In Michael Moore's New Film, He Shows Cinema-Goers, American and Foreign, How Every Other Place in the World Is Far More Humane than the U.S. Is

Cara Buckley has a New York Times interview with Michael Moore, the point of whose “Where to Invade Next” is, basically, that everywhere in the world is a lot more humane than America is. Moore

travels to three continents to “steal” good ideas from foreign lands and bring them back to the United States, including France’s gourmet school lunches and Finland’s successful, and homework-free, public education system. 

Moore spoke about the film’s origins, which began with a 1970s backpacking trip.

Q. Was the idea for this film cooking for a long time?

A. Since I was 19. Since I got a Youth Hostel card and Eurail Pass. Each country I went to with my backpack and my little tent, I’d keep saying, “That’s such a good idea, how come we don’t do that?” Then I was hiking in Sweden and busted my foot and had to go to the emergency room and they fixed it. And I’m so nervous because my Blue Cross from the U.S. wasn’t going to cover me. I don’t have any money on me. “They go, ‘O.K., goodbye.” “What? That’s it? Don’t I owe you anything?” “‘No. It’s all free here.” “But I’m not a Swede.” “It doesn’t matter.” I couldn’t believe it. I was gobsmacked.

Well, maybe Moore would do well to consider the arguments in the following posts:

• The French healthcare system, even if taken at its best, is like an expensive jewel on a beggar’s neck by Bojidar Marinov

• What the American enamored with French health care doesn’t realize is that the French, too, would love to have such a perfect health system by Guy Sorman

• Call it the grass-is-greener syndrome: the French have their own problems that show there's no such thing as a free lunch — or a free doctor's visit by Investor's Business Daily

Color me skeptical when Moore explains the extent to which he has allegedly been the target of assassination attempts.

After my [2003] Oscar speech and I got booed off the stage, somebody at the [Transportation Security Administration] keyed the Oscar. I got home, I live in a rural area in northern Michigan, some guys had a dump truck full of horse manure and built an almost four-foot wall across our driveway with the manure and then taped signs on all the trees along the road saying “Move to Cuba,” “Get the hell out of here,” just nutty stuff like that. Then I went through five years of a number of physical assaults on me, a couple of those were actually attempts to kill me, and then the attempt to blow up my house by this guy who had a fertilizer bomb, à la Oklahoma City.

Q. Do you avoid some topics that you would otherwise tackle were it not for the death threats?

A. No, no, no, no. Oh, no. “Bowling for Columbine” was a lot about how our fear is what motivates us to get these guns, and it puts us in a discombobulated state. … I can’t live in this constant state of fear that the hate machine that exists on talk radio and on Fox News whips up.

Reminder: Among No Pasarán's Michael Moore posts over a dozen years, we find the following:
• As the French Doctors Prepared Their Sharpened Instruments to Remove the Donor's Organs, Something… Twitched
• Masters of Deception: Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and the 9-11 Conspiracy Industry
• "Michael Moore could not withstand Michael Moore's scrutiny for more than 15 seconds"
• And last, but (certainly) not least:
the interview with the French newspaper in which the director of Sicko and Capitalism (A Love Story) admits in so many words — "Dude, I am on Marx's Tomb!" — to being nothing less than a Marxist

Masters of Deception: Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and the 9-11 Conspiracy Industry

The Big Lie gets lots of public attention and is carried forward as in a big parade, with many hungry listeners, while the truth must come limping behind on crutches, struggling to catch up, panting with it tongue hanging out

Wilhelm Reich (paraphrased)

Be sure to read about the the lecture circuit experiences of James DeMeo during his European tour in his article Masters of Deception: Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and the 9-11 Conspiracy Industry. I frankly don't know enough about his orgone energy theory to vouch for it one way or the other, but I will stand behind Masters of Deception 100%. (And by the looks of his experience in Europe, DeMeo is a man whom I would like to welcome into Americans Anonymous.)

…the 9-11 conspiracy books do not stand alone in making … fantastic charges. In fact, they are what might be called the "icing on the cake" of a larger onslaught of historical revisionist accusations, circulating for many years since even before 9-11 and originating from within neo-fascist far-Left and Right-wing political groups, which attempt to tarnish the USA and Israel as engaged in a much larger and ongoing conspiracy of conquest and empire…

Why should one need to bother wasting time to rebut them? The answer is, because so many people are attracted to them, creating real-world problems regarding credibility and international relations at many levels, not only between governments, but as I touch upon below, between ordinary people.

…Interest in my Saharasia discovery had grown over the years, and I was invited to lecture in Europe on many occasions. After 9-11, all that began to change. During one lecture trip to Berlin in 2002, I was pelted with questions derived from the conspiracy theorists — Didn't Eisenhower massacre a million German Prisoners-of-War? Wasn't it proven that FDR knew well in advance about Pearl Harbor? Didn't the USA provoke the Japanese, and Churchill provoke the Germans? Wasn't the USA now going fascist? Didn't Bush steal the last election? And wasn't 9-11 the result of a big American plot? No, I replied, with amazement that people had no embarrassment to ask such questions in public, without undertaking a lot of serious homework on the subjects, so as to really know. …

After [another] lecture, the Minister of Women's Affairs for Luxemburg, who had been in attendance, apologized to me with much embarrassment for the rude treatment I had received, saying she had never before seen such an outburst of hatred towards a speaker . …

Near the coffee bar, one large German fellow from the audience approached me, literally shaking with rage as he informed me that the "World Behavior Map" I had shown during my lecture was validating "Bushes Achse des Bösen " — the Axis of Evil. Somewhat astounded at this remark, I had to admit there was something to it. I told him my maps had been prepared in the 1980s, well before Bush or 9-11, and suggested it was no accident that the most socially violent cultures which were identified in my maps were also the fountain-heads of international terrorism. I asked, "what about Saddam Hussein and the millions he has killed? Don't you think he really was an evil character? Or the ethnic genocide and miserable treatment of women by the Talibans? What about the concentration-starvation death camps in North Korea, filled with political dissenters?" My suggestions that the modern terrorists and terror-supporting states were predominantly Islamo-fascist or totalitarian communist regimes brought only the most dismissive denials, and the even more incredulous accusation that I must be "a CIA agent, come to spread confusion". …

That same week, Der Spiegel magazine published a major expose on the worst of the 9-11 conspiracy books, focusing upon the popular books by Broeckers, Gerhard Wisnewski, Andreas von Buelow, and Thierry Meyssan, detailing the falsifications, fabrications, half-truths and lies-of-omission (the worst kind, as Orwell noted), as well as the whole-cloth fairy-tales. For awhile, it seemed the European intellectual scene would be completely over-flooded by the conspiracy materials, without any counter-critique whatsoever, when Der Spiegel waded into the quagmire with the article Panoply of the Absurd, revealing the most obvious distortions and fabrications, and in so doing, considerably drained the swamp. However, Der Spiegel (a liberal-left publication with anti-American sentiments) avoided discussion of two of the larger and probably more radically "serious" but willfully deceptive critics of the USA, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, whose influence and book sales have soared in inverse proportion to their factual content. …

Noam Chomsky is best known for his missives against the USA and Israel, who are misportrayed as the cause of all the world's problems. In this, he echoes the Islamo-fascists who rail against the "Great Satan" and "Little Satan", an idée fixe so intellectually nailed to the floor that he successfully avoids any mention of the genocidal butchery and crimes committed by the "Saharasian" Soviet Union, Red China and the multiple branches of the COMINTERN (100 million dead from that nasty bunch) — except perhaps to either blame their crimes on the USA and Israel, or deny that they occurred at all.

