"It’s not often that my work gets a killer five-star review from an actual killer...."

"In my 35 years as a filmmaker, have I said or done anything that has implied I condone murder?... Throughout my adult life, I have repeatedly stated that I’m a pacifist. In fact, I have never struck another human in my life. Not even on the playground...."

Writes Michael Moore, in "A Manifesto Against For-Profit Health Insurance Companies/I hereby give you my Oscar-nominated Documentary on the Killer Health Insurance companies like United HealthCare —SICKO — for FREE… and let’s end and replace this so-called 'health care system' NOW" (MichaelMoore.com).

In the United States, we have a whopping 1.4 million people employed with the job of DENYING HEALTH CARE, vs only 1 million doctors in the entire country! That’s all you need to know about America. We pay more people to deny care than to give it....

"Cats and dogs have an outsize carbon footprint, mostly because of their carnivorous diet."

"If the pet food industry, which mainly feeds dogs and cats, were a country, it would rank as the 60th-highest greenhouse gas emitter, equivalent to the Philippines. Rabbits, by contrast, leave a minimal pawprint. They eat small amounts of hay and otherwise discarded vegetables. Their waste can be used as fertilizer in gardens...."

From "Why you should consider bunnies as your next pet/'It’s like having a vegan cat'" (WaPo).

From the comments, from someone who said she had a rabbit as a pet:

Stelter's plaint would mean more if he'd face up to how badly CNN's Sanjay Gupta fared when he sat down with Joe Rogan.

CNN’s @brianstelter: People trusting Joe Rogan over “newsrooms like CNN” are “a problem that’s much bigger than Spotify” pic.twitter.com/3RnifScIzk

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 1, 2022

 

Background: "CNN praises Dr. Sanjay Gupta for interview with Joe Rogan, buries viral moments/Gupta admitted his CNN colleagues should not have referred to Rogan's COVID treatment as 'horse dewormer'" (NY Post, October 15, 2021). That's something I blogged at the time, here: "In trying to present Sanjay Gupta as a science-is-real hero for talking to Joe Rogan for 3 hours, CNN laid the groundwork for fact-checkers to draw attention to all the most damaging omissions." 

ADDED: Writing this post and searching my own archive for Sanjay Gupta, I turned up a post from January 7, 2009, when President-Elect Obama was considering Gupta for the position of Surgeon General. There was debate at the time about the way Gupta had treated the filmmaker Michael Moore about his movie "Sicko."

Film clip for 9/11.

 

Don't be put off by the larger context here. I've clipped a section that is entirely the reaction of human beings on the street in New York City on that day. 

You can scroll out of my start and stop points and watch the entire movie. Moore has made it available free on YouTube. I have never watched the movie, but, with 20 years distance, I am considering watching it today.

"He thinks he's going to win, and I know he's an evil genius. And he's smarter than all of us. And I know people hate to hear that."

Moore is incredibly nervous:

 

Foreshadowing https://t.co/rcRr5igG3N

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) October 31, 2020

"Not sure if this was intentional...."

I split screened shots from Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of Will, with @realDonaldTrump’s video of his return from the hospital. Not sure if this was intentional, but it's eerily similar. His media team looking to history for inspiration, perhaps? pic.twitter.com/ZsZfHLttdL

— matt danzico (@mattdanzico) October 6, 2020

This made me look up old posts on this blog with the "Leni Riefenstahl" tag. I found "Is Michael Moore like Leni Riefenstahl?" from 2004 (the first year of this blog). Somebody else had compared Moore to Riefenstahl, and I said:

There are many huge differences between Moore and Leni Riefenstahl, though. Quite aside from the fact that she was working in support of Hitler and Moore is working against Bush (and Bush is no Hitler, despite some noise to the contrary), Riefenstahl would have snorted at the lack of artistry in Moore's work. She was all about beautiful and precise visual imagery. "Triumph of the Will" does not pound at you with voiceover assertions, it aims to lure you and seduce you with sequences of images. Moore's type of propaganda is far, far easier to resist, because it is immediately and constantly apparent that he is propagandizing. That is a lot fairer to the viewer: your resistance is instantly activated. You can decide what you want to think. What Riefenstahl did was incomparable.

