Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Christopher Hitchens is a man you want on your side ...

Unfortunately, for the LLL/anti-war/root-causes crowd, he's not in their camp. The man is playing on our team, and he's batting .1000:

Christopher Hitchens/Slate: What Went Wrong - The flaw in Seymour Hersh's theory, and lo and behold Michael Moore makes a cameo appearance:

I ask this because, in the news cycle that preceded the Iraq atrocities, the administration was being arraigned from dawn until dusk for the offense of failing to take timely measures against the Taliban and al-Qaida. I hardly need to recapitulate the indictment here. We had our chance to see it coming, and to see where it was coming from, and the administration comprehensively blew all these chances, from the first warnings of suicide-hijacking to the cosseting of Saudi visa applicants. I might add that I completely agree with all these condemnations and wrote about many of them (including the spiriting of the Bin Laden relatives out of the country during a "no-fly" period imposed upon the rest of us) at the time.

But there is no serious way of having this cake and scarfing it. I remember a debate I had with Michael Moore—the newly crowned king of the Cannes Film Festival—at the more modest location of the Telluride Film Festival in 2002. Ridiculing the Bush administration's policy, he shouted that it had gone into Afghanistan to get Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar. "Mission NOT accomplished!" he added, to roars of easy applause. I asked myself then, and I repeat the question now: Would the antiwar camp have approved the measures necessary to ensure those goals? If they will the end, will they will the means? Would they taunt that lawyer in Tampa, as they taunt the supporters of regime change, with living a quiet life at home while others die in the field? Isn't the refusal to take out the leaders of al-Qaida a bit of a distraction from the struggle against al-Qaida?



Read it all: it's worth it.


Michael Moore & The Politcs of Entertainment

I think Rachel Lucas had it right in her opinion of Michael Moore:
PIG! PIG! PIG! PIG! PIG!

Have I made it clear how I feel about Monsieur Moore? Good.

In today's Opinion Journal: Daniel Schwammenthal exposes the less-than-honest goings-on of the porcine mockumentary director at Cannes, the post-Oscar festival of self-aggransizement that takes place in the south of France:

WSJ: Michael's Manipulations: Moore of the same at Cannes.

CANNES, France--On his way to the next film-festival interview, movie maker Michael Moore, self-declared champion of the downtrodden, lent his support to protesting show-biz workers on the Croisette, Cannes's beachwalk. He took a megaphone, screaming "a job is a human right, a living wage is a human right." Never mind that the protests were about neither jobs nor wages but small cuts to France's generous welfare checks for artists. He hasn't become a millionaire filmmaker by being too fussy with the facts.



We all know that the winner of Cannes' grand prize, the Palme D'Or, was decided before any films were actually screened: as Schwammenthal deftly illustrates, the glitterati will once again consume itself in a conflagration of anti-Americanism and award the Golden Palm to "Fahrenheit 9/11".

The LLL's will of course trample themselves to see it when it opens here in the US.

Monday, May 17, 2004

A Little Fun & Games ...

Too much going on to do much in the way of blogging, so I'm putting in a friendly diversion to pass the time.

Back soon!

Blue
What Color is Your Brain?

brought to you by Quizilla