…With my own eyes, I have seen people take a deep drink from the revisionist's poisoned well, only to rise up having been wholly blinded to the authentic history of the 20th Century, and begin throwing hate at Americans, "the Jews" and Western democracy in general, a new form of generalized "scapegoating" among those who enjoy all the benefits the West can offer, while simultaneously openly supporting some of the most blood-soaked dictators and totalitarian fanatics one could imagine. The strange phenomenon of Western intellectuals, movie-stars and antiwar activists, throwing hate at Bush, imperfect leader of the free world, and then jetting over to give a big friendly hug to mass-murderers like Saddam Hussein or Kim Jung Il also can be traced back to similar poisoned wells, which legitimize bringing to the surface all the buried anger and rage people carry in their guts, and transform the character no less than wearing of the mythical "Ring" of Tolkien. They would have us believe, the world would be a better place if only the West, the USA and Israel in particular, had not existed.

…And then there is Michael Moore …Moore has shown himself to be expert in the use of "lies of omission" — as well as of commission — which most people won't know about unless they consult his critics. … The devil is in the details, which in this case one can find most clearly gathered and discussed at the mooreexposed.com web site of David T. Hardy, a Tucson lawyer with genuine working-class roots and a respect for facts, who has devoted considerable time and energy to revealing the quite elaborated deceptions in Moore's books and films…

The precise details of Moore's lying in Bowling, Stupid White Men, Downsize This and Dude, Where's My Country? are presented by Hardy as well. He has a marvelous spoof essay on the shadowy connections between Moore and the Bin Ladens, using the same over-reaching illogic as employed by Moore and others against Bush. And he is not alone in gathering together documentation on Moore's quite deliberate distortions. Again, with some digging, an internet search brought forth a list of websites exposing Michael Moore's deceptions.

If you like Moore's works, and think he really is a good guy who wants to expose hidden facts and truth to mostly-ignorant Americans, you owe it to yourself to review these on-line materials. I'll add my own observation, made at the Hugendubel bookstore in Berlin. The cover of Moore's book Downsize This in the American edition shows him respectfully tipping his hat to the reader. The German edition … shows him menacingly holding forth several sticks of dynamite, in the manner of a terrorist. … The differences between the covers for his Bowling for Columbine DVDs are even more alarming…

[The] awful emotional rage … is a "feel-good" exercise, but one which so muddies the waters, that legitimate criticisms of Bush administration policies … are drowned out and lose effect. And what is genuinely honest, freedom-supporting and antifascist within the Bush policies, which have liberated the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq from genocidal tyrants and finally confronted global Islamofascism, this is shamefully ignored and thrown into the mud by the Chomsky-Moore-9/11-conspiracy crowd. …

Michael Moore's Comments on the 2018 Elections Are Revelatory of His Admitted Devotion to Marxism—"Dude, I am on Marx's Tomb!"—Never Disclosed by the MSM

“I want you to know that in this election you are not electing a member of the House of Representatives. You are electing the jury for the impeachment of Donald J. Trump. Never forget that over these next few months.”

When Michael Moore gives Democrats that message (thanks to Stephen Green) — he is actually quoting "a Democrat running in my district in Michigan" — he does not realize how revealing he is of the true nature of the Democrat Party. (Thanks to Ed Driscoll for the Instalink.)

A jury is supposed to be impartial — with lots of vetting from both defense and prosecution before each person is accepted as a bona fide member of said jury.

For leftists like Michael Moore, the courts, like the people in general, are supposed to fulfill the desires of the élites — our betters — and of the (Deep) State, in the same fashion as the kangaroo courts do or did in all authoritarian countries, from Nazi Germany to Sovet Russia.

How strange is that, however, for a man who, 11 years ago, basically admitted to a French newspaper that he was a full-fledged Marxist?

In the States, mainstream media types have called Michael Moore's Sicko his "least political film". But in his interview with Thomas Sotinel, the Le Monde reporter states that this seems to be Michael's coming-out as "a socialist". To which Moore answers (retranslated from the French) that, in a scene in Sicko,

I film myself on Marx's tomb. Nobody mentioned it. In the reviews in America, they wrote, "it's his least political film." And I say: "Dude, I am on Marx's Tomb!" Do I need to take out a baseball bat and hit them on the head [for them to understand]?!

In case you hadn't understood, this says — and this reveals — almost more about the powers-that-be (both in the U.S. and abroad) than about Michael Moore: being on the socialist/marxist-bordering left, for the MSM and America's Eastern élites (as for Europe's MSM and élites), is mainstream, is normal, is understandable, is OK, is cool. It is avant-garde. Beyond being (naturally) avant-garde and therefore (obviously) a positive and endearing trait, it hardly bares mentioning. And it is "not political" (that's only a dirty game that America's hit-below-the-belt Republicans play).

"Dude, I am on Marx's Tomb!"

In the States, mainstream media types have called Michael Moore's Sicko his "least political film". But in his interview with Thomas Sotinel, the Le Monde reporter states that this seems to be Michael's coming-out as "a socialist". To which Moore answers (retranslated from the French) that, in a scene in Sicko,

I film myself on Marx's tomb. Nobody mentioned it. In the reviews in America, they wrote, "it's his least political film." And I say: "Dude, I am on Marx's Tomb!" Do I need to take out a baseball bat and hit them on the head [for them to understand]?!

In case you hadn't understood, this says — and this reveals — almost more about the powers-that-be (both in the U.S. and abroad) than about Michael Moore: being on the socialist/marxist-bordering left, for the MSM and America's Eastern élites (as for Europe's MSM and élites), is mainstream, is normal, is understandable, is OK, is cool. It is avant-garde. Beyond being (naturally) avant-garde and therefore (obviously) a positive and endearing trait, it hardly bares mentioning. And it is "not political" (that's only a dirty game that America's hit-below-the-belt Republicans play).

