Filmmaker Michael Moore calls on Democrats to declare national emergency over Trump’s “espionage”

By David Walsh
Senior Art, Cinema & Culture Critic, wsws.org

Dateline: 25 March 2017

[su_panel background=”#FFFFFF” color=”#020109″ border=”7px solid #5382d7″ shadow=”12px 0px 1px #eeeeee” radius=”11″][su_dropcap style=”light”]O[/su_dropcap]n Wednesday, American filmmaker Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9 / 11, Bowling for Columbine, Roger & Me) called on the Democratic Party to “declare a National Emergency” in response to Donald Trump’s being investigated “for espionage.” Moore was referring to the announcement Monday by FBI Director James B. Comey that the agency was investigating whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election.[/su_panel]

The political degeneracy of a onetime progressive celebrity.
The man who gave us SiCKO has become a reactionary blathering idiot.

Moore has enthusiastically adopted the reactionary and diversionary anti-Russian campaign as his own. The documentary maker—along with the rest of the Democratic Party and its hangers-on, including the various late-night talk show hosts—refuses in large measure to oppose Trump for his militarism, persecution of immigrants, right-wing social policies and attacks on the working class, but instead lambastes the new president for his supposed “collusion and obedience to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin” [one of Moore’s recent tweets].

By a “national emergency,” Moore explained Wednesday in his Instagram message, he meant an effort by the Democrats to paralyze the US government. He urged the party’s leadership in both houses of Congress “to bring a halt to all business being done in the name of this potential felony suspect, Donald J. Trump. No bill he supports, no Supreme Court nominee he has named, can be decided while he is under a criminal investigation. His presidency has no legitimacy until the FBI—and an independent investigative committee—discovers the truth. Fellow citizens, demand the Democrats cease all business.”

Moore made his demagogic appeal to the Democrats and the FBI on the same day that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, as the WSWS has noted, floated the proposal for a palace coup against Trump. Friedman addressed an open letter to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, implying that they should remove Trump from office and install a military-CIA junta in the US.

BELOW: Gallery of liberal idiots or conscious servers of the ruling corporatist bourgeoisie—take your pick. Let us be clear about one thing: These people are not wrong for opposing Trump. They are wrong for opposing him for stupid, morally bankrupt reasons, and for being propagandists for a party and politicians that are as undemocratic, corrupt and servile to Wall Street and the military industrial complex as Trump, and which could just as easily land the world in a cataclysmic nuclear war. These arrogant, sanctimonious ignoramuses are not people to be followed—or admired.

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But Moore did not need to take a lead from Friedman. He has been arguing along these same general lines for some time, along with talk show hosts Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert, among others. Comic Rosie O’Donnell, a week before the inauguration, urged President Barack Obama in a tweet to impose “MARTIAL LAW—DELAYING THE INAUGURATION—UNTIL TRUMP IS ‘CLEARED’ OF ALL CHARGES [of involvement in the Russian hacking scandal].”

In any event, Moore has reached the point where his politics and actions are entirely without principle. It is difficult to determine at times whether he fully believes some of the stupid and reckless things he says. Everything is subordinated to the need to confuse and disorient the mass opposition to Trump and channel it in a reactionary direction, thus preserving the two-party system.

[su_pullquote]A READER SAYS: “At some point Moore had something interesting to say (e.g. Roger and Me) but his current political trajectory is completely reactionary. In his latest movie Trumpland he says somewhere about Hillary that “I hope she did kill Vince Foster. That’s badass,”. For Moore and his ilk, just having a female president is good enough, the criminal policies of such a president are of no concern. Now of all the things that Trump can be rightly criticized for, Moore has picked up the most reactionary way to attack Trump from the right. It is impossible to listen to this drivel.”[/su_pullquote]

It should be recalled that Moore spent the first part of 2016 firmly backing the campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He denounced Sanders’ opponent, Hillary Clinton, for opposing reform of the financial system, an increase in the minimum wage and a free health care system. He taunted Clinton as the candidate of Goldman Sachs, a “hawk” and supporter of “violence against the poor.” He asked rhetorically, “Can anyone with a conscience vote for someone who led us on to war in Iraq?”

When Sanders dropped out of the race and threw his support to Clinton, Moore turned on a dime and did the same. The filmmaker proceeded to extol the virtues of the former first lady, describing her as “our Pope Francis,” someone who will “kick ass in Congress.”

“Our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy,” he told the media.

The election of Trump threw the filmmaker into a genuine panic. Not so much because of the billionaire president’s right-wing policies, although Moore nominally opposes many of them, but because of the immense crisis and discrediting of the political system that the election results entailed.

The outcome of the vote revealed the miserable failure and bankruptcy of the Democratic Party, which was unwilling and unable—in the form of the Clinton campaign—to present a program that could attract any significant popular support. Since November, Moore has striven above all to conceal the central responsibility of the Obama administration and its right-wing policies and operations—an administration he supported—for Trump’s victory.

