17 Reasons Why You Should, Michael
1. For every disgruntled American Democrat moving here, 6 disgruntled Canadian Conservatives move south.
2. It will take a little of the load off your clogging coronary arteries.
3. Thanks to the mustard splatter down the left side of his favourite suit, Jimmy Carter voted for Bush.
4. Your Academy Awards invite wil be found in a locked drawer in a desk from the set of “Team America – World Police”. In 2006.
5. Your penis is still extremely small.
6. Not that it matters.
7. In 2008 the 527’s will feature anti-Moore ads by Moveon.gorge
8. Hemorroids. You’re at high risk, Michael.
9. Whoopi Goldberg is about to ring your doorbell, Michael. She’s looking for a pity fuck.
10. Roger Ebert is standing in line behind her.
11. [See 5.]
12. Jon Stewart has contracted Ed Gillespie as regular guest host.
13. There’s a bill in Congress to institute a military draft of unemployed, obese, middle-aged men with annual incomes of over 1 million. No, really, there is.
14. The West Wing opens the 2005 season with Fred Thompson taking over the role of Josiah “Jed” Bartlet.
15. Matt Drudge has been sent your “My Pet Goat” photo collection.
16. He has the tapes, too.
17. The best politically positioned Kennedy descendants today carry Arnold Schwarzenegger’s genes.

The Graceless Luser theme continued….
Michael Moore has come up for air, last sighted shortly before submerging in his private misery pool. (Goldstein contends it’s filled with guacamole, and he simply ate his way out.)
His contribution to the post-election discussion? A mosaic of US war dead, arranged to create a portrait of George Bush. I’ll spare you the link.

But today is a day to be magnaminous��towards those with whom we disagree. We should be generous and forgive Michael Moore his urge to lash out, for he has been dealt a double blow – for, with the re-election of George Bush, he saw a bigger prize snatched from his grasp last night.

Reminding all of the timeless wisdom of Al Gore – “If you can’t be a graceful loser, then just aim for loser.”
I’m pretty sure that qualifies as magnaminous. Megamagnaminous, even.
update – This was inevitable.

From Kevin Drum’s comments section the post-loss analysis is beginning…

But, when all is said and done, Bush’s very convincing popular vote has one unmistakable cause: Kerry lost because more Americans indisputably like, trust, and feel more comfortable and safer with Bush than with Kerry.
Why? The unavoidably obvious explanation is that Americans are by-and-large morons. Simpleminded, uninformed and undereducated, intellectually lazy and proud in their ignorance to boot, self-important and self- righteous, arrogant and benighted idiots. They are a reflection of George W. Bush, and in him they saw themselves. That’s why they love him and trust him so. Their reality is the faith-based myth that America is blessed and always right and great and perfect and freedom is handed down by God and not manmade constitutional governments and cultures of tolerance and inquiry. The are certain that the “real” America is in the unpleasant, xenophobic, homophobic, red states in the middle, where everybody has a white picket fence in the brain and they don’t seem aware of their own squalor and the fact that they make ends meet only because the far more prosperous blue states continue to subsidize their light beer guzzling.
More people voted for this idiot than for Kerry. This is what we have to come to grips with. The majority of the American electorate voted for Bush; voting for an idiot is idiocy, which is something usually practiced by idiots; ergo… What other conclusion can there be?
Americans chose Bush. They deserve him.

The left, in a nutshell. I don’t know that anyone can improve on this, but if I find more, I’ll update.
update – listening to John Edwards preamble to Kerry’s concession speech, I went to the TV and turned on the CBC. What are they running? A Bush bashing re-run of their faux comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes

On Oct.24th, the CBC’s Michael Enright * took on Christopher Hitchens about the nihilism of the left, his support for George Bush and the war on terror .
Audio here.
I should clarify that, despite the quality of the comments offered by Enright, the CBC’s Sunday Edition is not actually registered as a Canadian Abilities Council Sheltered Workshop.

Meatriarchy has a good piece up this morning about the pervasive socialist ideology invading our media, our schools…..
Via the Shotgun, where Paul Tuns has more. None of this is altogether new. In the early 70’s, I remember a teacher telling us that the US was in Vietnam for the oil.

