by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO- The Corner
I know that it’s shooting whales in a barrel to point out Michael Moore’s — once a guest in the Carter presidential box at the 2004 Democratic Convention — continued displays of ignorance. Nonetheless, the latest example is Moore’s lingering hurt because years ago Clint Eastwood once deadpanned that should Moore show up with his camera at Eastwood’s door (in the fashion that Moore himself had once attempted to ambush and embarrass actor Charlton Heston), Eastwood then might shoot him.
I suppose Moore was trying to suggest that the director of American Sniper logically transposed his own innate murderous instincts onto his movie, which Moore alone sensed.
But given that Moore is both stupid and a hypocrite, almost everything he says is either incoherent or a projection of his own pathologies. After all, he slammed sniping, then backtracked and said sniping was okay if used on the defensive by the invaded. In doing so, he nullified his own point that his uncle who invaded foreign ground was killed by a cowardly sniper — who apparently must have also had good reason to take to sniping against such foreign invaders on Asian ground.
Were a confused Michael Moore and others faulting American Sniper on the argument that Chris Kyle was a sniper per se, or that he was an American sniper?
In the current tensions with the Islamic World, pundits bandy about received wisdom that in fact is often ignorance. Here are a few examples.