Update: As far as I know, the best answer to Michael Moore's Sicko arguments is provided by Stuart Browning's Free Market Cure films…

More on Michael Moore in the archives (2004-2016)…

Great minds think alike: Pope Francis Asks to See Michael Moore in Private and Tells Him that "Capitalism is a sin"

"Capitalism is a sin" Pope Francis said to the director of Capitalism during a visit to the Vatican. In the Valeurs Actuelles weekly, Amaury Brelet reported that

The far left American director and the pontiff, who met a few weeks ago at the Vatican, seem to share, without surprise, the same radical opinions.
 
Great minds think alike

Michael Moore spoke with Pope Francis a few weeks ago at the Vatican. The far-right American director even detailed their interview while a guest on the show "Late Night with Seth Meyers". "I went to the general audience and asked to speak to me privately…"

In French:

Le réalisateur américain d’extrême gauche et le souverain pontife, qui se sont rencontrés il y a quelques semaines au Vatican, semblent partager, sans surprise, les mêmes opinions radicales.

Les grands esprits se rencontrent. 

Michael Moore s’est entretenu avec le pape François, il y a quelques semaines au Vatican. Le réalisateur américain d’extrême gauche a même raconté en détails leur entrevue alors qu’il était invité du show “ Late Night avec Seth Meyers ”. « Je me suis rendu à l’audience générale, et il a demandé à me parler en privé... »

Flashback: In an interview with a foreign-language newspaper never disclosed by America's MSM, Michael Moore, the director of Sicko and Capitalism (A Love Story), admits in so many words — "Dude, I am on Marx's Tomb!" — to being nothing less than a Marxist

Update — George Neumayr:

James Grein said what the bishops [of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)] wouldn’t:

“It is not Francis’s church; it is Jesus Christ’s church.”

PS : Bienvenue à la Ferme de Marguerite

What Leftists Like Michael Moore Ignore: Cubans wait months, sometimes years, for something as basic as a wheelchair

The hospitals most Cubans go to are shabby reflections of the one where Communist Party members are treated; Cubans wait months, sometimes years, for a wheelchair; they can’t count on oxygen being available; vital equipment breaks down; medicines runs out; doctors and nurses expect to be bribed.

Thus writes Anthony DePalma in a New York Times article reflecting realities that Michael Moore, among many others, ignored (notably in his movie Sicko). Echoing an article by Howard French of almost 30 years ago, the piece is adapted from the author's forthcoming book, The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times. Fausta adds: when you go for surgery, you have to bring your own stitches…

• Related — WikiLeaks: when Michael Moore's Sicko film was shown to Cuban doctors, they were 'disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba'

• Never disclosed by the MSM: Michael Moore admits to being devoted to Marxism

Until her mother died, [Caridad Limonta] had managed to avoid this unpleasant Cuban reality. But her mother’s illness and death also forced her to confront an unsettling truth that profoundly reshaped her relationship with the Cuban revolution and led her to a deeper understanding of what it really means to be Cuban.

It is an understanding that American voters and politicians might benefit from recognizing, in this election year when relations with Cuba, along with the votes of Cuban-Americans, are on the table. As Ms. Limonta came to realize, being a Cuban means having deep respect for, and first loyalty toward, her fellow Cubans and the heritage, customs and needs of their island society that they share, no matter who holds power there.

But it had taken Ms. Limonta decades to even approach that realization.

The first inkling came when her mother, a retired nurse, had been fussed over by some of Cuba’s best doctors inside Havana’s finest hospitals. Ms. Limonta needed to know: Had she benefited from Cuba’s acclaimed medical prowess because every Cuban does? Or had her mother been pampered because Ms. Limonta herself was a ranking member of the Communist Party and vice minister of light industry for all of Cuba?

Until then, Ms. Limonta’s faith in the revolution had been absolute. Born just three weeks after Fidel Castro started his uprising by beaching an old American yacht called Granma in a mangrove swamp on Cuba’s southern shore in 1956, she had fully embraced his promise to wipe out inequality and create a new Cuba.

Growing up in the tiny sugar mill town of Tacajó in eastern Cuba, she’d believed with all her heart that regardless of her gender, or the poverty into which she’d been born, or the deep mahogany sheen of her skin, she was equal to every other Cuban.

 … On the darkest day of the revolution in August 1994, when angry mobs shouted “Freedom” and “Down with Fidel”— the largest mass protest against the Castro government — she was enjoying a buffet at a Varadero beach resort, a deserved reward for a job well done. She eventually rose to vice minister and held powerful positions within the party. But she couldn’t understand why tens of thousands of Cubans had risked their lives trying to reach Florida in flimsy rafts.

As the revolution aged, contradictions grew harder to ignore. As her job took her around the country, she saw that the hospitals most Cubans went to were shabby reflections of the one where her mother was treated. Other Cubans waited months, sometimes years, for a wheelchair. They couldn’t count on oxygen being available. Vital equipment broke down. Medicines ran out. Doctors and nurses expected to be bribed.

The stark differences weighed on Ms. Limonta, weakening her revolutionary spirit as well as her heart. She was just 48 when she was rushed to the mediocre hospital to which she, as a resident of Guanabacoa, was assigned. But once doctors found out who she was, they insisted on transferring her to Cuba’s top cardiology center.

She got the pacemaker she needed, but the speedy treatment only deepened her doubts. Bound by a strict sense of social justice, she finally forced herself to see the truth. She and her mother had been pampered in their time of need not because they were equal to other Cubans. Not because they were socialists. Not because they loved Fidel. But because they were more important.

 … Standing before a mirror one day, she cried. The scars on her body made her look like she had been torn apart and sewn back together, which was how she felt about her life. She had turned her back on everything she once believed in and had no idea how to go on. 

 … Ms. Limonta’s heart keeps her in Cuba, where she receives free medical care, though not at elite hospitals. Now she brings gifts to see a doctor, as other Cubans do. She squeezes into rattling jalopies to get to work, as everybody else does. She finally feels equal to all the others who are fed up with endless assurances that the future will be better. Fed up with promises of plenty, but shortages of everything. Just surviving, day to day, week to week, saps their strength. Toughened by decades of deprivation, they have found ways to adapt to hardship, but have lost the will to demand change.

 

"Michael Moore could not withstand Michael Moore's scrutiny for more than 15 seconds"

"A more dishonest and demented person I have never met," Michael Moore's former manager told Kathleen Antrim, "and I have known a few! And he is more money obsessed than any I have known, and that's saying a lot."

Moore is the only client that Douglas Urbanski, a critically acclaimed 25-year veteran of the entertainment industry, has ever fired.

(Danke zu F R Hoffmann)

"I was bored from the middle…"

"It sure is a great country…"

But, but, but… where's the enthusiasm?!
The welcome given Michael Moore's flick is much different in "Axis of Evil" countries (both present and former members) than it is in countries whose citizens delight in mocking and castigating America for George W Bush's Axis of Evil speech.

Yahoo News:

Cinemagoers in the Iranian capital were given their first glimpse of Fahrenheit 9/11 this week, but appeared to enjoy more the rare chance to watch an American movie than its assault on their regime's arch foe George W. Bush.

