Question Time and This Week

the caption on this is great...

The highlight though was Moore confidently stating that Kerry will make the better President because he's going to properly go and hunt down terrorists, wherever they are. "Dude, Where's Your Credibility?" Haven't you just made millions from a film saying the very opposite?

Watch again folks

littlejohn would NEVER get on Question Time in the UK, which just shows what a poor shower this lot were.

the audience was woefully ignorant and incapable of expressing points that weren't related directly to their own experiences (and even that was done badly). it was as if they'd never seen a political debate before.

the miami voting league woman was terrific though. she brooked no shit.

I am still wondering about the pagan woman. Why was her voted discounted? Not because she was pagan, surely? She seemed to imply that.

oh god. i almost threw my glass at the tv at that point. i can't believe that no one commented.

xpost - and pagan woman was nuts, too. i'm assuming she meant that her vote was discounted in that bush stole the election despite the popular vote.

What's wrong with scoring party points? We need our people to be as partisan as possible. Moore was not, mostly, on fire, but he had a few better gags than anyone else, and when he takes a verbal swing at the enemy it gets me up and enthused with the blood of the battle. He is our commando guerilla comedy warrior of cynicism and low down dirty cunning and I'm backing him to the hilt any old time he wants to take down one of the enemy.

The audience was annoying - whooping/jeering at every soundbite or before the speaker had a chance to finish their argument.

i've realised i liked the voting woman mainly because of her eyebrow usage.

ok. lock everyone up and have done with it. we're all capable of walking on to a plane.

I liked Michael Moore's answer to the man who suggested that he wouldn't want war under ANY circumstances.

'I am still wondering about the pagan woman. Why was her voted discounted? Not because she was pagan, surely? She seemed to imply that.'

oh that is what she was saying.

I really got bored from the question about Blair onwards so I didn't get through all of it.

Someone who speaks out in direct opposition against the leader of their country, using disinformation as a tactic, while in a "war"?

Sounds like it entirely sums up his past 4 years.

But there is a more serious point. Lord Haw Haw, singnificant insult though it is, describes Moore completely given that he himself accepts America is at war (otherwise he could not claim, without contradiction, that Kerry should "go after terrorists better than Bush did"). The man has no place in rational or democratic politics, pure and simple. He fails to understand the process or the mechanism. (I take Pete W's point upthread about Littlejohn's "supporting your leader", but this is different. We're talking about Moore's own definition.)

Moore, by his own definition is fighting a "war" and is spreading disinformation in support of it. Aside from direct parallels such as anti-Semetism, which I don't anyone accuse Moore of to date, I don;t see what other part of it is wrong.

Wikipedia's front page (since it was quoted above) for Lord Haw Haw says :

Lord Haw-Haw was a propaganda radio program broadcast by Nazi German radio to audiences in Britain and Ireland on the mediumwave station Radio Hamburg and by shortwave to the United States. It started on September 18, 1939 and continued until April 30, 1945, when Hamburg was overrun by the British Army.

Two announcers played Lord Haw-Haw:

Wolf Mitler was a German national who spoke as the caricature of an upper-class Englishman. His persona was described by some listeners as similar to P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster. Journalist Jonah Barrington of the Daily Express coined the term "Lord Haw-Haw" to describe Mitler's voice: "he speaks English of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way-variety". Under Mitler, the program reached its greatest popularity in the British Isles, with over six million listeners.
William Joyce replaced Mitler in 1939. Joyce, a former leader of the British Union of Fascists, fled England before his planned arrest on September 1, 1939. For biographical details, please see William Joyce.
After Joyce replaced Mitler, Mitler was paired with the American-born announcer Mildred Gillars in the Axis Sally program and also broadcast to ANZAC forces in North Africa. Mitler survived the war and appeared on postwar German television. Joyce was hanged for treason on January 3, 1946.

Other British subjects willingly made propaganda broadcasts, including Raymond David Hughes, who broadcast on the German Radio Cymru; Norman Baillie-Stewart, a former Guards officer cashiered for selling secrets to Germany; and John Amery.