And, from November 28, 2016, "As a filmmaker, Mr. Bannon, 63, has cited both the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and the left-wing documentarian Michael Moore as models." The post title is a quote from a NYT article. I wrote:

Why is Leni Riefenstahl is called a "propagandist" and Michael Moore is a "documentarian." The same word — whichever you choose — applies to both. Riefenstahl was unquestionably a great film artist, far more interested in film as art than Moore. See the excellent, nonpropagandistic documentary about her, "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl." Moore is an out-and-proud propagandist. What's wrong with that if your cause is good? Riefenstahl presents the problem of what's wrong with art if your cause is bad.

So... there you see what should be my answer to the tweet. To serve your own good ends, you can use aesthetic devices that have been used by others to accomplish evil. To give another example, Socialist Realism is a great style for poster art, even though it was created and used by the Soviet Union. 

Trump retweets Michael Moore.

Michael Moore: I‘m ‘Begging‘ Dems -- Don‘t Underestimate White Male Trump Supporter‘s ‘Rage,‘ ‘Emotion‘ https://t.co/IktLtIZNgZ via @BreitbartNews Well, he got it right in 2016?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 14, 2020

"The boogeyman plunging him and the family of his late wife into the very worst of memory holes is a conspiracy-theory-loving, twitchy-fingered and often shameless tweeter who also happens to be the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump."

Writes Kara Swisher in "Twitter Must Cleanse the Trump Stain/The president is spreading a vile conspiracy theory on the platform. Maybe Twitter should finally hold him to its rules" (NYT).

The "conspiracy theory" in question is that Joe Scarborough had something to do with the death of a woman long ago. The woman's husband wants some Trump tweets deleted. There's also the idea — pushed by Mika Brzezinski (Scarborough's wife) — that Twitter should throw Trump off the site entirely.

But what exactly did Trump tweet? The woman's husband is quoted saying that Trump "allud[ed] to the repeatedly debunked falsehood that my wife was murdered by her boss, former U.S. Rep. Joe Scarborough." Alluded! We need the text of the tweet, but, incredibly, it's not in this long column.

I had to look it up. I found: "A blow to her head? Body found under his desk? Left Congress suddenly? Big topic of discussion in Florida...and, he’s a Nut Job (with bad ratings). Keep digging, use forensic geniuses!"

One reason not to quote the tweet is that it's just asking questions, and we'd have to spend time going into a subject we don't know. The woman's husband implies that the questions have all been asked and answered, but all he says is that there is one "falsehood" — that Joe Scarborough murdered the woman (Lori Klausutis). But Trump didn't tweet that statement. Does the debunking of the idea that Joe Scarborough murdered the woman make the things Trump actually did tweet into the sort of statement Twitter should take down?

First, Trump just asked questions, but even if we reject that loophole — I'm only asking! — it is true, I take it, that the woman suffered a blow to her head, that her body was found under his desk, that he left Congress suddenly, that it's a big topic of discussion in Florida, and that "Morning Joe" has bad ratings. And it's nothing but inane opinion to call Joe Scarborough "a Nut Job." Trump is called things like that constantly on Twitter, so there's no way there's a Twitter policy against calling famous people mentally ill.

I just said I have rig fatigue, but here are Democrats saying their own party is rigged, so that's kind of interesting.

From The Hill:

The DNC on Friday said it would drop the donor threshold for the Feb. 19 primary debate in Nevada. The move could open the door for Bloomberg, a billionaire who is refusing any donations to his White House bid, to win a spot at the event.

Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) presidential campaign ripped the DNC over its new debate qualifications, saying it is supporting “a rigged system.”

“To now change the rules in the middle of the game to accommodate Mike Bloomberg, who is trying to buy his way into the Democratic nomination, is wrong. That’s the definition of a rigged system,” said Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Sanders’s campaign....

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang [tweeted] "The DNC changing its debate criteria to ignore grassroots donations seems tailor-made to get Mike Bloomberg on the debate stage in February...."...

