Michael Moore's Letter To Obama

The Khaki Elephant has not exactly been a defender of Barack Obama. In fact, the posts on this blog tend to revolve around the revelation that President Obama may well be the worst president in U. S. history, from his juvenile economic policies to his love affair with government control. His leadership has been so amateur and damaging that is seemed nothing could prompt support from these pages . . . enter Michael Moore.

Today Michael Moore released an open letter to Barack Obama criticizing any strategy that would increase troop size in Afghanistan. In Moore's words,

"If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do . . ."

This is a far cry from Moore's initial take on the Afghanistan War depicted in his the epic work of misinformation, Fahrenheit 9/11, where he used a clip of Richard Clarke claiming that Bush's response to 9/11 in Afghanistan was "slow and small," a claim that had Moore's implied agreement in the film since he did not contradict it. Of course, that was back in the day when Moore criticized the Iran war by claiming it wasn't justified because Bin Laden was in Afghanistan. Wait a minute, didn't Obama promise to track down Bin Laden by now? Anyway, back to Michael Moore . . .

I have two problems with virtually everything Michael Moore does. First, his work is always based an overt manipulations of the truth that only his supporters and the functioning brain dead fail to see through. Second, well, if you try to follow his logic for more than a few minutes you need only be mildly observant to determine that Moore simply isn't very bright.

His manipulation of the truth is ever present. If you found Fahrenheit 9/11 then check out Fahrenhype 9/11 which exposes the misleading edits and outright lies of his post-terrorist attack treatise . . . though, come to think of it, in Dude, Where's My Country Moore claims there is no Terrorist threat. His tactics shouldn't surprise us since he launched his career with the film Roger and Me, an alleged documentary containing the primary premise that he could not get an interview with then GM Chair Roger Smith, and the film never mentioned the fact that Smith actually granted an interview.

The letter to Obama contains Moore's trademark manipulations (my gentle-mood way of saying "lies"). In the letter he claims to know that there are "LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan," though how he counted them we may never know. He implies that Obama's actions are prompted by "corporate backers" who could only be the dreaded "big oil" that Moore claimed were behind the initial push into Afghanistan (though Moore has never explained why America has failed to get all that blessed oil Bush was after). Moore asks "what would Martin Luther King, Jr. do?" apparently forgetting the Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican with little tolerance for the laundry list of lies that are Michael Moore's make up. He asks Obama "What would your grandmother do?" apparently forgetting that she was a "typical white woman."

But what bothers me the most about Moore is that he's just not very bright, yet some people fail to see it. His logic is virtually non-existent. For example, here is his choice for shining example of a President doing what's right when it comes to avoiding war:

We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That's the way General Washington insisted it must be. That's what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. "You're fired!," said Truman, and that was that.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't Truman the only world leader to drop atomic bombs on populated cities? Nice choice of an "anti-military" president, genius. Of course, in the mind of Moore the intellect is hardly important when one can be blinded by hatred of the U.S. military. As his letter explains,

Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in' hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD.

Forget his ignorance that the intelligence agencies of the U.S., Great Britain, Israel, France and Germany all believed in the existence of WMDs in Iran, Moore's insincere "love" for our kids in the military is undercut but his obvious failure to acknowledge that our military leaders are those same "kids in the armed services" with added experience. They are not the rabid torturers Moore pretends them to be. Nor are they hell bent on sending "more poor people to kill other poor people" just for a few kicks (Note: I suppose Moore is referring to our soldiers as the first "poor" in that equation, once again ignoring Pentagon statistics that American soldiers come from families with a higher average income than non-military Americans . . . but let's not let facts get in the way).

The bottom line is that we cannot fail in Afghanistan. Barack Obama may have considered withdrawal while he was campaigning, but it appears as though reality has set in and he knows the price of failure. We paid it on 9/11/01. Michael Moore would have us pay it again.