Random Michael Moore Deceits [#6]

"Some call you the elite; I call you my base"

Toward the end of Fahrenheit 9/11 Moore feeds his audience a short film segment of George W. Bush speaking to a seated gathering of men in tuxedoes. Mr. Bush addresses them earnestly: “I call you the haves and the have mores. Some call you the elite; I call you my base.” This segment is spliced in immediately after other segments in which Mr. Bush has been accused of attacking Iraq for no other reason than to enrich Big Business. It’s a vision of Wall Street straight out of a 1930s Soviet agitprop flick; all it lacked were the top hats and gold-handled walking sticks. At that moment the liberals loved Michael Moore; they just knew he had uncovered The Truth.

And from whence did this film segment, this revealing Rosetta Stone of the Republican Party, come? Well folks, this snippet is a surgically excised fragment taken from the October 19th, 2000 Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner. That’s the Alfred Smith dinner, not the Alfred Krupp dinner. All those men in tuxedoes are not really munitions makers and Wall Street bankers. This is an annual charity dinner to raise money for Catholic charities. The guests are generous people of every political persuasion. The candidates George Bush and Al Gore were the co-guests of honor. It is customary for the guest speakers at this event to indulge in self-deprecating humor, hence Mr. Bush’s laugh line about “my base.” Bush himself was exploiting a shopworn stereotype; in point of fact, much of the money raised by Republicans comes from small contributors; the Democrats are far more dependent on large lump-sum contributions from special-interest groups.

It’s a pity that Moore left Al Gore’s performance lying on his cutting-room floor. Gore, for once, had dropped his usual wooden demeanor: “The Al Smith Dinner represents a hallowed and important tradition, which I actually did invent.” In a send-up of his tediously repeated promise to put Social Security “in a lockbox,” Gore went on to promise to put “Medicare in a walk-in closet” and to put NASA funding in a “hermetically-sealed Ziploc bag.”

So Michael Moore’s misleading use of the Al Smith Dinner segment stands exposed for the cynical manipulation that it is. The hate-filled Mr. Moore chose to mischaracterize Mr. Bush as a greedy b#stard even as Mr. Bush was in the act of helping to raise $1.6 million to bring comfort to needy families."

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