Michael Moore's Bush-bashing polemic may have cruised through Iran's unforgiving censors thanks to its indictment of US policy, but the premiere of the film also had the side effect of making some viewers relate the same questioning to their own state of affairs.

"The authorities obviously gave the film the green light for political reasons, in that anything against the United States must be good," quipped one of the hundreds of mainly young people who flocked to Tuesday night's opening screening.

The prize-winning documentary has been allowed out on release here [in Tehran] to coincide with the third anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States — which kicked off a chain of events that has seen Iran surrounded by US troops and lumped into an "axis of evil".

"They are showing this film to erase from our minds the idea that America is the great saviour," said Hirad Harandian, another cinemagoer at the uptown Farhang cinema. …

On Tuesday night the film was sold out and the theatre packed with close to 380 people, most of them young. Many admitted they were just out to watch an American film, and not that one in particular.

…Sima Gharavi, a 24-year-old dressed in a short bright blue coat rather than the more conservative all-black attire … hastened to complain that "out of all the films people would love to see, the authorities had to go for this one — just because this film is in line with the view of the Islamic regime."

And despite sporadic laughs here and there, most of Moore's sardonic humour appeared to fall flat. The end of the film was also greeted with some half-hearted clapping.

"The problem is the subtitles," said Sogol Zand, an English teacher. "The jokes are not as funny."

Others, obviously out for a rare taste of Hollywood entertainment, disagreed.

"It was just too political. I was bored from the middle, and I wished we had gone to see Kill Bill instead," said one young man, referring to the trendy Quentin Tarantino flick also being shown.

…[Even though a twenty-something man] quipped in to say he was "disappointed" by the film and asserted "politics is not as important" for Iran's younger generation, he did envy Moore's position.

"It sure is a great country, where someone like Moore trashes the president and gets away with it — and makes so much money!" he laughed.

Another woman said she was impressed with the scene where Moore chases US congressmen to ask them if they would send their children to Iraq.

"How many top officials here sent their offspring to fight in the Iran-Iraq war?" asked the woman, one of several who directed their frustrations at Iranian authorities — and not President Bush.

(Thanks to Gregory Schreiber)

Weinstein Scandal: Isn't the real problem the 1960s sexual revolution, which has lead to leftists spending much of their time scolding us about our sexism, racism, and retrograde morality?

I don't agree with everything in James Kirchick's Daily Beast article, but he starts out with this paragraph:

Weinstein is just the latest in a long line of men whose left-wing politics coexisted harmoniously with retrograde attitudes about women. In his statement, Weinstein said that he “came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different.” Many people scoffed at this explanation, as this was precisely the time when women’s liberation brought workplace sexism to the societal forefront. But Weinstein was right in a way he didn’t comprehend. Ever since second-wave feminism became part of the political left, there have been men who, ostensibly enlightened in the realm of gender relations, are in fact deeply misogynist and believe that their progressive street cred somehow obviates their attitudes about women, attitudes as regressive as those held by the Mad Men-era males who ruled the earth just before the sexual revolution.

More to the point, Jon Gabriel writes about the gall Hollywood has to wag its finger (thanks to Instapundit):

America knows that the same culture that enabled Weinstein spends much of its time scolding us about our sexism, racism and retrograde morality.

George Clooney lectured the nation at the 2006 Oscars, saying Hollywood’s “out-of-touch” elites were “the ones who talked about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular.”

Clooney credits Jabba the Weinstein with his big breaks into acting and directing.

At the 2003 ceremonies, Michael Moore thundered "Shame on you, Mr. Bush!" Weinstein has produced several of Moore’s deceptive documentaries, including his upcoming Trump-thrashing screed slated for 2018.

Perennial awards favorite Meryl Streep scolded Trump voters for sexism in her 2017 Golden Globe speech.

"This instinct to humiliate, when it's modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody's life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing,” she said. “Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose."

This is the same Streep who used her 2012 Globe speech to thank “God – Harvey Weinstein,” praise be unto him.

 … Americans … expect Hollywood elites to be hypocrites, whether it’s Leonardo DiCaprio flying 8,000 miles in a private jet to pick up an environmental award, or Alec Baldwin attacking Wall Street while working as a pitchman for Capital One.

They also expect Washington elites to be hypocrites. Democrats preach feminism while lionizing abusers like Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy, and denounce capitalism while nominating ultra-rich candidates like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

As Glenn Ryenolds remarks in USA Today,

For people who keep telling us how fearlessly truthful they are, they sure have a lot of ugly “open secrets.”

What does this tell us about the liberal world? asks The Guardian's Thomas Frank.

Today … Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie producer … is in the headlines for an astonishing array of alleged sexual harassment and assaults, but once upon a time he was renowned for something quite different: his generous patronage of liberal politicians and progressive causes.

This leading impresario of awful was an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He was a strong critic of racism, sexism and censorship. He hosted sumptuous parties to raise money for the fight against Aids.

In 2004 he was a prominent supporter of a women’s group called “Mothers Opposing Bush”. And in the aftermath of the terrorist attack against the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, he stood up boldly for freedom of the press. Taking to the pages of Variety, Weinstein announced that “No one can ever defeat the ability of great artists to show us our world.”

To call this man a hypocrite is to state the obvious. This champion of women is now accused of sexual harassment on an epic scale. This defender of the press was excellent at manipulating it and on one memorable occasion is said to have physically roughed up a reporter asking tough questions.

  … What explains Weinstein’s identification with progressive causes? Perhaps it was all about cozying up to power, the thrill of being a friend of Bill Clinton.

Perhaps it was all about moral absolution, in the same way that lists of corporations-that-care always turn out to be led by outfits like Walmart, Goldman Sachs and Exxon-Mobil. In the world of the wealthy, liberalism is something you do to offset your rapacious behavior in other spheres. It’s no coincidence that, in Weinstein’s desperate first response to the accusations against him, he thought to promise war against the National Rifle Association and to support scholarships for women.

But it’s also something deeper than that. Most people on the left think of themselves as resisters of authority, but for certain of their leaders, modern-day liberalism is a way of rationalizing and exercising class power. Specifically, the power of what some like to call the “creative class”, by which they mean well-heeled executives in industries like Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Worshiping these very special people is the doctrine that has allowed Democrats to pull even with Republicans in fundraising and that has buoyed the party’s fortunes in every wealthy suburb in America.

That this strain of liberalism also attracts hypocrites like Harvey Weinstein, with his superlative fundraising powers and his reverence for “great artists”, should probably not surprise us. Remember, too, that Weinstein is the man who once wrote an essay demanding leniency for Roman Polanski, partially on the grounds that he too was a “great artist”.

Harvey Weinstein seemed to fit right in. This is a form of liberalism that routinely blends self-righteousness with upper-class entitlement. That makes its great pronouncements from Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons. That routinely understands the relationship between the common people and showbiz celebrities to be one of trust and intimacy.

