Why does Michael Moore get criticized for punking right wingers?

[RadioRaheem84]

I just finished a ridiculous anti-Michael Moore documentary by a typical chubby goatee'd right wing schlub. You know the type, with the douchy smile and the Oakley sunglasses, buzzcut, extremely high sense of morality, and all that jazz.

Anyways, he is upset because Moore punks a lot of right wingers and creates a sort of sideshow in order to get them to admit their repulsive views or to force reality out of them when otherwise in a normal interview they would've bullshitted their way throughout.

One scene in the pseudo-documentary tries to nail Moore by "taking apart" his famous scene in Bowling for Columbine where he gets a free hunting rifle by opening up a bank account. Moore called ahead of time to request the gun, saying that he wanted it there that day, when it usually takes a couple of weeks. The bank granted his request. Moore goes to to the bank, signs up for the account, and gets his gun the same day. The lady who operated the branch said in her defense that the gun was in a vault three hundred miles away and had to be brought to the bank. Even with all of the "hard-hitting" "taking apart" the dumb director took to make the scene he never fully dismissed Moore's initial claim that one can get a free gun at a bank by opening up an account. This is mentioned in the last minute of the scene and the bank managers just laugh it off as if it's not relevant.

So there you have it. These right wingers are picking on Moore for creating an avenue in which people will get caught for the scams they've been pulling for years and he gets discredited for creating a scenerio in which they'll get caught on camera? Have they not watched his tv show in the earl 90s? It was a brilliant show in which Moore used this same tactic to lampoon the utter absurdity of the system! But oh, it's deception, because he lied to the poor union-busting boss or the Republican Congressman who doesn't mind shipping his constituents kids to war but not his own.
According to the right wing filmmaker these lies shouldn't be tolerated to create a "false" impression of "reality". Reality being that America is a wonderful, unrelenting fighter for the little people, a nation where anything is possible. :rolleyes:

I am hoping this thread will open up a discussion on how the right wing use an absurd standard of morality to defend and uphold power. How they have created a reality so absurd that it would be thought of as crazy to discredit.

[RED DAVE]

An obvious example is the entire Right bullshit about the family. Check out the private lives of their leaders: they make Bill Clinton look like a moralist. Newt Gingrich told his wife he was divorcing her while she was in the hospital with cancer. Bob Dole divorced his wife who helped him through school writing for him because he had a crippled arm. John McCain ... . The list goes on. They use petit-bourgeois morality, which they ignore, as a club to hit the Left over the head with.

RED DAVE

[Raightning]

Reminder this is the same right-wing who created the "ACORN scandal", in which they didn't merely provide a good setup, they made a propaganda piece Goebbels would be proud of including such wonders as:

* Going to literally DOZENS of ACORN branches, where they were repeatedly told to fuck off essentially.
* Selectively editing filming to make even the one branch that didn't immediately tell them that look like they were gung-ho supporting them.
* Interspersing footage of the 'investigators' in full "pimp" regalia to make it look like ACORN were quite willingly helping a man who looked like he belonged in a 70s movie at the villain.

They're absolutely pathetic. But if you want a stronger counter-argument than that, the thing to point out is that it doesn't matter if Moore lied to get the situation set up - the people caught quite willingly expressed that sentiment.

Oh, sure, they'd never say it publically. But isn't that the whole bloody point? What Moore is doing in those cases is brining their true feelings to the forefront - he's cutting through the PR image and all that rubbish and just getting their true views out. It isn't even a matter of trapping them, like an interviewer trying to squeeze an answer out of a politician; it's essentially lying not to force them to say something they don't want to, but to relax them and make them think they can say what they want to without getting in trouble for it.

Ask the right-wingers whether they believe the Democrats are expressing their forthright and true opinions with what they say in speeches about, say, HCR. They'll tell you no (and they'd probably be right for the most part, but that's another matter). Then, ask them this: if you accept that those politicians may hide their true feelings, isn't it true that politicians on the (further) right would do the same? Watch them either stumble or engage in massive cognitive dissonance.

You don't even have to enage them on whether their bourgeoise morality is a bullpile or not. You just need to point out their hypocrisy

[CartCollector]

You don't even have to enage them on whether their bourgeoise morality is a bullpile or not. You just need to point out their hypocrisyVery true. If Moore sent a woman to a bank to get a free abortion you can bet that they wouldn't have complained.

[Wolf Larson]

Micheal Moore has himself created an absurd hypocritical standard of morality to defend and uphold Democrat power. Because Micheal Moore is a talking head for capitalist liberals. He, at one point not long ago, was tripping all over himself to get Obama in office. His latest film was a joke of a partisan hack job blaming the crisis on republicans in lieu of capitalism itself. You see, he'll do a documentary exposing some of the more generic problems with NAFTA/CAFTA and then go and support Obama who has promised to keep the NAFTA free trade agreements going. Then he'll come out against the Iraq war as ll other liberals did but ignore the FACT Obama's chief of staff rigged a pro Iraq war congress in 2006 well after the fact we all knew the war was bullshit. He also ignored Obama's rhetoric surrounding Afghanistan and at one point , as an excuse, said Obama just had to sound tough for centrist voters.