A fair bit of buzz today about the 12 minutes of the Bin Laden tape that were cut to avoid showing Bush in a favourable light play better in prime time. Some are arguing that there is a Michael Mooresque quality to the script… I’m not entirely convinced.

Officials said that in the 18-minute long tape – of which only six minutes were aired on the al-Jazeera Arab television network in the Middle East on Friday – bin Laden bemoans the recent democratic elections in Afghanistan and the lack of violence involved with it.
On the tape, bin Laden also says his terror organization has been hurt by the U.S. military’s unrelenting manhunt for him and his cohorts on the Afghan-Pakistani border.
A portion of the left-out footage includes a tirade aimed at President Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, claiming the war in Iraq is purely over oil.
A voice in the background can be heard saying “You rucky, Bin Raden…”

How do you know when your assailants aren’t right wingers?
related…..

Jaegar at the Shotgun;

“ACK!!! John Kerry will not allow a lowly Toronto City Councillor who never served in Vietnam to question his patriotism! When he promises to protect the nation from Toronto’s garbage he means it!
So get with it Toronto – find your own dump or cheer for Bush. Which will it be?”

Heh.

Allow me to introduce readers to the incoming Supreme Court Justice, Rosalie Abella. This page from the socialist manifesto quote should provide about all Canadians need to know about her.

“We need to understand that “equality” does not necessarily mean treating people the same… Sometimes equality means treating people the same, despite their differences, and sometimes it means treating them as equals by accommodating their differences.”

Justice Abella is also famed for her ruling to the age of consent for male homosexuals in Canada to 14 because she concluded the law

“arbitrarily disadvantages gay men by denying to them until they are 18 a choice available at the age of 14 for those who are not gay, namely their choice of sexual expression with a consenting partner.” … “perpetuates rather than narrows the gap for a historically disadvantaged group — gay men — it does so arbitrarily and stereotypically, and is, therefore, a discriminatory provision which infringes the guarantee of equality.”

This is assuming her appointment survives the grueling committee review process.

Apocalypse Cow.

With admiring overtones, local lefty CKOM afternoon host, Kurt Leavins, played a short clip of Ted Kennedy speaking at the DNC this afternoon. In what was presumably meant to be a moment of nostalgia and profound reflection, he then shared an audio clip of the man who could have been President if the bitch had just learned to swim speaking at the funeral of his big brother, John F.
Leavens said it gave him a feeling of “deja vu”.
The spine shivers.
?
Deja vu? As in an instantanious funeral revisitation? Ted Kennedy delivering a eulogy at the DNC?
(If you say so. My Kennedy “deja vu” moments occur when young women succumb to death by rich playboy”, but that’s just me.)
In related coverage;
Via, Bankers Online, the convention schedule;

6:00pm – Opening flag burning ceremony.
6:05pm – Pledge of Allegiance to the United Nations
6:10pm – Secular words by Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton
6:30pm – Anti-war concert by Barbra Streisand.
6:45pm – Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
7:00pm – Tribute theme to France.
7:10pm – Collect offerings for al-Zawahri defense fund.
7:20pm – Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
7:30pm – Tribute theme to Germany.
7:45pm – Anti-war rally moderated by Michael Moore.
8:25pm – Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
8:30pm – Terrorist appeasement workshop.
9:00pm – Gay marriage ceremony for male and female couples.
9:20pm – Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
9:30pm – CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN urge defeat of President Bush.
10:00pm – Posting the Iraqi Colors by Sean Penn and Tim Robbins
10:10pm – Reenactment of Kerry’s fake medal toss.
10:15pm – Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
10:20pm – Cameo by Dean ‘Yeeearrrrrrrg!’
10:30pm – Abortion demonstration by N.A.R.A.L.
10:40pm – Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
10:50pm – Special thanks to the New York Times & Washington Post.
11:00pm – Multiple gay marriage ceremony for threesomes and groups.
11:10pm – Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
11:15pm – Maximizing Welfare workshop.
11:30pm – Saddam Legal Defense Fund pep rally.
11:50pm – Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
12:00pm – Nomination of Democratic candidate.
NEW: 5:00am -Ted Kennedy Will Conduct a Swimming Class.

