Kevin Drum: Ethical Suckhole
I don’t know what the upside is to pre-emptively excusing the latest squeezings of the traitor Michael Moore, but that’s what sorry, sorry apologists do:
It’s true that I wish Michael Moore were a wee bit more scrupulous with the facts in his films, but I sometimes wonder if he doesn’t insert random distortions into his movies deliberately. With rare exceptions, after all, they’re small things that could just as easily have been presented correctly without damaging his narrative at all. But the end result is the kind of publicity money can’t buy, and it’s the sweetest kind of publicity of all: the kind that’s subsidized by his enemies, who helpfully boost ticket sales by furiously denouncing his films for weeks on end.
Got that? Lying is a respectable tactic. A marketing tactic used throughout a propaganda film to generate free publicity and sell tickets. Of course, there must also come a tipping point with such a scheme where the lies and manipulations become so numerous that the marketing tactic gives way to a general impression that the “filmmaker” is a lying cocksucker who hates his country.
Which brings me around to Kevin Drum.
Why are you such a partisan hack that you would try to mitigate the work of a traitor?
As one of my favorite characters from The West Wing once said, you’re not Satan —you’re the guy who runs into the 7-11 to get Satan a pack of cigarettes.