Micheal Moore is a liberal. Fuck him and the apologetic liberals he churned out. Most of his so called films are lame and don't even expose the truth of the matter from a socialist perspective. Where was he when Obama was forcing this corporate private health law down our throats? In his latest film where was the condemnation of the Obama administration facilitating more Wall St bail outs? He's a fraud and he knows it which is why he's tried to salvage his fake image as of late by criticizing Obama. Too late. Micheal Moore is a part of the problem not a part of the solution. He feeds the misinformed ignorant and sycophantic partisan divide. He's a democrat.

[¿Que?]

Nice!

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

I think Wolf Larson is a little too hard on Moore. Here is a more balanced review of his latest film:


Capitalism: A Love Story

Culture Column by Pat Stack, March 2010

Over 20 years ago a friend said to me, "You really ought to catch this film Roger & Me. It's by a guy called Michael Moore and it's a very funny documentary about the closing of the GM motor works in Flint, Michigan."

This sounded most unlikely to me. Documentaries were rarely funny at the time, and the subject matter didn't seem to lend itself to humour. I went expecting something worthy but probably dull.

How surprised I was. Moore's film was indeed funny, angry, unusual and utterly devastating all at one time.

At a time when the US airwaves seemed to be increasingly taken over by nasty, talentless shock jocks, along came this filmmaker, talking about the plight of the poor, the greed of bosses, the corruption of government and the resistance of workers, and doing so in ways we just weren't familiar with. The film made such an impact on me that I have never forgotten even trivial details about Flint such as that its most famous son was late-1950s pop singer Pat Boone.

I remember thinking at the time that this was a great, but very personal, tale about the destruction of one man's home town, the factory where his father worked and the community he grew up in. This was surely a one-off.

How wrong can you be? Moore has been with us ever since. His films are record-breaking best-selling documentaries and he has won awards at Cannes and an Oscar. His output has remained highly provocative, entertaining and pertinent to his times.

Apparently angrier as the years have passed, his targets have been all the right ones: gun control (Bowling for Columbine), George W Bush and the warmongering neo-cons (Fahrenheit 9/11), the US healthcare system, or lack of it, (Sicko) and many more.

In the process he has become the b�te noire of the US right. Huge amounts of time and money have been put aside to discredit him, yet his standing simply grows.

Up until now though, Moore's attacks on the system have tended to be this or that flaw in it. His latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, is surely his most ambitious yet. He takes on the whole system, and does so in the usual humorous, entertaining and yet devastating manner. Even for a seasoned anti-capitalist like myself there were moments that left me truly speechless - for instance, the tale of the privatised juvenile detention centre and the corrupt judges just beggared belief, as did the insurance scam that allows businesses to make millions in profit from the deaths of their workers.

Moore paints a picture of the colossal growth in disparity between rich and poor, the destruction of lives, livelihoods, homesteads and the dignity of ordinary working people. He does so with historical flashbacks, visits to occupying factory workers and activists resisting home repossessions. This is a film of anger, but also of resistance and hope.

Has Moore finally crossed the line into revolutionary socialism? It would be lovely to say he has, but Moore remains firmly rooted in the traditions of US radicalism.

It is an honourable, but flawed, tradition. It takes as its starting point the radicalism of the American Revolution, the founding fathers, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

It is a tradition that constantly seeks to show that the right has distorted the dreams of the revolution and betrayed the founding fathers. It is a sentiment that can be heard in the songs of Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen, the speeches of Ralph Nader and the writings of John Steinbeck.

It is most clearly, and perhaps sadly, articulated in Moore's film when he harks back to Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal. Moore does not believe everything was right about the US he grew up in (he is acutely aware of the plight of blacks and the Vietnam War), but he does believe things only got truly rotten with the arrival of the man he sees as the corporations' puppet, Ronald Reagan.

Thus like most US radicals he ends up being completely torn by the question of the Democrats. When Al Gore stood against George W Bush in 2000, Moore supported Nader as an independent for president. Four years later he publicly begged him not to stand against John Kerry. In this film he tends to skate over the Clinton administration and sees in the election of Barack Obama the rejection by the populace of corporate America. Unsurprisingly therefore he was hugely enthusiastic at Obama's election, yet you sense the radical's unease as to where it may all end.

Therefore his solutions to capitalism are essentially electoral ones, backed by struggle and popular resistance. This leaves a big gulf between him and revolutionary socialism. But, for all that, he is one of the good guys. We who stand in the revolutionary tradition are all the better for having him and his films as weapons against all that's rotten in the world.

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11209

[Meridian]

I agree with the above review, in that the movie was generally positive for our movement. In fact, I think very much so.

I saw it with friends who are not explicitly revolutionary, and it caught me off guard with its surprisingly radical message... For example, the International (in some sort of jazzed up version?) being the outro song, was a nice touch. Anyways, it served as a 'take-off point' for a discussion of socialism and capitalism following the viewing. I think many people were caught unaware of the strong anti-capitalist message here, while the viewers were most likely already leftists (by watching a Moore movie). That means it may reach potential revolutionaries.

[¿Que?]

About Capitalism, I didn't like the part where he equated Christian values with anti-capitalism. He clearly wasn't addressing anyone remotely familiar with Weber.