Michael Moore is the creator of the most succesful documentary ever released in the US, a movie that grossed more on its opening weekend than any other documentary did during its entire theatrical run and which did so while being run in less than 900 theatres.
This documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 was the first documentary to gross over 100 million dollars, was the first to sell more than 2 million copies of the DVD on the first day of release.
More importantly, it was the first mass media examination of many of the important issues surrounding
the war in Iraq.
The man himself is one of the few unwavering left wing voices in the US mass media, somebody who has never sold out to the Republicans, never attempted to be a Republican-lite.
Why then should the Democratic Party disassociate itself from him?
The answers can be found easily when you read Peter Beinart’s nasty little piece of scaremongering: he longs for the good old days of commie-bashing:
On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington’s Willard Hotel to save American liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop had warned that “the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction.” Liberals, they argued, “consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West.” Unless that changed, “In the spasm of terror which will seize this country … it is the right–the very extreme right–which is most likely to gain victory.”
[…]
But, over the next two years, in bitter political combat across the institutions of American liberalism,
anti-communism gained strength. With the ADA’s help, Truman crushed Wallace’s third-party challenge en route to reelection. The formerly leftist Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled its communist affiliates and The New Republic broke with Wallace, its former editor. The American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) denounced communism, as did the naacp. By 1949, three years after Winston Churchill warned that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe, Schlesinger could write in The Vital Center: “Mid-twentieth century liberalism, I believe, has thus been fundamentally reshaped … by the exposure of the Soviet Union, and by the deepening of our knowledge of man. The consequence of this historical re-education has been an unconditional rejection of totalitarianism.”
A sort of noxious anti-communism then, updated for the 21st century. Peter Beinart is one of those though, realistic no-nonsense foreign hawks at the New Republic whose main achievement seems to be helping Bush confuse the “war against terrorism” with invading Afghanistan and Iraq, with Michael Moore and MoveOn.org substitute for the communists as the enemies of liberalism ™:
When liberals talk about America’s new era, the discussion is largely negative–against the Iraq war, against restrictions on civil liberties, against America’s worsening reputation in the world. In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and institutions–most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn–that do not put the struggle against America’s
new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world. As a result, the Democratic Party
boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to
look tough. But, below this small elite sits a Wallacite grassroots that views America’s new struggle as
a distraction, if not a mirage. Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American
liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.
It is disgusting to see somebody who has been so wrong on so many occasions in the past four years to be accusing one of the few effective American leftwing people of well, being a traitor. This is why the Democratic Party is in trouble, because of this elitist cliche of idiots, shut away safely inside the
Beltway or in the Ivy Leagues, who have no clue about the real world and who don’t really care about what is happening there, as long as their cozy lives are not disturbed. It’s sickening.