Businessman Tom Steyer [said]... “changing the rules now to accommodate Mike Bloomberg and not changing them in the past to ensure a more diverse debate stage is just plain wrong..." 

PLUS: "I watched the debate in Iowa here two weeks ago -- the all white debate -- and the fact that the Democratic, the DNC will not allow Cory Booker on that stage, will not allow Julian Castro on that stage, but they are going to allow Mike Bloomberg on the stage? Because he has a billion f*cking dollars!"

AND: It's not just changing the rules for the debates: "DNC members discuss rules change to stop Sanders at convention/The talks reveal rising anxiety over the Vermont senator's momentum on the eve of voting" (Politico).

"For some Democrats, it’s a scenario they say they’ve dreaded and feared: waking up to the reality that the 78-year-old Vermont senator, an independent who has reshaped party policy and promised to bring a revolution to Washington, has a real shot..."

"... at capturing the nomination. For the Sanders campaign, it’s been part rallying cry, part admonition: At events across Iowa this weekend, the candidate and his top surrogates repeatedly warned of a coming fight with forces that would try to stop them, at points celebrating the clash, at points cautioning supporters to stay positive.... 'In these last eight days, things are gonna get crazy,' Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday. 'I don't even know what's gonna happen. And that's why we've gotta stay focused and committed as possible. And let's make it joyous, y'all... Let's make it joyous.'... Michael Moore... told supporters, 'The knives are out. The rich woke up this morning, and they read these articles and they're like, "Oh no, oh no, what are we going to do?" So we'll see what they're going to do.'... The 11 candidates in the race have largely declined to attack Sanders directly...."

From BuzzFeedNews.

ADDED: Here's how the new Iowa polls look today, with Bernie spiking. Look at that, and then answer this:

In this last week, will we see the other candidates attack Bernie directly?

No, they'll play nice and keep the attacks aimed at Trump.

The indirect attacks will become more obviously against Bernie.

At least some of them will openly attack Bernie.

They'll all jump on Bernie.

 

pollcode.com free polls

Michael Moore leads the way in the "stop Warren" effort... but you have to listen to his podcast to get the details.

I said I wanted to do a separate post about whatever it was Michael Moore said that got Drudge to link with the teaser "MICHAEL MOORE: She Stuck Knife in Back...," but on clicking, I see it's a whole podcast...

Elizabeth & Bernie have appeared in my films. I love them both. Why Elizabeth chose to stick a knife in Bernie’s back is beyond me. At a time when job #1 is to remove Trump, how did this help? My new RUMBLE podcast “The Sad Downfall of Elizabeth Warren.” https://t.co/uFwOFNka9U

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) January 15, 2020

... so that's not blog ready. That's a side road I won't take the off-ramp for. I will continue down the highway and go for the debate transcript. I've already done my close analysis of 16 seconds of the after-debate gesturing between Bernie and Warren, and what I really want to do is to see what they said about the miniature controversy that's been stirred up over whether Bernie ever said that a woman cannot beat Trump.

Just as I have no time — well, really, patience — for a podcast right now, I could not put up with sitting through the 2-hour debate last night. I DVR'd it, and I started to watch it, but it didn't begin until 8, and I'd already maxed out my TV-watching capacity on the "Jeopardy!" "Greatest of All Time" show and the Trump Milwaukee rally, both of which started at 7. I watched Trump until there was enough lead time on the "Jeopardy!" recording to skip the ads, then watched "Jeopardy!," then turned to the debate. The first question was so idiotic — an open invitation to just say why you're "best prepared to be commander-in-chief" — that I gave up on pushing myself to watch.

"I refuse to participate in post-racial America. I refuse to say because we elected Obama that suddenly that means everything is ok, white people have changed."

"White people have not changed. Two-thirds of all white guys voted for Trump. That means anytime you see three white guys walking at you, down the street towards you, two of them voted for Trump. You need to move over to the other sidewalk because these are not good people that are walking toward you. You should be afraid of them."

From "Michael Moore: ‘White guys who voted for Trump ‘are not good people. You should be afraid of them’" (Red State).

"Lemon and Cuomo reenact Trump's 13 seconds of silence."