Countless people who should have known better are proclaiming their surprise at Harvey Weinstein’s alleged abuses. But in truth, their blindness is even more sweeping than that. They are lost these days in a hall of moral mirrors, weeping tears of admiration for their own virtue and good taste.

Robert Tracinski drives the point home (spasibo to Instapundit):

If you’ve ever wondered where the left gets this idea that America is some kind of hellscape of misogyny and sexual predation by wealthy and privileged men—well, now you know. They were describing the culture of some of their own institutions.

 … [Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi  and far-left, pro-Communist journalist Sam Kriss] got away with their behavior for as long as they did because they had a reputation of fighting viciously for the cause [other journalist heroes include those at NBC, The New Republic, Mother Jones, etc, etc, etc, not to mention Harvey Weinstein's decision to fight the NRA…], particularly when it required someone who was willing to rejecting normal standards of respectability and civility.

What made them so many fans was precisely their viciousness, their willingness to berate and insult, because surely their political enemies are such horribly evil people that they don’t deserve the protection of civilized norms. Kriss was even part of a movement called the Dirtbag Left:

“a term coined…to refer to a style of left-wing politics that eschews civility-for-its-own-sake in favor of subversive, populist vulgarity.”

In other words, these writers were lionized and promoted precisely because of the characteristics that marked them out as predators. It’s hardly a new phenomenon and has even been immortalized on film. These guys are all the hippie boyfriend in “Forrest Gump,” who can’t help smacking around his girlfriend because “it’s just this war, and that lying SOB Johnson.”

 … The … result, as with previous sex scandals, will be a long-term loss of authority when it comes to lecturing the rest of us from a pretended position of moral superiority.

It turns out that Jeffrey Lord has figured out what the real issue is (thanks to Ed Driscoll):

Question. Where did Harvey ever get the idea he could do these things and it was no big deal?

Answer: From a ’60s culture of a sexual revolution that produced exactly the same behavior in fellow Boomer Bill Clinton. Recall in 1999 that by then Bill Clinton had been accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick, indecent exposure by Paula Jones and groping — in the room adjacent to the Oval Office — by Kathleen Willey. And, of course, he had been investigated by Independent Counsel Ken Starr in the Monica Lewinsky matter, she a White House intern of the ripe old age of 22. The last was detailed in the Independent Counsel’s official report to the House of Representatives, known as “The Starr Report.” It was, to say the least, graphic in terms of what it described of Clinton’s behavior.

With that as background, recall now the incensed response from Democrats and liberals raised in that Baby Boomer sexual revolution culture. They were furious, insisting that this was “only about sex.” Meaning, no big deal.

Exhibit Two: The New York Times

 … [A clip from Michael Moore’s show The Awful Truth, aka Exhibit One] is a vivid expression of just how the ’60s culture out of which Baby Boomers emerged disdained their parents’ sexual mores as a joke, the culture of Puritans and prudes. As if to prove the point, turn no further than a review of Moore’s show in the New York Times. The review says as follows:

Nothing on “The Awful Truth” has been quite as funny or satisfying as a segment from the first episode, in which people dressed as Puritans chase after Ken Starr’s car, waving copies of the Starr Report and howling like extras in “The Crucible.”

Got that? The New York Times — even as Bill Clinton was awash in allegations of rape, groping, pants dropping, and an affair with an employee his daughter’s age — finds Moore’s take labeling Clinton critics as Puritans and prudes “funny” and “satisfying.”

No wonder Harvey Weinstein — a friend of both Bill Clinton and Michael Moore — thought he had carte blanche to do what he has been doing. …

Exhibit Three: The 2003 Oscars

 … Harvey Weinstein deserves all that’s coming. But the interesting question here is what about the 1960s sexual revolution itself that launched, in fairness to Harvey, all manner of Baby Boomers into a sexual culture where everything and anything goes? A sexual culture that was glorified countless times in Hollywood films, sending the repeated message that not only does everything and anything go but that anything and everything are OK.

Liberals — frantic now at the sudden self-undermining of a sexual culture they have spent decades championing, cheering, literally applauding not to mention protecting when they weren’t mocking those who objected — are trying to point accusing fingers at, but of course, President Trump.

Newsflash? Like millions of his fellow Boomers the young Donald Trump grew up swimming in the same culture as the rest of us. And the worst liberals can point to is locker room talk on a bus in a private conversation and what they once liked to call in the Clinton cases “she said-he said” situations, all of which he has not only denied but threatened lawsuits to settle.

The real problem here? It isn’t Harvey or anybody else — it’s the 1960’s sexual revolution and the sexual culture it produced that is so vividly illustrated in those clips from Michael Moore’s mocking of Ken Starr, the loving New York Times review of that episode, and all those cheering Hollywood stars standing to give a rousing round of applause to a child rapist. Not to mention those countless films that glorified all kinds of sexual revolution practices.

Maybe at long last aging Baby Boomers will take some time to reflect on what their — my — generation has wrought. And begin to ask whether what began all those decades ago with the sexual revolution of the 1960s is now taking its long overdue curtain call courtesy of Hollywood’s ultimate Boomer showman — Harvey Weinstein.

Related: Weinstein Scandal: longing "for the ultimate male/female Safe Space — a space where every male is neutered"

WikiLeaks: when Michael Moore's Sicko film was shown to Cuban doctors, they were 'disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba'

Nothing but the utmost praise is what Michael Moore has had for Julian Assange but he probably hadn't read the following WikiLeak first and, as VI puts it, "The more I read of the Wikileaks documents the more I think it has backfired on Assange's attempt to smear the US. This is one of my favorite revelations":

Cuba banned Michael Moore's 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a "mythically" favourable picture of Cuba's healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a "popular backlash", according to US diplomats in Havana.

The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.

But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so "disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room".

Castro's government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it "knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them."

…according to the FSHP, the only way a Cuban can get access to the hospital is through a bribe or contacts inside the hospital administration. "Cubans are reportedly very resentful that the best hospital in Havana is 'off-limits' to them," the memo reveals.

…The memo points out that even the Cuban ruling elite leave Cuba when they need medical care. Fidel Castro, for example, brought in a Spanish doctor during his health crisis in 2006.

Is Michael Moore a racist?

With the release of Michael Moore's latest fictonalised docu-drama, "Capitalism: A Love Story", the mind goes back to an earlier work of Mr. Moore, the book "Dude, Where's My Country?"

The reason for thinking back, the book in question was heralded at the time as:

"But his book is intended to serve as a handbook for how people with liberal opinions (which is most of America, Moore contends, whether they call themselves "liberals" or not) can take back their country from the conservative forces in power."

