Michael Moore just has to blow off steam every so often, even if it means ignoring the pain suffered by victims and using the opportunity of their tragedy to rant again about his Stalinesque politics.
Friday night, just hours after the massacre in Newtown, Conn., Moore spoke at an event in New York City honoring Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1975. This conferring of merit on the same man who admitted he shot at the agents fit well with Moore’s rant, in which he said first that we are a warlike people:
Other countries, I mean, they have their crazy people, and they have people that–there have been shootings and killings in Norway, in France and in Germany. But there haven’t been 61 mass killings like there have been in this country just since Columbine. Sixty-one mass shootings in this country. I like to say that I sort of agree with the NRA when they say, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” except I would just modify that a bit and say, “Guns don’t kill people, Americans kill people,” because that’s what we do. We invade countries. We send drones in to kill civilians. We’ve got five wars going on right now where our soldiers are killing people–I mean, five that we know of. We are on the short list of illustrious countries who have the death penalty. We believe it’s OK to kill you when you’ve committed a crime.
Then he made a sharp turn farther to the left and attacked health insurance companies:
And then we have all the other forms of violence in this country that we don’t really call violence, but they are acts of violence. When you–when you make sure that 50 million people don’t have health insurance in your country and that, according to the congressional study that was done, 44,000 people a year die in America for the simple reason that they don’t have health insurance, that’s a form of murder. That murder is being committed by the insurance companies. When you evict millions of peoples–millions of people from their homes, that’s an act of violence. That’s called a home invasion.
Finally, he evoked the specter of Occupy Wall Street:
All the wrong people are in prison in this country. I can’t believe we’re just standing blocks away from the biggest criminal operation that this country has ever seen, right down that street [on Wall Street], and not one of them has gone to prison for what they’ve done. When you have eliminated so many millions of jobs, when you’ve ruined communities like mine, Flint, Michigan, you have killed people, because–because having seen firsthand the effects of these corporate decisions–the alcoholism, the drug abuse, divorce, suicide, all the social problems that go along with this act of violence–but we don’t call it violence, and no one’s ever arrested for it–I think it’s a real shame. And frankly, as an American, this is not how I want to be remembered.
Why don’t we remember Moore the way he would prefer, with his own words. First, implying that the reason we have gun violence is because we believe in God and go to church:
I think it’s safe to say we’re not the only ones with a violent past or a penchant for genocide. Hello, Germany! That’s right I’m talking about you and your history, from the Huns to the Nazis, just loving a good slaughter (as did the Japanese, and the British who ruled the world for hundreds of years – and they didn’t achieve that through planting daisies). And yet in Germany, a nation of 80 million people, there are only around 200 gun murders a year. So those countries (and many others) are just like us – except for the fact that more people here believe in God and go to church than any other Western nation.
Because we are racist:
Why are most of these guns in white suburban and rural homes? Maybe we should fix our race problem and our poverty problem (again, number one in the industrialized world) and then maybe there would be fewer frustrated, frightened, angry people reaching for the gun in the drawer.
Comparing the Iraqis who killed our soldiers to the heroes of the American Revolution:
The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not “insurgents” or “terrorists” or “The Enemy.” They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.
Slandering the NRA:
The NRA hates freedom. They don’t want you to have the freedom to send your children to school & expect them to come home alive.
Advocating violence himself, in an ad he produced with MoveOn.org targeting Mitt Romney if he won, in which one elderly woman says: “We will burn this m*****f****r down.” Another woman warned that she would find Romney and launch a “c**k punch, right in the n*t sack.”
And more dangerously, warning the wealthy of future violence:
The smart rich know they can only build the gate so high. And, and, sooner or later history proves that people when they’ve had enough aren’t going to take it anymore. And much better to deal with it nonviolently now, through the political system, than what could possibly happen in the future, which nobody wants to see …
Moore didn’t care that hours after the Connecticut tragedy the only proper action was to either express the deepest of condolences or shut up. Moore is only interested in getting his name in the papers, whether by lying (his career choice) or threatening (another career choice.).
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