{"id":6805,"date":"2009-12-01T13:54:24","date_gmt":"2009-12-01T18:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=6805"},"modified":"2009-12-01T18:38:33","modified_gmt":"2009-12-01T23:38:33","slug":"new-war-president-meet-old-fraud-filmmaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=6805","title":{"rendered":"New War President? Meet Old Fraud Filmmaker!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Moore descends into madness<\/a>\u00a0in this open letter to the President re his Afganistan speech tonight:<\/p>\n

Dear President Obama,<\/p>\n

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point\u00a0[at 8PM this evening] and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, “we elected you for the pork; forget about all that “defending the nation” BS, Mr. President.<\/p>\n

Of course, Moore is being just as disingenuous and selective and context-challenged here as he’s been in every single one of his movies.\u00a0 And who’s busted him on it?\u00a0 That noted right-wing tool Crooks and Liars<\/em>:<\/p>\n

In an open letter to President Obama<\/a>, Moore on Monday seems to have forgotten candidate Obama’s aggressive stance<\/a> towards Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan:<\/p>\n

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.<\/em><\/p>\n

But at almost every turn in the 2008 campaign (for example, starting at about the 17:30 mark in the video above), it was Barack Obama who pledged to “finish the fight in Afghanistan<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

In August 2007<\/a>, as you’ll recall, Senator Obama received a hellstorm of criticism for his statements regarding attacking Al Qaeda bases in Pakistan. As part of a broad – and forceful – foreign policy speech on August 1, Obama rightly took the Bush administration to task for the failure of its “no safe havens<\/a>” doctrine in Pakistan. Regarding the Al Qaeda sanctuary safely nestled along the Afghan border, Obama declared:<\/p>\n

“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, Obama has always<\/em> – at least, in front of politically-mixed crowds – parroted the lefty conventional wisdom that while Iraq was wrong wrong wrong, Afghanistan, the “Real War”, was right right right.<\/p>\n

But facts have always been stupid things to Michael Moore.<\/p>\n

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That’s the way General Washington insisted it must be. That’s what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. “You’re fired!,” said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Put another way, Moore would have Obama fire the guy who he hired to replace the first guy he fired.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which may be<\/span> is the way the prima-donna Moore runs his production company, but it’s really not good leadership.<\/p>\n

Of course, everything Moore doesn’t know about leadership is matched by his ignorance of history:<\/p>\n

So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea — “Let’s invade Afghanistan!” Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It wasn’t “the Soviet generals’ idea”, and it wasn’t anywhere close to a dispositive nail in the USSR’s coffin; they absorbed 25 million dead in World War Two, and murdered at least 40 million of their own on top of that, and that led them to the peak, <\/em>not nadir, of their power.\u00a0 It wasn’t Afghanistan that led to the USSR’s fall; it was contemporaneous political changes the regime had to adopt to try, and eventually fail, to survive in the face of Reagan’s aggressive containment.<\/p>\n

Afghanistan’s nickname is the “Graveyard of Empires.” If you don’t believe it, give the British a call. I’d have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[MOORE’S LEGIONS OF FORMER EMPLOYEES:\u00a0 “Then you must have his Yahoo IM Chat handle, you tyrannical jagoff”]<\/p>\n

But the Soviet reference is fully appropriate – because although this fisking has gone on a bit already, it’s really just a tangent.\u00a0 The real meat – or, given the subject matter, suet – of this post follows.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Moore:<\/p>\n

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you’re doing it so you can “end the war”) will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you’ve said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone — and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout “tea bag!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“The haters”.<\/p>\n

My high school history teacher, a Vietnam-era veteran, noted that one of the most important things he learned in basic and infantry training was that the enemy was not, in fact, human.\u00a0 He was a “Gook”, a “Slope”, or whatever it took to believe that you weren’t really shooting, bayonetting, grenading or shelling a human, but a not-quite-human caricature embodying everything you were trying to fight.<\/p>\n

In the thirties, when Stalin wanted to soften society up for a purge, his PR minions – sort of the 1930’s versions of “Media Matters” and the “Center for “Independent” Media” – would popularize a simple, 1-2 syllable, endlessly-repeatable terms to refer to those to be purged.\u00a0 Not specifically<\/em>, as a very general rule, although Stalin did purge plenty of specific people and groups.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But during the purges of the ’30s, when Stalin’s paranoid imagination told him that his economic plans were being sabotaged, he sent his minions far and wide denouncing “wreckers” – people who were ostensibly sabotaging the Soviet economy in ways big and small.\u00a0 The idea, of course, wasn’t to actually find people who were throwing monkey-wrenches into turbine assemblies or pouring sugar into diesel tanks.\u00a0 The idea was to have an instant, memorable, chantable term to use as a cover for every <\/em>abuse they were ready to inflict.\u00a0 And so Stalin and his minions denounced as “wreckers” everyone who got in his way; it wasn’t that he needed help dehumanizing his opponents – but it certainly made it easier for the rest of society to go along with it.<\/p>\n

Moore is onto the same thing, here (emphasis added):<\/p>\n

Don’t be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters<\/strong>. They<\/strong> will not stop until this country is torn asunder<\/strong> and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor<\/strong>. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right<\/strong> still wouldn’t be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio<\/strong> and television because no matter what you do, you can’t change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.<\/p>\n

The haters<\/strong> were not the ones who elected you, and they can’t be won over by abandoning the rest of us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Leaving aside that the independents – who were <\/em>the ones that elected him – will be re-hristened as “haters” for commiting the apostasy of forsaking “The One”, do you see what Moore is doing here?<\/p>\n

One facile, hate-enabling, defamatory catch phrase after another.\u00a0 Those of us who dissent from Obama aren’t people who disagree; we “hate” him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So overwrought with hatred for “haters” is Jabba The Mike that he forgets exactly who he, himself, is:<\/p>\n

All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Really, Jabba?\u00a0 You endured this?\u00a0 Your “rights” were “suspended?”<\/p>\n

As bad as things were for the GOP from 2004 through Obama’s election, I could always give thanks for one thing; Michael Moore was not on my <\/em>side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Moore descends into madness\u00a0in this open letter to the President re his Afganistan speech tonight: Dear President Obama, Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point\u00a0[at 8PM this evening] and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stupid","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6805"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6816,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6805\/revisions\/6816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}