Protein Wisdom is also blogging the convention. Well, channeling might be the more accurate word…

Please, let it be true, let it be true….
Elections Canada to Charge Moore

Elections Canada will lay charges against shockumentary filmmaker Michael Moore.
Officially, Elections Canada will neither confirm nor deny plans to lay formal charges against Moore. However, Canadafreepress.com has learned through sources that charges are imminent and expected by the end of next week.
The anti-Bush Moore, who often lets his mouth get ahead of him, may think he got away with the boner of the Canadian release of Fahrenheit 9/11 just days ahead of the June 28 federal election, but there is the little matter of election law infringement.

Two birds with one stone. Bitchslapping Michael Moore with Canadian anti-speech laws. How delicious.

Mike Bradley, the mayor of Sarnia, wants to make Michael Moore an honorary Canadian citizen.
Bob Tarantino wants to kick his ass.
Over at the Shotgun, commentor Rick McGinnis speculates…

It’s interesting to think what would have happened to Moore, had he been born Canadian.
He’d have been born in Oshawa, the son of a middle management worker at GM. His dad would get him a job, but he’d quit the line after a day. He’d have dropped out of York University, and gotten a job at NOW magazine, where he’d experience a meteoric rise but would suddenly be fired after one too many personality conflicts with publisher Michael Hollett.
He’d turn to filmmaking, parlaying his connections into a short documentary that would get programmed at Images or the Perspectives Canada section at the Toronto International Film Festival, but would never see commercial release, and take several years before getting video release with an independent distributor who went bankrupt with most of the copies still in boxes in their warehouse. (Copies of the DVD of Moore’s film, “49th Paral-hell”, would turn up in sell- off bins for years.)
Moore’s best hope would have been to be Rick Mercer, except that he’s nowhere near as charming as Mercer, and we already have one, so he’d basically be relegated to the occasional underpaid rant in This Magazine and sporadic work as a production assistant on American TV movies being shot in Toronto.
Frustrated by the lack of opportunities for a (straight, white, but overweight) cinematic propagandist in this country, he’d move south, where so many other Canadians have found not only opportunity, but the mysterious freedom to dissent publicly in “facist Amerikkka”.

About right.

Michael Moore had an opinion on the Canadian federal election a few weeks ago…

“Your election comes before ours, and it will be such a blow to those of us trying to get rid of Bush” if Harper wins.
“I’ve spent a lot of time trying to convince Americans that Canadians are smart people, and you’re going to make me look really bad. I really need you to make sure that Mr. Harper does not take over,” Moore reportedly told the crowd of approximately 600 in attendance at the screening.�
Moore said Harper “has a big pair of scissors in his hands and wants to snip away at the social safety net that distinguishes you from us. The primary difference between Canadians and Americans is that you have a general basic ethic that says, ‘We’re all Canadians. We’re all in the same boat, and if one of us doesn’t have health care, we all suffer as a result of that. If one of us isn’t helped when we hit upon hard times, then we all hurt as a result of that.'”
Moore said that the America ethic is “every man for himself. Me me me me me. To let people in your country to have that ethic take over and destroy that thing that makes you wonderfully Canadian is something that must be resisted on June 28 (The Election Day in Canada). “

Here’s your chance to enlighten Mr. Moore about something else that is wonderfully Canadian – limits on speech.

it is an offence for “[Any] person who does not reside in Canada [to], during an election period, in any way induce electors to vote or refrain from voting for a particular candidate unless the person is (a) a Canadian citizen; or (b) a permanent resident.”

On a related topic, Pete Townsend is more than a little annoyed. Michael’s been making stuff up again.
And this is fun, too. This, too.

Evidence that refutes the claims of the hysterical left that the Bush administration is threatening civil liberties and freedom of speech.
Exhibit A: Ted Rall* is still drawing breath.

Fringe cartoonist? Hardly. Rall is carried in the Washington Post and about 140 other newspapers.
Crossposted at the Shotgun

Listening to John Gormley Live this morning in the truck, to a discussion on Moore’s Moonbat Masterpiece, a caller phoned in who mentioned a website with an address I promptly forgot. He explained that it compiles in one place every half-baked, quarter-baked and unbaked conspiracy theory surrounding the events of Sept.11. We’ve heard them all by now. The caller, of course, thought the website was credible.
With the controversy swirling around Farenheit, I’ve been reminded a lot lately of Oliver Stone’s JFK. The parallels are striking – from the media hype to the public debate, to the eventual debunking and consensus that Stone’s movie was a pile of unsubstantiated crap. While conspiracy theorists still abound over the events in Dallas, not many of them cite Oliver Stone these days. When all the hoopla is over, and Iraq stumbles its way towards quasi-democracy and Bush has moved back to Texas, replaced by Kerry in 2004 or Rice in 2008…I predict Farenheit 9/11 will be sitting on a dusty shelf, next to JFK. Nobody will take Moore any more seriously than they do Mr. Stone.
But this morning, as the conspiracy seeker was being summarily dismissed as a lunatic, I began thinking about the extinction of the werewolves.