This made me think of the way George W. Bush was treated for how he reacted on 9/11 when he was told that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. Interestingly, it's very hard to get to video clips and mockery of the ex-President (by Googling). The top hit on my search was "Bush explains slow reaction to September 11 attacks" (Reuters)("Former President George W. Bush says his apparent lack of reaction to the first news of the September 11 2001 attacks was a conscious decision to project an aura of calm in a crisis").

But for many years, an extremely negative interpretation of his silence prevailed. Eventually, I found this clip from the Michael Moore documentary:


George W. Bush Reads 'My Pet Goat' in 'Fahrenheit 9/11' from MMFlint on Vimeo.

ADDED: Writing this post, I wondered whatever happened to Michael Moore. I see that The A.V. Club a few weeks ago had "15 years later, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 remains essential American agitprop":

One of the most striking things about watching Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2019 is realizing just how deeply, uncomfortably resonant it is with our current state of the union. Within the first half hour, it depicts a venal, intellectually bankrupt administration led by a preening dimwit as he spends most of his time in the White House golfing and avoiding responsibility....

But even without the striking parallels to our current fiasco of an administration, Fahrenheit 9/11 remains a potent and stirring work, cinema with the ability to boil the blood and activate righteous indignation in the viewer. True, Moore’s reputation has diminished somewhat in recent years. ... A lot of this has to do with his self-aggrandizing persona, a loudmouthed man-on-the-street type...

He means Moore.... though it sounds like Trump. Isn't that Moore's problem now?! George W. Bush had the dullness off which the exuberantly expressive Moore could bounce. That's the style Trump himself displays. Ask the other Bush, Jeb.

ALSO: Is Michael Moore shadow banned on Twitter? I've followed him for a long time, but I never see his tweets in my timeline. When I go to his Twitter page, I see that he has been putting things up, maybe not every day, but a few things each week.

Acting!

Michael...WE LOST

What more could we have done? We don’t have the Senate or the Presidency.

What more can we do for god sakes?

We should focus on the midterms but stop criticizing without a real world solution.

And frankly what were you doing? https://t.co/Gsg0YX26Wy

— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) October 4, 2018

"I operate as if he is a two-term Trump. I have to. If you think any other way..."

"... you are guaranteeing that whoever is going to run against him will lose.... I think the man is an evil genius and he was able to outsmart the smartest person ever to run for president... He figured out how to win by losing the election. How did that happen? Historians are going to deal with this for years to come."

Says Michael Moore (who predicted in 2016 that Trump would win). Moore also said he thinks Trump is the author of that anonymous NYT op-ed: "Trump wrote it. Trump or one of his minions wrote it.... He's the master distractor. He's the king of the misdirect. If we have learned anything by now, it's that he does things to get people to turn away. Let me give you the line in there that is most identifiable that he wants the public to believe. It's the line that says, 'Don't worry, adults are in the room.' That's the idea, to get us to calm down and look away from what he's really doing."

It's the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx.

I'm not seeing a lot of celebrating, but here's Michael Moore:

Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx! You believed that everyone should have a seat at the table & that the greed of the rich would eventually bring us all down. You believed that everyone deserves a slice of the pie. You knew that the super wealthy were out to grab whatever they could

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) May 5, 2018

The mainstream media stories I'm seeing tend to be about the Chinese statue: "Karl Marx’s German home town celebrates his 200th birthday with a Chinese statue — and a struggle" (WaPo):

The unveiling of a two-ton Chinese-funded sculpture to honor the German philosopher on the 200th anniversary of his birth brought scads of tourists to Trier, where his life began. While here, they took in Marx lectures, toured the Marx family home and bought vast quantities of marked-up Marx souvenirs....

The city is split over whether a democratic nation such as Germany should be erecting monuments that are paid for, designed and built by an authoritarian one such as China. The divide spilled into the streets Saturday with dueling demonstrations for and against the monolith, forming a noisy backdrop to the statue’s official dedication....

Not so long ago, Germany was tearing down statues of Marx. An icon of communist East Germany, his likeness was scrubbed from many a town square after the country’s reunification under democracy and capitalism in 1990....

