The Moore bore

By JAY AMBROSE
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Following the recent success of Democrats in the mid-term elections, one of my liberal e-mail buddies sent me a cutesy, gloating list of pledges by Michael Moore, and I have something to report. The patient has not recuperated.

Moore, the same leftist who gave us "Fahrenheit 9/11" and other documentaries seriously amiss in the department of intellectual honesty, asks on his Web site for signatories to his list, but is essentially taking it upon himself to speak for liberals and Democrats in telling conservatives and Republicans what the Democrats will do now that they are back in control of Congress and, presumably, the country.

The favor he performs is inadvertently to underline some of the most indefensible pretenses of at least a few of those he here claims to represent _ an almost laughable moral superiority, for instance _ and to remind us that just as conservatives have their fathead embarrassments, so do the liberals.

For starters, he says, "We will never, ever call you 'unpatriotic' simply because we disagree with you," implying that conservatives do that to liberals all the time. I haven't much noticed it, myself.

It is true that some of us may point to the puzzling anti-Americanism of some radical leftists such as Noam Chomsky or Ward Churchill, or even wonder aloud why someone like Moore traipses about Europe telling audiences how dumb we Americans are. But shouts of "You're no patriot" seem to reside mainly in the imaginations of victim hood-seeking leftists who themselves sometimes engage in an interesting version of that game.

Moore, as one example, seems to believe Americans who either have not served in Iraq or do not have a child in combat there have no right to support the war, or that it is a telling indictment of them if they do. Not just a handful of his ideological brethren keep harping on the fact that some of the war's architects never served in the military, as if that style of ad hominem discourse advances understanding of the real issues. Is Moore telling us these princes and princesses of non sequitur lambasting will now cut this stuff out?

"We will let you marry whomever you want," Moore also promises in his list, apparently meaning Democrats favor gay marriage. A great many do not, at least not on the record, although there is no doubting that far more Republicans than Democrats are seeking an amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting gay marriage. I concur that theirs is a mistaken goal.

But I do have sympathy for a central concern of many of these Republicans _ that the courts should not leapfrog the democratic process in ruling with no legal authority that state legislatures shall be required to allow gay marriages. How about this pledge, Mike _ "We liberal activists promise to quit using the courts to get our way in contravention of constitutional understandings and the will of the people?"

There's more of Moore, too much to cover here, except for some brief observations about how he simplifies to the point of meaninglessness, betrays misapprehensions and leaves out the hard questions.

He talks about balancing budgets without saying how _ higher taxes or less spending, or what mix of the two? He promises universal health coverage without even a hint that you could actually diminish health care and wreck the federal budget if you don't do this thing right. He doesn't seem to know that vast amounts of embryonic stem cell research are planned in this country even without federal funding. He favors abortion without telling us how he feels about the abomination called partial-birth abortion.

He seems to think that catching Osama bin Laden would have been the most vital protective reaction after 9/11 and doesn't grasp that Bin Laden is as good as dead _ if alive, he is hiding in a cave somewhere, cut off from any chance of significant leadership. I am not sure from what he writes in advocating gun control that he knows the difference between automatic and semi-automatic firearms.

He gets on a high horse about raising the minimum wage, forgetting that something under 1 percent of the workforce is paid that little, that large numbers of those getting the hourly sum are part-time, young workers from households with total incomes of fairly hefty amounts, and that minimum wage hikes always risk eliminating jobs.

Here is one more pledge I'd like from Moore _ that he will keep writing and reminding us of what it is about some of his ideological ilk that makes them so unhelpful in resolving issues.

(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)