Saturday, June 30, 2007

...And He's Fat

The Star, a liberal Canadian paper no less, trashes Moore's latest flick, Sicko (link):

(Moore) sparks valuable debate about such serious issues as gun abuse, politicized terror and corporate chicanery, yet he does so with little regard to factual accuracy or even simple fairness. He is a crusader without conscience.
...
Sicko is also completely lacking in journalistic rigour, presenting only the negatives of for-profit U.S. health care and only the positives of the government-run Canadian, British, French and Cuban Medicare programs. As always, Moore makes unsupported assertions and uses out-of-context edits. The film is not a documentary, if that term is to mean anything more than unvarnished propaganda.
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many other sad and shocking stories are contrasted with scenes of the enlightened Utopias in other countries, where Medicare is "free" – if you ignore the fact, as Moore does, that high taxes and long wait times pay for that "free" care.
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Moore interviews the pediatrician daughter of late Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, who tells us that communism is better than capitalism.

Gosh, who could argue with such impartial counsel? Maybe the many Cubans who each year try to flee the island to become American citizens? Such things, as usual, don't trouble Moore. Nor does it seem to occur to him that if Guantanamo were to deny health care to its prisoners, the U.S. would be in violation of international law and basic human rights.
The good news is that I think Moore is finally, and deservedly, getting marginalized as most people get that he unfairly stacks the deck in his films.

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