'So what' you say? Well, the client-media state in the US is all atwitter about the claimed (ie. false) underlying racial overtones to widespread dissatisfaction with the current US President Barack Obama. One of the phrases used by the teabaggers which has the client-state media up in arms claiming racism:

But I began to suspect that race was a factor for at least some critics when I heard them shouting about "the Constitution" and "taking our country back." Maybe Obama's health-care plan is an awful idea and his budget is way too big, but how exactly is any of this unconstitutional? Clearly, for some folks, there's a deeper rage at the man occupying the White House.

In summary, "taking our country back" liberals to conservatives = good. "taking our country back" conservatives to liberals = racism.

Hypocrisy? of course
Double-standards? naturally
Further rendering the word "racism" meaningless? unfortunately so

They have that same dirty weasel look	Même face, même race
Michael Moore, like the French, appeases terrorists. The French do it to 'save their asses' and to pre-emptively appease (pre-emptive appeasement, now there's a French concept if ever there was one) their suburban thug youth, Moore does it to rake in the cash.	Michael Moore, tout comme les franchouilles, fait preuve de sa compromission avec les terroristes du monde entier (voire au-delà). Les fwançais agissent ainsi pour pas se faire botter le cul et pour faire des accomodements préventifs à sa populace de caillera banlieusarde (la compromission préventive, voilà un concept bien franchouille), Moore le fait pour gagner un max de thunes.

There ain’t a word, thought, deed, symbol, piece of legislation, or news item that cannot be imbued with a racial angle when there’s a determined race hustler around

As President Obama prepares to make his merciful exit from office

writes Benny Huang incredulously over at the Constitution website,

he’s taken time to tell a Chicago reporter that race relations have improved on his watch.

He spoke these words in the same city where four young blacks recently kidnapped and tortured a mentally retarded white man while shouting “F**k white people!” and “F**k Donald Trump!” as they livestreamed the whole thing on Facebook. And he did all of this with a straight face.

“The good news is that the next generation that’s coming behind us…have smarter, better, more thoughtful attitudes about race,” said the failed president. What he means by this is that an entire multiracial generation of Americans has been raised on lessons about white privilege and minority victimhood. They’ve internalized this ideology so completely that they simply can’t interact with people who don’t share it.

Barack Obama’s historic presidency was supposed to unite us. I don’t think his “failure” to do so is an accident. He spent eight years agitating just like his hero Saul Alinsky and his mentor Frank Marshall Davis did. The results were predictable—anger, chaos, and violence. Cops have been murdered, neighborhoods have been torched, and innocent people have had their lives ruined. Before Barack Obama came along we were making progress in this country toward demoting race to a nonissue. Now it’s the issue, the all-consuming concern that supersedes all others. Race is everything and everything is racial.

It’s killing our nation.

President Obama’s remarks remind me of a creeping feeling I’ve had of late that I write entirely too many columns about race. It wasn’t always this way. Back when I was in college I made a name for myself on the staff of the student newspaper as a rabid “anti-choice” activist because I wrote regularly about our on-going baby holocaust. These days I rarely address the subject and I feel a little guilty about it. Planned Parenthood is still running its Murder, Inc., so why aren’t I writing more about it?

The answer is that I, like too many other conservatives, play defense. I respond to what’s happening in the political realm. In my college years I wrote so much about the evils of the abortion industry because race was not nearly as important as it is now. These days, with so much emphasis on race, I feel compelled to respond to the all the idiocy that people spout about “white privilege” and our poor, maligned president who just can’t catch a break because no black man can in this horrible, racist country. I want to point out that white-on-black crime is exceedingly rare, that no one cares when cops shoot white people, and that the Department of Justice does not dispense equal justice under the law but instead prefers blacks above all others.

And yet here I am writing another column about race. It’s very difficult to write about anything else when every issue has been racialized. Race and racism are inescapable.

There isn’t a word, thought, deed, symbol, piece of legislation, or news item that cannot be imbued with a racial angle when there’s a determined race hustler around.

Gun control? You betcha. Michael Moore, producer of the anti-second amendment “Bowling for Columbine,” racialized that issue in 2012. Said Moore:

“We’ve got over a quarter-billion guns in people’s homes. And they’re mostly in the suburbs and rural areas where there is virtually no crime and no murder. So why is that? What are they really afraid of? What do they think of — who’s going to break into the house? Do they think it’s little freckled-face Jimmy down the street? I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s who they’re afraid of. And it cuts down to the heart of our race problem that we still haven’t resolved.”

Moore’s argument is self-defeating. For starters, he’s essentially admitting the validity of the “more guns less crime” argument advanced by John Lott in his book by the same name. Furthermore, does it make any sense to believe that people who live far away from blacks are really afraid that blacks are going to break into their homes? No, those are the worries of urban dwellers, many of whom favor gun control because they don’t want blacks to have them. No matter, Michael Moore has declared the exercise of our right under the US Constitution to be a form of racist neuroticism. End of discussion.

The issue of illegal immigration (often called just “immigration”) has become so intertwined with race that it’s hard to believe that anyone ever saw it through any other lens. I recall being a soldier stationed in Germany in 2002 when I met a Bulgarian girl who flippantly mentioned that her best friend from Bulgaria was living as an illegal alien in Chicago. (Bulgarians are white Eastern Europeans, by the way.) I was shocked. At the time I didn’t consider any racial dimension to the illegal immigration issue. I didn’t care then, just as I don’t care now, what color the illegal immigrants are. They should come in the right way or not at all. It’s not a racial issue, it’s a rule of law issue.
 
But there I go again using those racial dog whistles. My “law and order” rhetoric is racist according to National Public Radio. During the 2016 campaign NPR ran an outlandish piece entitled “Is Trump’s Call For ‘Law and Order’ a Coded Racial Message?” Apparently only a racist could want that. Non-racists prefer lawlessness and disorder—which happens to be what Barack Obama has wrought.

Just when I thought that the constant racialization of everything couldn’t get any worse, it did.

Even I was taken aback when New York City legalized (or “decriminalized”) public urination because those kind of laws are raaaaaaacist!

“We know that the system has been really rigged against communities of color in particular,” city council member Melissa Mark-Viverito, a Democrat, told the New York Times. “So the question has always been, what can we do in this job to minimize unnecessary interaction with the criminal justice system, so that these young people can really fulfill their potential?”

My guess is that minorities are disproportionately punished for public urination because they disproportionately offend just as they disproportionately violate most other laws—except Asians of course, but I guess the system isn’t “rigged” against yellow people.

We’re living in a racial bonfire and our public officials just keep pouring gasoline on it. Speaking in defense of the Black Lives Matter movement, President Obama bemoaned the problem of the unfair treatment blacks receive at the hands of police. “The African-American community is not just making this up…It’s real.” Well yes they are making it up and Obama should acknowledge this if he wants to be called a leader. They made up the Ferguson narrative which was a complete fabrication. They tried to railroad the cops in Baltimore before the prosecution disintegrated in court. They made up a ridiculous story about a supposed unarmed black man in Charlotte, Keith Scott, reading a book in his car before being besieged by racist cops. The officer who shot him, by the way, was black. He also wasn’t charged with anything because he did nothing wrong.