It’s hard to imagine a time long ago when werewolves were taken seriously, when simple-minded village people huddled together beside bright fires, with their doors barred against an unspeakable fate. Harder yet to imagine the irrational terror of an unbelievable, supernatural creature.

All in all though, werewolves were a resilient lot – incomprehensibly powerful, virtually immortal. They survived in the folklore and literature of civilization for centuries. How many silver bullets were spent in the dark, how many beasts felled, to return to their human forms?
In the end, the magnificent and malevolent creature were condemned to nothingness- their last gasps expended on celluloid. I think the last true werewolf movie was An American Werewolf In London – long after the real thing was gone.
They had to see it coming. When Edison created the light bulb, the werewolf retreated with the dark. A century later, Apollo on the moon and Armstrong walking its surface, the creature was struck a fatal blow. The moon was no longer magic.
Today, Mars rovers and Titan probes have pushed these quaint old monsters so deeply into the void that we nearly forget they ever existed. There, they joined the mermaids and the sea witches and the Windigo. Only the vampire survived, but at a price – the everlasting humiliation of being vanquished by girls named “Buffy”.
But with their demise, a vacuum arose.
Denied the objects of old superstitions, the human mind sought new ones. As science explored both outward and inward, demystifying and explaining the unknown, the superstitious had fewer places to go. With nowhere else to turn, they cast their lot with the known. Today, they fear the powerful mortal figures of our present, and find darkness in the giant shadows that they cast. Conspiracy folk fables arise from the mists just as surely as the howls of the werewolves did in centuries past.
Instead of supernatural, bloodthirsty creatures of lunar inspired madness, the monsters of the simple minds of our new age are mere human beings, transformed into scheming omnipotent creatures through the power of the political. One can’t help but think that it must be frustrating to settle for such pale and transient villians. Perhaps this is the reason for their shrillness – they’ve been cheated of the real thing. Real werewolves don’t have term limits.
So today, while a small metal object circles the planet of Saturn, and geneticists unravel the human genetic code, as physicists transform light into tools and molecules into robots – the superstitious still gather together in the dark, reassured by the flickering screen of the cinema, as their ancestors were reassured by the flicker of the cabin fire.
Perhaps we should just leave them be.

Jeff Goldstein is involved. With Peter Fonda. In a manner of speaking. Thus, the expected language warnings.

Christopher Hitchens reviews Farenheit 9/11.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.

It should be noted that Michael Moore has assembled an attack team of lawyers to sue anyone who insults him or his film. Hitchens goes on to deconstruct the contradictions and outright fictions at length in the so-called “documentary”.

Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (…) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

“The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States “

And that’s just from Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it’s highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It’s also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

(By way of comparison, the approving pap from a clueless Roger Ebert.)
hat tip – QandO

CBC Watch:

With copy slogans like “He came inside me,” “I came inside him” and “He likes it Raw,” Health Canada and a handful of AIDS groups are running a new national HIV ad campaign targeting gay men under the catch phrase “Think Again”(a phrase already used by Health Canada for a campaign to target smokers).

CBC Watch has a followup on the reaction of the People’s Network to Jim Pattison’s refusal to run the images on Pattison Group billboards. Short version: “bad conservative billionaire!”.
I like Kathy Shaidle’s take.
A couple of years ago, a friend who works with Sask Health mentioned that they were worried that a new needle exchange program was going to anger diabetics, who had to pay for their own. I told her, “And rightfully so.”
“But,” she protested, “AIDS is a public health issue.”
“and diabetes isn’t?”
“A lot of people don’t know that you can catch HIV through intravenous drug usage. They don’t know….”
“What.. ? Did they miss the day in Grade 6 where we learned shooting drugs into your veins with a needle is bad for you???