Looks like those suave, sophisticated Frenchies have fallen for an overweight American con man.
Just to be fair to the froggies, the committee that bestowed the Palm d’Or, the highest accolade of the Cannes film festival, upon the ample shoulders of film-maker Michael Moore for his Bush-bashing Fahhrenheit 9/11 included such New World types as Quentin “Kill Bill” Tarantino.
Don’t the sycophants of Cannes know that Michael Moore is a big fat liar?
Just to get you up to speed on the lies and the lying liar who told them, Andrew Anthony in the Guardian has a good recapitulation of some of Moore’s whoppers.
Let’s start with the most recent big lie:
“Moore arrived in Cannes by his traditional mode of transport – on a wave of controversy,” writes Anthony. “Disney had announced that it would not distribute his new film, Fahrenheit 9/11, in America, which left the film’s producers, Miramax, a division of Disney, looking for a new partner. Moore accused Disney of censoring his film to protect the tax breaks its Disneyworld complex enjoys in Florida, the state controlled by Jeb Bush, brother of the President (Fahrenheit 9/11 details the cronyism and corruption of the Bush regime, as well as its failings in the ‘war against terror’).
“Disney countered that Moore had known for more than a year that it would not handle the film and was only complaining now to publicize his film. Nevertheless, the director once again successfully positioned himself on the moral high ground in a battle against a multinational corporation. He finessed the same maneuver with Stupid White Men, his bestselling critique of American capitalism, by claiming that Harper Collins had tried to suppress the book, and that it only agreed to publish him following a protest by librarians.”
Moore was fired from the left wing Mother Jones magazine. He claimed it was over journalistic issues (the magazine wasn’t daring enough for him) and won a $58,000 lawsuit against MJ.
Anthony writes that he might have been fired because he was a pain in the derriere:
“Behind the scenes, however, a different picture was forming. Moore’s employers were confronted with ever more regal demands. He insisted that Channel 4 house him at the Ritz when he worked in England on The Awful Truth, a fact he now portrays as the revenge of the working class against corporate might. Meanwhile employees grumbled. ‘He’s a jerk and a hypocrite and didn’t treat us right and he was false in all of his dealings,’ said one former worker. His former manager, Douglas Urbanski, has said that Moore ‘was the most difficult man I’ve ever met…he’s money-obsessed’.”
Read more of Anthony’s piece to learn why Moore sends his kids to a posh private school (nothing wrong with that, by the way, unless you’ve attacked others for the same thing) and more’
Meanwhile, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard steps forward with a heretofore un-chronicled Moore whopper (and provides the witty headline for this item).
In ‘Michael Moore and Me,’ Barnes recounts that in a previous book Moore claimed that he called Barnes after Barnes made a statement about how bad it is that nobody today knows the Iliad and the Odyssey.
“…So the next day he said he called me. “Fred,” he quoted himself as saying, “tell me what The Iliad and The Odyssey are.” I started “hemming and hawing,” Moore wrote. And then I said, according to Moore: “Well, they’re…uh…you know…uh…okay, fine, you got me — I don’t know what they’re about. Happy now?” He’d smoked me out as a fraud, or maybe worse. The only problem is none of this is true. It never happened. Moore is a liar.”
For the record, Fred had read the Iliad and the Odyssey at U. Va. — and he saw the flick “Helen of Troy” before he even got there. (Fair Warning: The Other Charlotte and I are planning to blog on Brad of Troy as soon as I hie myself to a movie theatre to see Brad and those burnin’ towers of Illium.)
But back to the burning beaches of Cannes:
What did you make of the ovation Moore received? It was the longest on record in the annals of Cannes. With apologies to Sally Field, here’s what I thought: They really, really hate us. Us being Americans.
Along these lines, and also in the Weekly Standard, Adrian Wooldridge has a piece on “The Michael Moore Conservatives” of England. They don’t like us very much either, it seems.
Wooldridge provides many fascinating reasons for this…
“One is social snobbery,” Wooldridge writes. “The Tory Old Guard was much happier with Rockefeller Republicans, with the sort of people who were impressed by Oxbridge colleges and London clubs. George W. Bush represents an America where people actually believe in God, rather than treating religion as a convenient fiction, where people believe in business, rather than dismissing it as a rather grubby pastime, and where people believe that gun ownership should be extended to the masses, rather than confined to people who own grouse moors.
“A second might be termed ‘imperial snobbery.’ The easiest way to get the chaps in the golf club guffawing is to ask what it would have been like if the Americans had ruled India. The British are convinced that they are much better at understanding ‘Johnny Arab’ than the Americans. (A hint: The way to deal with Arabs is to co-opt their local leadership rather than to blather on about democracy, something Johnny has never understood and never will.)”