Tuesday, June 29, 2004
In response to David Brooks' latest diatribe All Hail Moore in the NYTimes...
It seems Brooks has taken it upon himself to outpropagandize the liberal filmmaker with his latest rant, hopefully meant as an ironic, playful twist on Moore's own incontinence with the truth. Brooks' tortured logic is a classic example of the intellectual dishonesty many, including said author, are accusing Moore of propagating. In his article Brooks colorfully asserts the following strained correlations, expressed to you for brevity's sake in shorthand equational form by Trying Times:
Moore's opinion asserted while in another country=Moore's assertions in his movies=people who believe what he says in his movies=people who go to his movies=liberals=the general state of liberal politics in America
THEREFORE: Moore's ranting in other countries is equal to the pathetic state of liberal politics! We've come a long way since Goebbels, but it seems Brooks is just as willing to join the conservative crowd of intellectual brutes spitting false generalities about the left, right up there with the likes of Rush Limbaugh. I'm sorry, David, I was beginning to think you were above such things. Speaking of Rush, Trying Times has this message to convey to all those gotcha! columnists out there raking over Moore's film for falsehoods: WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?!?! Have not Bill O' Reilly, Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage and Sean Hannity been promoting worse deceptions for only, say, the last decade and a half? What have the detectives of "intellectual dishonesty" like Michael Isokoff and Christopher Hitchens been doing that all this time? Oh right! They were too busy perpetuating legal myths about Bill and Hillary Clinton! Way to go on that whole Whitewater thing! Turns out the ensuing investigation only cost the American taxpayer 70 Million dollars and a chance to avoid having to ever hear or look at Monica Lewinsky. But we enjoy wasting money, as many of the aforementioned Moore-bashing writers are keenly aware by now. How else can you explain giving 150 Billion dollars to fund a pointless war on the other side of the world? At least we got to see those cool computerized graphics of airplanes and tanks on Fox News. Of course, you would never try to make a war seem like a video game just to perpetuate its continuation, that would be propaganda! Only Michael Moore would be egregious enough to dabble in such things. Oh, and there was and is no need to write articles castigating Fox and the other networks for destroying any sense of balance and sobriety in the American publics judgment of the war. That time is better spent blasting a movie maker for engaging in occasionally delusional editorial indulgences. Especially if the core message of those indulgences is that you as journalists resoundingly failed to properly examine the rationales for a failed war.
It seems Brooks has taken it upon himself to outpropagandize the liberal filmmaker with his latest rant, hopefully meant as an ironic, playful twist on Moore's own incontinence with the truth. Brooks' tortured logic is a classic example of the intellectual dishonesty many, including said author, are accusing Moore of propagating. In his article Brooks colorfully asserts the following strained correlations, expressed to you for brevity's sake in shorthand equational form by Trying Times:
Moore's opinion asserted while in another country=Moore's assertions in his movies=people who believe what he says in his movies=people who go to his movies=liberals=the general state of liberal politics in America
THEREFORE: Moore's ranting in other countries is equal to the pathetic state of liberal politics! We've come a long way since Goebbels, but it seems Brooks is just as willing to join the conservative crowd of intellectual brutes spitting false generalities about the left, right up there with the likes of Rush Limbaugh. I'm sorry, David, I was beginning to think you were above such things. Speaking of Rush, Trying Times has this message to convey to all those gotcha! columnists out there raking over Moore's film for falsehoods: WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?!?! Have not Bill O' Reilly, Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage and Sean Hannity been promoting worse deceptions for only, say, the last decade and a half? What have the detectives of "intellectual dishonesty" like Michael Isokoff and Christopher Hitchens been doing that all this time? Oh right! They were too busy perpetuating legal myths about Bill and Hillary Clinton! Way to go on that whole Whitewater thing! Turns out the ensuing investigation only cost the American taxpayer 70 Million dollars and a chance to avoid having to ever hear or look at Monica Lewinsky. But we enjoy wasting money, as many of the aforementioned Moore-bashing writers are keenly aware by now. How else can you explain giving 150 Billion dollars to fund a pointless war on the other side of the world? At least we got to see those cool computerized graphics of airplanes and tanks on Fox News. Of course, you would never try to make a war seem like a video game just to perpetuate its continuation, that would be propaganda! Only Michael Moore would be egregious enough to dabble in such things. Oh, and there was and is no need to write articles castigating Fox and the other networks for destroying any sense of balance and sobriety in the American publics judgment of the war. That time is better spent blasting a movie maker for engaging in occasionally delusional editorial indulgences. Especially if the core message of those indulgences is that you as journalists resoundingly failed to properly examine the rationales for a failed war.