I went back to Paul Johnson's book "Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky" and reread the chapter on Marx. Excerpt:

His angry egoism had physical as well as psychological roots. He led a peculiarly unhealthy life, took very little exercise, ate highly spiced food, often in large quantities, smoked heavily, drank a lot, especially strong ale, and as a result had constant trouble with his liver. He rarely took baths or washed much at all. This, plus his unsuitable diet, may explain the veritable plague of boils from which he suffered for a quarter of a century. They increased his natural irritability and seem to have been at their worst while he was writing Capital. ‘Whatever happens,’ he wrote grimly to Engels, ‘I hope the bourgeoisie as long as they exist will have cause to remember my carbuncles.’ The boils varied in numbers, size and intensity but at one time or another they appeared on all parts of his body, including his cheeks, the bridge of his nose, his bottom, which meant he could not write, and his penis. In 1873 they brought on a nervous collapse marked by trembling and huge bursts of rage.

Unwittingly!

"Michael Moore participated in anti-Trump rally allegedly organized by Russians" (Fox News).

(If that link fails, I'm going to have to stop linking to Fox News.)

The post title is a witting allusion to the latest indictment in the Mueller investigation.

And let me quote Trump's best tweet one more time: Get smart America!

"One year into the Donald Trump administration, Oklahomans generally seem happy with the results, even if they don’t always appreciate the president’s style."

"'I thought he would really be good for the economy, and I feel like he’s got that off to a good start,' said Sage Smith of Claremore, who was interviewed near downtown Tulsa last week. 'A lot of people feel like his antics on Twitter go a little too far,' Smith said. 'It doesn’t bother me that much. But, being president, he probably shouldn’t do some of that.'"

The view from Oklahoma, recounted in "'He's done some amazing things': One year into his presidency, Trump remains a favorite in Oklahoma" (Tulsa World).

Why is Althouse reading Tulsa World? Is she traveling? No, I stumbled into Oklahoma as a result of the images searches done for the previous post, which got me to "Table Talk: Tulsa's 'Rosie the Riveter' to speak at VFW brunch" ("The 94-year-old [Marina] Metevelis was 16 when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. She applied for a job at the Wichita (Kansas) aircraft plant where B-17 Flying Fortresses were manufactured, and she became a riveter her senior year in high school").

That's from October 2016, back when TV news-talk-show people were telling us the election was over, and Hillary had won...



Confession: I rewatch videos like that frequently.

AND: Michael Moore's "5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win" was the most prescient thing anyone had to say before the election. I think people thought he was just kidding and trying to be provocative to get attention.

Sloppy Steve.

I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2018

Trump nicknames, ranked (best to worst):
Lyin' Ted
Rocket Man
Little Rocket Man
Little Marco
Sloppy Steve
Crooked Hillary
Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd
Cryin' Chuck Schumer
Low Energy Jeb
Failing New York Times
Psycho Joe
Liddle Bob Corker
Pocahontas

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) January 5, 2018

BREAKING: Bannon gets his Forever Name: Sloppy Steve https://t.co/CnULrpiaxQ

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) January 5, 2018

ADDED:

Wait! @realDonaldTrump - On Oct 28 you gave ME the nickname “Sloppy Michael Moore” in one of your crazed tweets. Using the same nickname for TWO people...another sign of dementia! Unfit to serve!

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) January 5, 2018

AND: "Sloppy" is good because Bannon looks extremely sloppy and there's also the idea that it was sloppy to leak so much (ick, bodily fluids) and to be so inattentive to what is true and what it means to be loyal.

The main problem is that Trump already used "sloppy" for Michael Moore.

With 2 data points on "sloppy," I get the impression that he feels disgust toward men who are fat and don't discreetly encapsulate the fat in a standard business suit (as he himself does).

"While not at all presidential I must point out that the Sloppy Michael Moore Show on Broadway was a TOTAL BOMB and was forced to close. Sad!"

A classic Trump tweet.

Some people — including me — find this hilarious, especially the "While not at all presidential," but some — I'm sure — are flummoxed. If it's not at all presidential, why the hell are you saying it?! That's so wrong.

But there's value in "a little bit of wrongness," as we discussed here.