Are Michael Moore and Roseanne Barr Promoting Violence?
The only funny thing Michael Moore ever did was the film Canadian Bacon (1995), and it wasn’t that funny. Critical reviews of Canadian Bacon were largely negative, with a 14% certified rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The film is about the president’s handlers contrive a military threat from Canada in order to boost the president’s political prospects in the next election. In a sense, everything Moore produces is contrived.
Most people know Moore for his semi-, some say “fake,” documentaries Roger and Me (1992), Bowling for Columbine (2002), and Fahrenheit 9/11, the highest-grossing “documentary” of all time, taking in over $200 million worldwide. Not content with making tens of millions of dollars. Moore sued producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein for $2.7 million in unpaid profits from the film, claiming they used “Hollywood accounting tricks” to avoid paying him the money.
The same time Moore is raking in millions of dollars, he produces Capitalism: A Love Story. Moore is against capitalism for the other guy. This is typical of liberals. It’s OK for them to drive big cars, fly in private jets, and live in houses that have a carbon footprint that spans a city block. By the way, Moore’s net worth is around $50 million, so he’ll escape Roseanne Barr’s call for an execution tax.
The year that Moore claimed in his book Stupid White Men that he didn’t own any stocks, he reported to the “IRS that a foundation totally controlled by Moore and his wife had more than $280,000 in corporate stock and nearly $100,000 in corporate bonds.”
Moore’s holdings have “included such evil pharmaceutical and medical companies as Pfizer, Merck, Genzyme, Elan PLC, Eli Lilly, Becton Dickinson and Boston Scientific,” writes Peter Schweizer in his book Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy.
“Moore’s supposedly nonexistent portfolio also includes big bad energy giants like Sunoco [an oil company, not a solar company], Noble Energy, Schlumberger, Williams Companies, Transocean Sedco Forex and Anadarko, all firms that ‘deplete irreplaceable fossil fuels in the name of profit’ as he put it in ‘Dude, Where’s My Country?’
“And in perhaps the ultimate irony, he also has owned shares in Halliburton. According to IRS filings, Moore sold Halliburton for a 15 percent profit and bought shares in Noble, Ford, General Electric (another defense contractor), AOL Time Warner (evil corporate media) and McDonald’s.
Moore decries excess wealth, but he’s wealthy. He says he’s against war and violence, but he has no problem directing violence to people he does not share the same ideological worldview although he shares their stock portfolios and big bank accounts.
Moore said the following on Current TV’s “Countdown” program with Looney-Toon leftist Keith Olbermann:
“The smart rich know they can only build the gate so high. And . . . sooner or later history proves that people when they’ve had enough aren’t going to take it anymore. And much better to deal with it nonviolently now, through the political system, than what could possibly happen in the future, which nobody wants to see.”
Moore, playing the role of Robespierre, was echoing sentiments similar to those voiced by Roseanne Barr, a modern day Madame Defarge, who called for the beheading of rich people who refuse to turn their excess wealth over to the government.
Protests got out of hand in Greece during protests similar to the ones we are seeing on Wall Street:
Thousands of Greeks took to the streets in a nationwide strike to protest government austerity measures. And in the capital, they turned violent.
Protesters threw Molotov cocktails at police and torched buildings. Police responded with tear gas. Along the main demonstration route in central Athens, five bank workers were rescued from the balcony of the burning bank, but one man and two women did not make it out.
If the Wall Street protests turn violent in the United States, we’ll know who to blame.