Bozell & Graham Column: Michael Moore Darkens the Cineplex Door

August 15th, 2015 8:04 AM

It’s been six years since a Michael Moore mockumentary struggled at the box office. Capitalism: A Love Story grossed a paltry $14.3 million, less than an eighth the take of his hit Fahrenheit 911. The long wait for the next Moore spectacle is almost over. The day before the next 9/11 anniversary, Moore’s new America-bashing film Where To Invade Next will debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, where movies about America by an American make their debut.

As usual, the film’s “principal cast” is just Michael Moore, egomaniac. Moore boasted he hadn’t done a TV interview in a year. (Thank the Lord for small favors.) And succeeded wildly in keeping this film a secret (ditto). The festival website promises only "his most provocative and hilarious film yet: Moore tells the Pentagon to ‘stand down -- he will do the invading for America from now on.’”

That sounds positively knee-slapping. 

There’s one obvious reason for Moore’s low political profile, as the Los Angeles Times related: “Moore’s six-year movie absence has been motivated by many things, but certainly the presence of a Democrat in the White House may not be entirely coincidental.” In other words, his guy has been in control, so apparently all’s well. But now that we’re preparing for a new president, America’s a mess and it’s Moore to the rescue. 

In his last documentary on America’s history, Dinesh D’Souza argued: the "notion of the essential goodness of America is under attack, replaced by another story in which theft and plunder are seen as the defining features of American history." That summation describes the Moore ideology precisely. 

“The issue of the United States at infinite war is something that has concerned me for quite some time, and provides the necessary satire for this film,” Moore explains. “[There is] this constant need it seems to always have an enemy. Where’s the next enemy, so we can keep our whole military-industrial complex alive, and keep the companies that make a lot of money from this in business?” 

In Moore’s world, America is a predatory colossus, an imperialist menace, always waging unprovoked wars with a military establishment full of mindless killers. In January, he greeted the wildly popular and engrossing film American Sniper by tweeting “My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot u in the back. Snipers aren’t heroes.”

When pro-Americans fired back, Moore compared them to vicious terrorists: “the American lovers of violence and the issuers of fatwas in OUR society haven't gone away. They are our American ISIS.” 

Michael Moore: once a hate-filled mudslinger, always a hate-filled mudslinger. 

Thom Powers, the programmer of the film festival in Toronto promises the new Moore flick is “going to take a lot of people by surprise.” But who believes that? We’ll just get another shovel of Moore’s America-stinks narrative, as he stated in January when he sneered we were never liberators in Iraq: “We will be better off in the future when we say we lost Vietnam, we lost Iraq, we lost Afghanistan. Why do we invent this fairy tale about ourselves? It does no good, and it is only going to get us into more trouble in the future.”

Simply put, the “fairy tale” here is that America represents freedom and democracy, and that our supposedly great country is a global force against terrorism and genocide. 

Moore hates America with all the passionate intensity of a Third World hut-dweller, and in so doing has become fabulously wealthy in America. He now owns nine properties including a lakefront mansion in northern Michigan and a pricey large condo in Manhattan. 

He’s just another hypocritical leftist, like Obama and both Clintons, another filthy rich elitist raging against The Man.