New Vent: Schooling Michael Moore Updated

posted at 8:05 am on June 22, 2007 by Bryan
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Michelle picks apart the cherry-picked facts and half-baked logic of Michael Moore’s new crockumentary, SiCKO, which opens in theaters today. Plus, health tips from the svelte film maker.

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Update: I don’t usually do this in a Vent post, but this story is worth adding here because, unlike the reporter who filed the story, I was there at the screening and the reporter has at least one fact wrong in an otherwise good story:

[U]nlike Al Gore’s film on global warming, which helped rally support on an equally controversial problem, “Sicko” is creating an awkward situation for the leading Democratic presidential candidates.

Rejecting Moore’s prescription on healthcare could alienate liberal activists, who will play a big role in choosing the party’s next standard-bearer. However, his proposal — wiping out private health insurance and replacing it with a massive federal program — could be political poison with the larger electorate.

At a special screening in Washington this week, politicians, lobbyists, media pooh-bahs and policy junkies flocked to see Moore’s film.

No one “flocked” to see this film on *Thursday, which was the lobbyist screening at Union Station theater in DC. I was there. That’s my footage in today’s Vent–I was a few feet from Moore when he entered the theater. There were a couple dozen or so red-shirted people who claimed to be RNs supporting the film, though they wouldn’t talk to me on camera or even answer when I asked whether they were really nurses or not. They didn’t even get into the lobbyist screening, at least not while I was there. They were gathered outside, waiting to get into another screening of it. There was a small group of white-haired ladies shouting “Health care not warfare” standing outside the theater, because no gathering of leftwingers is complete without some kind of anti-war demonstration, no matter how irrelevant it might be to the issue at hand. Inside, there were maybe 30 or 40 people seated to watch the film, in a room that could seat hundreds. Most of those people were probably not lobbyists at all. They just followed Moore into the theater, as I had done when he walked in. That is not “flocking” to see the film by any standard definition of the term. It’s a bunch of people letting themselves be used as props, and a few who actually watched the film as Moore’s intended targets/audience. As he entered the theater, one of Moore’s people said that he’d attracted “about a dozen” lobbyists to the screening. Is that flocking? I don’t think so.

As to the article’s larger point, that it creates a difficulty for Democrats, that’s probably true. They certainly aren’t flocking to support it, they way they flocked to get behind the pile of lies called Fahrenheit 9-11 back in 2004. Undermining a war in progress obviously didn’t create the same dilemma then that undermining a push to socialize health care creates for them now.

Correction: The lobbyist screening I attended in DC was on Wednesday, not Thursday as I said above.

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