 … But that’s what scummy race-baiters like Eric Holder do. They tell lies to agitate, to divide, to make this group of people resentful and that group of people defensive. There’s no excuse for it. Let’s hope that this kind of poison politics goes out with Obama.

Dinesh D’Souza had to pay: Try to imagine Michael Moore being arrested during Bush’s 2nd term and the ensuing outcry it would have caused on the Left

Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza pleaded guilty last week to charges of funneling campaign donations in excess of the legal limit through straw donors to the campaign of Senate hopeful Wendy Long.

Thus starts Benny Huang's Patriot Update report.

The D’Souza case has reeked from the beginning of reprisal from on high. His film “2016: Obama’s America” was the second highest grossing political documentary of all time, just behind Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Some have called D’Souza’s film the conservative answer to “Fahrenheit,” though I reject that comparison on the grounds that “2016” is actually truthful. But try to imagine Moore being arrested during Bush’s second term and the ensuing outcry it would have caused on the Left. Hollywood would be making movies for years to come portraying Moore as a political prisoner.

Some might argue that D’Souza is an innocent man who took a plea deal rather than going to trial and risking a harsher sentence. I doubt it, but if that’s the case he should have stuck to his guns.

Even in light of his recent guilty plea, the D’Souza case still seems fishy. In a society in which the application of the law is so often whimsical all prosecutions begin to take on the appearance of selectivity and even payback.

But wait a second, a dissenting voice might say, D’Souza did the crime and now he’s doing the time. How can that be political payback? The answer is that crimes have been so estranged from their punishments that they hardly seem even tangentially related. Yes, it appears that D’Souza broke the law but that in and of itself tells us little about why he’s in the docket.

There are all sorts of people breaking the law right now, in high places and low, who are being excused. Illegal aliens are living in our midst. Plenty of industries are employing them too, which is also illegal. CIA director David Petraeus divulged classified information to his biographer/mistress. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper perjured himself when he said that the NSA was not “wittingly” spying on Americans. Planned Parenthood is failing in their obligation as mandatory reporters by remaining silent about underage rape victims seeking abortions at their facilities. Both AG Eric Holder and IRS official Lois Lerner are in blatant contempt of Congress. Holder is also guilty of perjury, having testified before Congress that he only learned of Operation Fast and Furious “in the last few days,” implying that he had been in the dark about the gun-walking program. Officials at the IRS illegally disclosed classified tax information to the leftwing journalistic foundation ProPublica, as well as to the Human Rights Campaign and the Los Angeles Times.

Certain people are apparently above the law. Dinesh D’Souza isn’t one of those people, though he could be if he were one of the cool kids, that is, a progressive who receives invitations to all the right Georgetown parties. Instead he made a movie that examined Obama’s political education, including his anticolonialist roots and communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. So he had to pay.

Which isn’t to say that D’Souza should skate. The rule of law is a part of civilization’s foundation that has been steadily eroding for decades. Law breakers should face punishment and that includes D’Souza. I say this while still maintaining that the campaign finance law he broke is silly and constitutionally dubious. Laws that are unconstitutional should be overturned through judicial review, and laws that are bad policy should be repealed via the legislative process. Simply ignoring laws we don’t like is a slippery slope to anarchy.

Eric Holder, the highest law enforcement officer in the land, disagrees. He argues that his office has great “discretion” in enforcement. “There is a vast amount of discretion … that an attorney general has,” Holder said. “But that discretion has to be used in an appropriate way so that you’re acting consistent [sic] with the aims of the statute but at the same time making sure that you are acting in a way that is consistent with our values, consistent with the Constitution and protecting the American people.”

 A quick look at Holder’s track record, however, reveals that his exercise of discretion is not based on concern for values, the Constitution, or the American people. His idea of “discretion” should really be called bias. Holder’s DOJ only enforces laws it likes and only against people it doesn’t. By ignoring certain laws, it essentially nullifies them without actually having to go through the legislative process.

 … Dinesh D’Souza admitted to violating the law and for that he should pay. Yet his admitted guilt makes him no less of a victim of revanchist prosecution for a minor crime. As the old adage goes, “They’re framing a guilty man in there.”

Good-Bye, 007; Farewell, Lord Sinclair: RIP Sir Roger Moore (1927-2017)

A good obituary of Roger Moore appears in the Daily Mail thanks to Alexander Robertson and Marc Johnson — cheers to Sarah Hoyt who reveals that

HE WAS MY FIRST CRUSH WHEN I SAW HIM IN THE PERSUADERS.  I WAS TEN.

From the documentary, A Matter of Class:

Here is Roger Moore’s own story, as told by the famous actor himself. This profile also includes the recollections of colleagues and friends like Gregory Peck, Michael Caine, Tony Curtis, Carroll Baker and Maud Adams.

A couple of interesting quotes:

When Sean Connery played James Bond, he played it as the bad boy womanizer. And when Roger Moore played Bond, he played it as the man that — maybe — would marry the heroine …if the circumstances were right.
— Jackie Collins (26:53)

With women, I think the difference between Sean and Roger was that Sean macho'ed them into bed, and Roger loved [laughed?] them into it…
— Michael Caine

Meanwhile, Adrien Guilleminot has a long interesting commentary (en français) on the James Bond films in the Géo monthly.

With the heaviest of hearts, we must share the awful news that our father, Sir Roger Moore, passed away today. We are all devastated. pic.twitter.com/6dhiA6dnVg

— Sir Roger Moore (@sirrogermoore) May 23, 2017

The Daily Mail includes a selection of Sir Roger's quotes

IN HIS OWN SUAVE WORDS... 

Women have played a big part in my life on and off-screen and I think I’ve finally worked them out. I always make sure I have the last word. That word is ‘yes’.

‘It just gave me a stiff neck’ — explaining why taking Viagra left him neither shaken nor stirred.

Intelligence is my most endearing quality, according to [his wife] Kristina. That’s her Swedish sense of humour.

Being eternally known as Bond has no downside. People call me Mr Bond when we’re out and I don’t mind a bit. Why would I?

‘I had creaking knees and my leading ladies could have been my granddaughters’ — on his last appearance as James Bond in A View To A Kill, aged 57.

‘I lie all the time. I say different people, otherwise you’ll upset somebody’ — on his favourite Bond girl.

I’m one lucky b******. In my early acting years, I was told that to succeed you needed personality, talent and luck in equal measure. I contest that. For me it’s been 99 per cent luck. It’s no good being talented and not being in the right place at the right time.

The saddest thing about ageing is that most of my friends are now ‘in the other room’. I miss David Niven the most. I still can’t watch his films without shedding a tear.

Some of the things I’ve done in my life I’m ashamed of. We don’t talk about those, though. If I could give my younger self some advice it would be: ‘Grow up!’

