one particularly stupid white man

The Sydney Morning Herald reports from a news conference by spheroid propagandist and money-grubbing enemy collaborator Michael Moore (registration probably required).

At a press conference for foreign correspondents in New York on Tuesday, Moore said Mr Howard's decision to get “in bed” with Mr Bush was “disgraceful” and he hoped Australian voters, after seeing his film, would seek “regime change”.

“I get a lot of mail from Australia,” Moore said. “I probably get per capita more mail from Australia than from any other country. A lot of angry Australians. I never realised how angry and I don't think just because they are living in Australia, right?

“No, I mean, I realise, it's like, you're living on an island, but you're also a country, but you're also a continent. So I know there's a lot of confusion there, right?”

Apparently not nearly so much confusion as present in Moore's pastry-addled brain. Or, as Christopher Hitchens puts it:

I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible.

I'm very very late in linking to to Hitchens' review, which, in addition to demonstrating how Moore's presentation is both calumnious and incoherent, also shows just how much the filmmaker fails to grasp those thinkers he self-consciously emulates.

Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (…) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …

And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

When it comes to Orwell, Hitchens does have something of an advantage.

(SMH link via Tim Blair.)

MORE. Dave Kopel offers a work in progress: Fifty-six Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11. Well documented and link-rich.

AND MORE. Lileks. Enough said.

The Hitchens review is extremely insightful and well written (as usual). I've referenced it numerous times in conversations and emails with my left-leaning Moore fan friends. When doing so its fun to baffle them by mentioning his previous commentary, a scathing critique of Ronald Reagan titled: "Not Even a Hedgehog The stupidity of Ronald Reagan."

Yeah, for conservatives—especially religious conservatives—Hitch is an uneasy ally.

But on the war, I'm glad to have him on our side.