Batfink's Beep -- 1-23-06

Panic from the Mooreons

January 23, 2006

Michael Moore is worried. Very worried. He recently wrote on his web site that Canadians should come to their senses, and reject Tory Stephen Harper in their elections today, on the grounds that it would hand yet another victory to, who else, George Bush.

This comes on the heels of the politically disastrous attack ads run by liberal Paul Martin, and the apparent backlash thereto. Martin, back on his heels as never before due to a massive corruption scandal that precipitated these new elections in the first place, and his party unprecedentedly trailing the long-out-of-power Tories, ran a series of ads that advised voters with much snark and sarcasm that a vote for Harper would 'make Bush happy'.

Now, you might think that argument would cut some ice with the Moore types, and you'd apparently be right if Moore himself is any indication. You might even think that tying a candidate, no matter how unfairly, to any foreign leader, would get up the individualism (some might call it xenophobia) of any people. It goes directly to patriotism, after all, accusing a candidate of being too close to a foreign leader. Indeed, the tactic has been used in Canada itself, by Martin himself, to good effect in the past. But this time, the winds don't seem to be blowing that way anymore. Reports the Washington Post:

Rob Hlohinec, 58, doesn't see what's so bad about Americans. He even admits to knowing some.

"I've talked to Americans. They want the same things we want," Hlohinec said as he watched a Conservative Party campaign rally in this Ontario town last week.

It seems that the Canadians have actually come to realize that they're not really all that different from us, and that maybe good relations with the world's only superpower and their largest trading partner, might actually be a good thing. The net effect of the advertising gambit, according to current polling, has been an increase in relative Tory support, now showing at about 10%.

It wasn't supposed to go that way; hence, Mr. Moore's panic. Taking essentially the same line in his post as the ill-fated ads, and dripping with the same snark and sarcasm:

Oh, Canada -- you're not really going to elect a Conservative majority on Monday, are you? That's a joke, right? I know you have a great sense of humor, and certainly a well-developed sense of irony, but this is no longer funny. Maybe it's a new form of Canadian irony -- reverse irony! OK, now I get it. First, you have the courage to stand against the war in Iraq -- and then you elect a prime minister who's for it. You declare gay people have equal rights -- and then you elect a man who says they don't. You give your native peoples their own autonomy and their own territory -- and then you vote for a man who wants to cut aid to these poorest of your citizens. Wow, that is intense! Only Canadians could pull off a hat trick of humor like that. My hat's off to you.

This stuff is certainly nothing new from the meatheaded Moore. I seem to remember a somewhat similar, both in tone as well as content, post on election day 2002, when Moore exhorted his flock to send Bush a message by blowing the GOP away at the ballot box. And of course there was his all out effort to keep Bush from a second term with his propaganda film F911.

He didn't get his wish then, of course. Let's see if the Canadians take him any more seriously than most Americans do.

ADDENDUM (late Monday, but before the results came in): On re-reading the Moore screed, it occurs to me that its greatest folly isn't its dumbfounding arrogance, in presuming to tell the citizens of foreign nation who to vote for and why, but rather its unimaginable, dripping contempt and condescension. Read it for yourself: can you imagine anyone, even Moore, thinking that an attitude like that will actually win him converts? Hell, I'd vote for Kerry if I thought it would spite someone who took THAT kind of tone with me.

This is why the leftist cause is in retrograde, I think -- anyone that sure that he knows everything and his opponents know nothing, ought to at least be right.

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