Monday, June 14, 2004
In regards to the recent article by Sebastian Mallaby in the Washington Post entitled Big Government Again...
Trying Times would like to chime in to second Mr. Mallaby's thoughts on the Republican facade we all see through, their public distain for "Big Government". How many astronomical deficits must the American people be subjected to before we see this rhetoric for what it is? A sham. Mallaby's collegue George Will stated it most accurately earlier this month when he blasted neo-conservatives for a so-called "Global Social Engineering" project, Iraqi quagmire in case. Small government is a farce in lew of such grandiose strategies. Alas, it seems that it will have to be driven into voters skulls by the tragic aftermath of failed policies like the Iraqi adventure before they quit believing in the "party of small government". Other examples of Republican "Big Government" policies abound, most notably that federal spending under the Bush regime has been higher than during the Clinton era, occuring in concert with starving state budgets. The result has been a huge increase in debtor status for all while typically well funded social projects like college tuition grants and state employee wages stagnate. This has NOT been the result of smaller government, but simply the re-adjustment of monetary priorities for a group obsessed with re-inventing a quasi-Christian empirial state in the place of proven domestic secular social projects (the federally funded welfare state, such as it is). To return to Mallaby's more upbeat tone, voters are perhaps awakening from a twenty four year hiatus from sanity to realize that BIG government is not inherently a problem, but BAD government can be. Espousing on this point, it can be said that no particular social project is necessarily without value, except in the way in which it has been (or could be) implemented. Thought must be given more to why or why not something cannot be done, or perhaps even to what degree it can be accomplished. Specifically, we must ponder whether this country is capable of efficiently transforming another nation-state into a democracy (such as our desire in Iraq) through a sensible cost-benefit analysis. The same can be said for the various divisions of the welfare state. E.g., How can we most efficiently educate our populous? It needn't be with pure monetary gifts to aspiring higher-ed students, but it seems obvious that double-digit annual increases in tuition is not the correct answer either. Hopefully, as Mallaby points out, we are entering a more thoughtful, nuanced era on the uses of government. No longer is it adequete to proclaim that all government intervention is bad, or even that it could be completely tamed if we desired it so. Neither party is capable of such restraint (unless you count the Clinton Democrats). It should be obvious after experiencing the rotund spending of the Johnson, Reagan, and Bush years that both parties are interested in creating a "Great Society", they merely differ on the details.
Trying Times would like to chime in to second Mr. Mallaby's thoughts on the Republican facade we all see through, their public distain for "Big Government". How many astronomical deficits must the American people be subjected to before we see this rhetoric for what it is? A sham. Mallaby's collegue George Will stated it most accurately earlier this month when he blasted neo-conservatives for a so-called "Global Social Engineering" project, Iraqi quagmire in case. Small government is a farce in lew of such grandiose strategies. Alas, it seems that it will have to be driven into voters skulls by the tragic aftermath of failed policies like the Iraqi adventure before they quit believing in the "party of small government". Other examples of Republican "Big Government" policies abound, most notably that federal spending under the Bush regime has been higher than during the Clinton era, occuring in concert with starving state budgets. The result has been a huge increase in debtor status for all while typically well funded social projects like college tuition grants and state employee wages stagnate. This has NOT been the result of smaller government, but simply the re-adjustment of monetary priorities for a group obsessed with re-inventing a quasi-Christian empirial state in the place of proven domestic secular social projects (the federally funded welfare state, such as it is). To return to Mallaby's more upbeat tone, voters are perhaps awakening from a twenty four year hiatus from sanity to realize that BIG government is not inherently a problem, but BAD government can be. Espousing on this point, it can be said that no particular social project is necessarily without value, except in the way in which it has been (or could be) implemented. Thought must be given more to why or why not something cannot be done, or perhaps even to what degree it can be accomplished. Specifically, we must ponder whether this country is capable of efficiently transforming another nation-state into a democracy (such as our desire in Iraq) through a sensible cost-benefit analysis. The same can be said for the various divisions of the welfare state. E.g., How can we most efficiently educate our populous? It needn't be with pure monetary gifts to aspiring higher-ed students, but it seems obvious that double-digit annual increases in tuition is not the correct answer either. Hopefully, as Mallaby points out, we are entering a more thoughtful, nuanced era on the uses of government. No longer is it adequete to proclaim that all government intervention is bad, or even that it could be completely tamed if we desired it so. Neither party is capable of such restraint (unless you count the Clinton Democrats). It should be obvious after experiencing the rotund spending of the Johnson, Reagan, and Bush years that both parties are interested in creating a "Great Society", they merely differ on the details.