By all means, show me where Moore doesn't fit into that characterisation. He broadcasts propaganda, by his own admission. He speaks to his 'audience' in the language they will answer to (in his opinion). He co-opts other American subjects to make propaganda broadcasts on his behalf.

I'm assuming when you refer to "in the Nazi's pay" you mean Mitler's German nationality, and Joyce's adopted German nationality, in which case, yes, I agree entirely, they were in the direct pay of the country they were giving disinformation in favour of.

Moore is not in the direct pay of either the Afghanis or the Iraquis, but continues to broadcast propoganda (by his own definition) which includes disinformation (by anybody else's definition) against the country he is a passport holder of. Does this make him less or more stupid than Lord Haw-Haw? Unless you're assume that making millions from said disinformation from the free market is cleverer than making it directly from the people you're spreading the disinformation in favour of.

Does this mean I don't think Bush is an incompetent fuckwit, in the pay of big industry, and war-crazy? No.

Do I think this means John Kerry is automatically a better choice?

I fully expect to see every British poster to ILX signing their allegiance to Michael Howard underneath this if their answer to the above sentence is "Yes".

I shouldn't have called you a cunt last night. Sorry, I was a bit pissed.

Just like I'd love for any American ("or maybe just" m) to tell me the difference between Tony Blair and Michael Howard?

Michael Moore says we should vote for Kerry because he'll be tough on terrorists. BillClinton bombed a soap factory in Sudan because "intelligence" told him it was a munitions plant. Michael Moore even admits in 'Stupid White Men' that Clinton passed most of his so-called ethical policies (like agreeing to Kyoto) in his final days because he knew he wouldn't have to enact them.

As an outsider, and not drawn along the whooping political lines we say on the Question Time, it doesn't seem hugely different to me. Yes, Bush appears to be a complete fuckwit. As I said above, for the same reasons most British people on this thread would consider Tony Blair a complete fuckwit. Now see how many of them will automatically vote for the opposition because of that.

(btw, ythink bubba c made barely covert attempts to skew the intelligence he was recieving on sudan such that he might carry out the ideological aims of the anti-cleanliness hawks running his administration under the guise of 'ridding the world of dangerous weapons'?)(ps before you tell me that i am, i'm not saying clinton's blameless, but conflating some very different, and differently motivated, military, economic and environmental blunders with the 'they're all big industry puppets' line is, at best, oversimplification)

(this is all in parenthesis because its 2am and i'm not even in a fighting mood)

Erm... actually, the Clinton administration have made overt claims about the Sudan bombing being "to send a message to the world" and "to teach them a lesson" despite what intelligence sources were willing to leak to the contrary about the place he was bombing, as Michael Moore admits in "Stupid White Men".

Yes, Bush is wrong on a great number of things - and motivated by big industry and other economic, sometimes personal, relationships. Does this make him any different to practically every world leader alive today?

(btw, the only countries I've ever been to where I've heard no political dissent are Cuba and Japan. I'm sure there are different reasons why in either place.)

Oh, and I'd still like a non-Brit to point out the differences between Blair and Howard.

(i sleep now)

Protect Our Borders And Shores
Today, our borders, our ports, and our airports are not as secure as they must be. John Kerry and John Edwards will make our airports, seaports, and borders more secure without intruding upon personal liberties. " The last part of that second one is interesting: if I object to having my fingerprints taken on entering America, is that enough? If 100 people object? How do you make something more secure without increasing restrictions or surveillance?

On domestic policies Bush and Kerry do indeed seem to have differences, although very minor ones - the rhetoric is almost identical, although Kerry fixates on "middle classes and those who aspire to be middle class". But both say they'll create well-paid jobs and give tax breaks. Bush actually says he'll give them to "all". (I don't believe a word of it, but we can only judge Kerry on rhetoric so it's only fair to do the same with Bush)

On the environment they differ hugely, obviously, but I think what's interesting about Kerry is that he only focusses on environmental issues within America (the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and urban regeneration).

(I still want to know whether aldo thinks that Moore should be put on trial for treason or not, even if he doesn't believe in the death penalty for it)