Michael Moore--The Leni Riefenstahl of socialism

Rich Lowry:

MICHAEL Moore set out to make a movie attacking the American insurance industry and ended up attacking the American character. By the end of his movie "SiCKO," his plaint is less about American resistance to government-run health care than its overarching rejection of collectivism. As Moore puts it, everywhere else it's "a world of we," but here a "world of me."

His voice thus joins a vast, age-old chorus of left-wing bafflement and disillusion at American exceptionalism - our national traits that have prevented the development of a statist politics along continental European lines.

Moore's explanation for this phenomenon is typically twisted: Americans are saddled with debt from college loans and health care, and that keeps us from demanding French-style pampering from our government for fear of foreclosure by The Man.

Tellingly, Moore picks up this theory in an interview with Tony Benn, an old-school British socialist of the sort who simply doesn't exist in the U.S. Here, our left-wing politicians vote for war funding before they vote against it, always trimming to keep from rubbing too strongly against the American grain. Moore fervently wishes that grain were different, and he celebrates all countries where government has a vaster reach and tighter grip - from Cuba to France.

He is practically the Leni Riefenstahl of socialism. Anyone in a country with government-provided health insurance is portrayed as tripping through daisies to the hospital, where everything is free and the care is perfect. America, in contrast, is a vista of unrelieved gloom. Moore is adept at the propagandist's art - keep it simple and keep it dishonest.

You would never know that America ranks highest in the world in patient satisfaction, or that only about half of emergency-room patients in Canada get timely treatment.

...

Few are so adept at the unfair attack as Moore and few are so prickly when challenged on that unfairness. His tantrum when mildly challenged by a CNN doctor shows his dark side. It is the side that wants to limit challenges to his vision like the liberals who want to shut down talk radio that they disagree with. He may really believe that kite flying in Iraq symbolized prewar society there better than the mass graves that were found after the liberation, but film makers' fantasies are not the real world.