values has torn at our souls, assaulted our sensibilities, eroded our work ethic, softened our attitudes about responsibility and increased our sense of entitlement. The last insult is in their mainstreaming of mushy thinking.

The insufferably narcissistic Moore, who lives on the ritzy Upper West Side of Manhattan while portraying himself to be just another working man, has helped the cause by using the art of distortion to paint America as a villain.

In "Sicko," his critique of the U.S. health care system, Moore tries to claim that U.S. medical care is a captive of free-market "greed." Nearly 20 years earlier, he used "Roger & Me" to try to paint General Motors and then-CEO Roger Smith as cogs of a rapacious American corporate machine that devours the weak and the poor.

Moore was most dishonest when he made "Fahrenheit 9/11." He accused President Bush of using the 9/11 attack as a rah-rah excuse to go to war with Iraq. It was propaganda. Dave Kopel of the Colorado-based Independence Institute documented 59 deceits in the movie.

In his Riefenstahl-ish "Sicko," Moore tries to make the argument that Cuban health care is superior in both quality and cost to U.S. health care. But if it were Moore's own health at stake, would he choose Cuba or the U.S.? This year even dictator Fidel Castro had to call in a doctor from abroad to get proper medical care for a relatively uncomplicated illness.

But don't say anything negative about the island-prison's health care. Doing so has landed many a Cuban in prison — assuming the care itself didn't put him in the ground — as would making a film that criticized the Cuban government, even on milder terms than Moore criticized the U.S.

It's reasonable to think that Moore himself may have considered the irony. But his greed and ego override it.

Were Moore merely poking at an ossified establishment, were he a modern-day Will Rogers or H.L. Mencken, then his work might have value.

But he has tried to pass off his fiction as fact. He goes for the emotional at the expense of the rational. He stages scenes and takes cheap shots. His is the work of a pretentious auteur looking for his own soul. That such a man should be praised is a shame on everyone involved.