Sean Burns of Philadelphia Weekly, articulating exactly how I feel about Mr. Sicko:
A buddy recently quipped that in another lifetime George W. Bush and Michael Moore probably would’ve been great friends. This sounds outlandish at first, but chew on it for a little while.I haven't seen "Sicko" yet, but damn "Live Free or Die Hard" was a lot of fun. Posted by Stephen Silver at June 28, 2007 03:26 PMBoth are millionaires who strive to pass themselves off as “regular folks”—there’s not much difference between Moore’s carefully cultivated blue-jeans-and-ball-cap getup and our president’s Crawford brush-clearing regalia. Both Moore and Bush address the American people in the condescending tone one might take with a developmentally delayed child, and there’s never a crisis in our complex modern age that can’t be resolved with a simple declarative sentence. Neither gentleman has much interest in gray areas.
Speaking as someone who sees the world as an endlessly complicated and terrifying place, I personally find such reductive black-and-white worldviews profoundly unhelpful, no matter which side of the aisle they come from. I know I’m violating the unspoken agreement among good liberal-minded folks, as we’re all apparently supposed to gloss over the unsavory aspects of Michael Moore’s methods and demagoguery, at best admitting that his shenanigans and distortions aren’t any worse than what Rush Limbaugh does on the airwaves every day.
This may be true, but I don’t like Limbaugh either. Shouldn’t we be aspiring to something better and more substantive?