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Christopher Hitchens recently trashed Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11 on slate.com in a piece that I could barely make it through because of its poor writing, flawed logic, half-truths and obvious trolling with lines like "[Fahrenheit 9/11] is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of 'dissenting' bravery
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-j
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Taibbi does nothing to further this argument. He spends a thousand words trashing Hitchens and the state of journalism today. But he says next-to-nothing about Hitchens' arguments.
I still haven't seen the movie, so maybe i should just keep it to myself (like that'll happen), but it seems to me that the last thing we need is our self-declared mouth-piece acting like a vindictive blowhard throwing around specious arguments. that's exactly the sort of thing that rush, o'reilly, et al use to convince the great plains that liberals from the coasts are a bunch of half-crazed, acid tripping schizophrenics.
corn farmers in iowa will hear about this film and see the "perversion" of the truth by the left, not an argument for putting this entire administration in the dock... when anything less than that is doing everyone on the left a disservice. it's only effect on the argument is to further polarize the left, when it should be trying to shift the middle in our direction.
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i realize you said we should "shift the middle in our direction," but i think that's a dangerous path to walk. it almost always leads to the party moving further toward the center, and we saw how well moving toward the middle worked for gore in the last election. i'd say the traditional left are the most disenfranchised at this point. and by left i don't mean kids on college campuses, i mean working-class people who used to be the lifeblood of the democratic party. the fact that it's even fathomable for union members to vote republican at this point is a total coup for the republican party.
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To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.
Most importantly, I guess I just get excited anytime a journalist comes out and admits they're a corporate mouthpiece with no reason for existing other than to put text between ads and what they say is ( ... )
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