[lbo-talk] Moore's Less?

Lance Murdoch lbotalk at lancemurdoch.org
Fri Sep 5 07:05:43 PDT 2003


On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Dennis Perrin wrote:


> Some good points made, but a lot of hair-splitting. Moore does embellish in
> order to make polemical and humorous points, however "right" he may be
> overall.

An incredible amount of hair-splitting and virtually no points. One of Moore's "lies" in the above link is when he says a plaque "proudly proclaims that the plane killed Vietnamese people on Christmas Eve of 1972. It was the largest bombing campaign of the Vietnam War." The plaque does say the plane killed Vietnamese people on Christmas Eve of 1972 though, which the critic agrees with, it seems to be quibbling over a non-point.

When he made Roger and Me on a shoestring budget, GE's PR department did a job on the film in a manner like Brown and Williamson did a job on Jeffrey Wigand. Most of it was in both cases a lot of mud, whether or not it was true didn't matter, as Noam Chomsky says "the person throwing the mud always wins". Moore did a point-by-point refutation of what GE's PR department put out, but it was too late, they had already succeeded in their aim, the New Yorker put out a bad review with a lot of the false charges and so forth. Since that strategy worked so well, I guess the right decided to use that as their basis of attacking him (along with whatever else was in their bag, like accusing him of making money on his films), and of course, DLC New Republic reading limousine liberals swallow it up and attack him because they hate him as well.

I've read these lists attacking Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine, usually they're long lists of dozens of items listing the supposed multiple lies in the movies. Most of them are inaccurate or hair splitting to the extreme...each movie has maybe one or two errors, or statements that could possibly be considered deceptive. It's just a standard mud-slinging attack, what else would you expect, and of course the DLC'ers just swallow it right up.

-- Lance



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