On "Good Morning America" today, Barack Obama takes on the other half of the Clinton team, the non-candidate who has been contesting him in the primaries:
"The former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling. He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts--whether it's about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas.
"This has become a habit, and one of the things that we're going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he's making statements that are not factually accurate."
So now we have the unprecedented spectacle of a Presidential candidate being double-teamed and responding directly to both Clintons who have been challenging him.
"I understand," Obama concedes, "that there are going to be sharp elbows in a primary and certainly there's going to be some rough and tumble in a general election" but claims that Bill Clinton has gone too far.
He is not alone in that opinion. The new Newsweek reports that leading Democrats, including Sen. Ted Kennedy and House Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel, who worked in the Clinton White House, are telling the ex-President to "pipe down."
The man who coordinated Clinton's impeachment defense in 1998 and is now a senior Obama adviser argues that "recent events raise the question: if Hillary's campaign can't control Bill, whether Hillary's White House could."
Obama has apparently decided to stop waiting for an answer to that and start providing his own critique.
Showing posts with label Good Morning America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Good Morning America. Show all posts
Monday, January 21, 2008
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Michael Moore, Cheap-Shot Messiah
It must be wonderful to be the smartest guy in a world of morons, the only honest person left on earth, the last great truth-teller in the universe.
On Good Morning America yesterday, Michael Moore took time out from promoting The Word on health care in America, to lecture Chris Cuomo on the failure of “the people in this building” and the rest of the media to prevent the war in Iraq. To his credit, Cuomo was having none of it.
Deconstructing Michael Moore is difficult because his heart is usually in the right place, but his judgment and journalistic ethics are off on some other planet. Documentaries are journalism, not audio-visual polemics, and he has erased the line between them.
Jon Stewart, no defender of MSM, was on point as usual when he told Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on “Crossfire” that they were partisan hacks: “You should be doing debate, which would be great, but you’re doing theater.”
Moore is purporting to enlighten, but despite his pretensions, he is doing theater. He may give audiences vicarious satisfaction in dramatizing the idiocies of our health care system, but he isn't telling them anything new and he certainly isn't making any positive contribution to the debate over improving it. He is, however, making money and getting a lot of attention for himself.
Analyzing the media’s share of the blame for the war in Iraq is important, as Bill Moyers showed in “Buying the War,” but taking smug cheap shots is something else.
When Moore blithely blamed his hosts for the death of 3500 American soldiers and Cuomo challenged him to be careful about such sweeping assertions, Moore’s answer was “I don’t have to be careful.”
That says it all. Moore has made his reputation and millions of dollars by aspiring to be the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. But his visions have been, to put it kindly, cockeyed.
On Good Morning America yesterday, Michael Moore took time out from promoting The Word on health care in America, to lecture Chris Cuomo on the failure of “the people in this building” and the rest of the media to prevent the war in Iraq. To his credit, Cuomo was having none of it.
Deconstructing Michael Moore is difficult because his heart is usually in the right place, but his judgment and journalistic ethics are off on some other planet. Documentaries are journalism, not audio-visual polemics, and he has erased the line between them.
Jon Stewart, no defender of MSM, was on point as usual when he told Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on “Crossfire” that they were partisan hacks: “You should be doing debate, which would be great, but you’re doing theater.”
Moore is purporting to enlighten, but despite his pretensions, he is doing theater. He may give audiences vicarious satisfaction in dramatizing the idiocies of our health care system, but he isn't telling them anything new and he certainly isn't making any positive contribution to the debate over improving it. He is, however, making money and getting a lot of attention for himself.
Analyzing the media’s share of the blame for the war in Iraq is important, as Bill Moyers showed in “Buying the War,” but taking smug cheap shots is something else.
When Moore blithely blamed his hosts for the death of 3500 American soldiers and Cuomo challenged him to be careful about such sweeping assertions, Moore’s answer was “I don’t have to be careful.”
That says it all. Moore has made his reputation and millions of dollars by aspiring to be the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. But his visions have been, to put it kindly, cockeyed.
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