I still have some of Bond’s suits in my wardrobe, but they don’t fit me now. In the 007 days I was so thin that if I turned sideways you could mark me absent.

My mum instilled in me the proverb: ‘I cried because I had no shoes, until I saw a man who had no feet.’ Those words are always with me and I’m a believer in showing kindness to others and not expecting repayment.

Medicine has always fascinated me and I’m a hypochondriac. It’s not that I wake up every morning and think: ‘I’m dying.’ At my age, I know I am.

Related: A 7-Year-Old Spots a Celebrity in an Airport, His Heart Sinking When Roger Moore's Autograph Does Not Read "James Bond"; What Happens Next?

Before 007, Roger Moore Starred with Tony Curtis in The Persuaders — Some Interesting Trivia on the TV Series, Courtesy of No Pasarán

As the Doctors Prepared Their Sharpened Instruments to Remove the Donor's Organs, Something… Twitched

…les chirurgiens pouvant pratiquer les prélèvements d'organes n'étaient pas immédiatement disponibles. Lorsqu'ils arrivent au bloc, leurs confrères pratiquent le massage cardiaque depuis une heure et trente minutes, sans résultat apparent. Mais au moment même où ils s'apprêtent à opérer, les médecins ont la très grande surprise de découvrir que leur patient présente des signes de respiration spontanée, une réactivité pupillaire et un début de réaction à la stimulation douloureuse.

Can you imagine what would would be the reaction should this type of scandal happen in the United States? (And rightly so.) A dead (sic) organ donor ready to have his vitals removed who starts twitching and moving! Isn't this the type of story Michael Moore would have used in his film Sicko?

But it happened to happen in a country with a health system that someone like Michael Moore — not to mention the French/European élites themselves — would present as an archetype model (or the closest thing to that) in contrast to the outrageous, heinous, and scandal-ridden national shame of the United States; and so, instead, Jean-Yves Nau begins his article by treating his Le Monde readers to an unimpassioned, passive, non-alarmist, philosophical debate.

C'est une affaire aux frontières de la vie et de la mort. Un dossier qui suscite émotion et réflexion chez les professionnels de la réanimation médicale et chez les responsables chargés de la bioéthique. Qui les oblige à se demander quels critères objectifs permettent de dire à partir de quand un malade sur lequel on pratique une réanimation peut être considéré comme un donneur d'organes. Sachant que ces organes, une fois greffés, permettront de prolonger l'espérance de vie d'autres malades.

What a difference 3 years, losing the Olympic games, a failed EU Constitutional referendum and a Presidential election make

Party like it's 2004. Not! No longer on their high horses, even Libération PropagandaStaffel doesn't give Michael Moore two thumbs up for Sicko.

Michael Moore praises the Socialized healthcare system that let 15,000 die from heat in 2003 (many waiting for ice water in hospital hallways).

Une "catastrophe sanitaire" et une "Omerta" : "L'hôpital a eu du mal à avouer ses bêtises"

"L'erreur, on peut la comprendre, même la pardonner, mais ce qui est inadmissible, c'est que rien n'a été fait pour soigner mon père. L'hôpital savait mais ne lui a donné aucune chance pour s'en sortir"

"On m'a menti" : Sandrine Blanchard has an article about the type of ultra-successful health care program that French government authorities didn't brag to Michael Moore about and that "Sicko" didn't tell the members of Michael Moore's fan club about. "Vous comprenez, dit [Jean-Luc Genay], l'hôpital Jean-Monnet a caché trop de choses, ils ont menti, alors on ne fait plus confiance."

Une "catastrophe sanitaire", a reconnu, le 8 juin, Roselyne Bachelot, la nouvelle ministre de la santé, dans un entretien accordé au Parisien. Un radiophysicien qui modifie le protocole de radiothérapie et se trompe dans le paramétrage, des médecins radiothérapeutes qui minimisent les plaintes des malades en les attribuant à des "complications classiques", des autorités locales qui ne mesurent pas l'ampleur de la crise... cette affaire comporte une chaîne incroyable d'erreurs et de défaillances.

…"Tout ça, c'est à cause d'un manque de personnel pour faire fonctionner ce genre d'appareil, pense-t-il. Les machines, elles sont de plus en plus sophistiquées mais il faut des hommes pour les utiliser."

…"C'est un péché d'orgueil de la part des médecins", considère M. Colombel. Mal suivis, peu écoutés, les malades "sont restés livrés à eux-mêmes", souligne l'IGAS. Solange Didierlaurent le confirme avec rage : "On a été abandonnés." Son père, âgé de 84 ans, est mort il y a quelques semaines.

…cette affaire dramatique est "révélatrice d'un dysfonctionnement dans la prise en charge de la souffrance des patients et d'un manque de démarche qualité". De son côté, M^e Welzer parle d'un "dossier emblématique" qui illustre "la chape de plomb qui prévaut sur les erreurs médicales".

More dissecting of the left's implicit assumption that any soldier who sees live fire immediately transforms into Mahatma Gandhi

Despite the left's implicit assumption that any soldier who sees live fire immediately transforms into Mahatma Gandhi, military members, by and large, are hawks

Ben Shapiro points out.

In truth, the left would regard military control of foreign policy as an unmitigated disaster. In the view of those like Michael Moore, the only good American soldiers are those who are unemployed or dead. Soldiers are only good if they aren't fighting, since America's wars are always wrong and America's soldiers are war criminals. (An added side benefit: If those soldiers never see combat, they, too, can never be foreign policy hawks -- service in non-active combat roles doesn't count in the leftist view.) Dead American soldiers are good since they can be used as pawns by foreign policy doves: body bag pictures and grieving mothers -- all of it undermines American morale and support for strong foreign policy. Dead soldiers can be cast as "victims," and their corpses cynically used as clubs against America's foreign policy. In holding itself up as the great defender of victimized military members, the left denigrates the courageous choices made by military members every day. Deciding to enter the armed services isn't a choice the left understands, but it is a choice -- an honorable, brave, praiseworthy choice. The leftist claim that soldiers are victims means that they are boobs and ignoramuses, incapable of choosing a lifestyle that risks death in defense of American freedoms.

Implicitly, then, the "chickenhawk" argument rejects all options aside from civilian pacifist control of American foreign policy. If all soldiers are victims, too stupid or ignorant to make up their own minds about joining the military, how can we trust them with foreign policy? And according to the "chickenhawk" argument, civilian hawks cannot control foreign policy. The only ones left are complete pacifist loons like Michael Moore and Arianna Huffington. How convenient!

And convenience is what the "chickenhawk" argument is really about. Pacifists don't want to discuss real foreign policy issues -- they want to call names. If you can't win over the populace at large, the only solution left is to stifle the argument. That's what "chickenhawk" is about. At the end of the day, "chickenhawk" is morally and intellectually chicken.