Virtually from the moment the Republican president took the oath of office, Moore has vehemently denounced him as a Russian puppet and lobbied for his removal.

At the time of the February 13 resignation of Trump’s national security advisor, Michael T. Flynn, because of Flynn’s earlier communications with the Russian ambassador to the US, Moore flew into near hysterics. He demanded Trump “vacate” the White House immediately, calling the president a “Russian traitor.”

On February 14, Moore tweeted Trump, “It’s now noontime in DC & it appears you are still squatting in our Oval Office. I gave u til this morning to leave.” He added later, “What part of ‘vacate you Russian traitor’ don’t you understand? We can do this the easy way (you resign), or the hard way (impeachment).” He followed up the same day, “Traitor! Resign by morning!”

On Facebook February 14, Moore referred to a “stunning bombshell from the New York Times,” i.e., entirely unsubstantiated allegations about Russian interference in the US elections, and went on, “It’s what we all suspected. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on: TRUMP COLLUDING WITH THE RUSSIANS TO THROW THE ELECTION TO HIM. … If it turns out there’s a traitor in the White House, the judicial branch must find a fair, peaceful way to un-do and then re-do the election of 2016.”

Along with everything else, this business about Trump being a “Russian traitor” is a filthy effort to revive McCarthyite anti-communism.

In a revealing Facebook entry March 5, following Trump’s claim that the White House had wiretapped his campaign in 2016, Moore commented: “Did Obama ‘tapp’ Trump? Let’s Hope So. If you’re like me, you have no love for the FBI, the NSA or the CIA. If you are from my generation, you know these are very often nefarious institutions. The FBI spied on Martin Luther King to stop his civil rights activities. The NSA was ordered to make up stuff on Iraq so [George W.] Bush could start a war. The CIA has had leaders of countries assassinated and democratically-elected Presidents (Iran, Chile, Guatemala) overthrown. These secret organizations have for decades committed so many acts in our name that have done much damage to good people and movements here and around the world.”

After making this acknowledgement, Moore went on to suggest that if the Obama administration and the intelligence apparatus indeed had evidence that the Trump campaign was in contact with Russian officials, “then it not only is possible that the Justice Department or the national security apparatus decided to get a warrant to dig deeper, I think most patriotic Americans would agree with me that the Obama administration HAD AN OBLIGATION to order that wiretap because an act of treason—Trump campaign people colluding with Russia to affect the outcome of our election—had taken place.”

So, without batting an eye, Moore expressed his support for and entered into a political bloc with the “nefarious institutions” he admitted only a few lines before had been responsible for global misery and murder, backing them in their internecine conflict with Donald Trump. The filmmaker should not have the slightest political credibility at this point.

Crude, pragmatic, generally swinish… this is Michael Moore now, a political scoundrel.

SELECT COMMENTS (From original thread)

Richard Allen •

Michael Moore is worth $50 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
There is tendency among middle class Marxists to avoid the fundamentals of class analysis, i.e. the material identification of what class somebody they like or wish to to swaye is actually in. Michael is far beyond the middle class by any definition. $49 million could buy a lot of class struggle, leaving him a million to take care of what’s left of his life. But then how could he guarantee that his children enter that parasitic class of rentiers. Of course it takes far less money to bribe the middle class and/or nouveau riche. Chomsky is worth $2million. http://www.hoover.org/resea…. He also rationalizes his wealth on the basis of that ultimate principle love of family. Workers get pity and not love from these petty bourgeois. The putrid fact that both of these activists have made a great living decrying the pain and suffering of the working class is obscene. But to be fair other liberals like John Steinbeck did worst. He encouraged his sons to go kill peasants seeking their freedom in Vietnam and joined the CIA himself. Jack London poured a fortune into a obscene ranch and militantly supported the allied side of World War I. However we can forgive these two writers since they at least gave us great literature. Something neither Moore nor the Chomsky have done. Both have made
a fortune on second rate liberal propaganda. A form of cowardly libertarian anarchism.

stown •

Moore should be challenged to make a movie about the Flint Sit-down Strike, since it did happen in his hometown. He has the financial resources and there is an abundance of historical material and some close living relatives of leading participants that could prove to be essential. But no, it is all Russia all the time.
Ort •

Moore began his public career as a populist iconoclast and contrarian; he was a “guerilla theater” David who persistently, noisily, and even courageously challenged corporate and political Goliaths. His filmmaking reflects a relatively radical sensibility– “radical”, that is, in the broad sense of challenging authority and seeking root causes for sociopolitical conflicts and abuses.

But when Moore put on his would-be “pragmatic” baseball cap, he became a virtual parody of the progressive-liberal lite “Everyman”. As a child growing up in a family of loyal Democrats, Moore internalized the prevailing mythology, ethos, and belief system.

This outlook, or model, is predicated on a devout belief that “good government” is the best remedy for social and economic inequality and other abuses of power; a reformist belief that change occurs incrementally, and is best accomplished by continually supporting “lesser evil” candidates and policies; and, most importantly, the inevitable conclusion that this “method” of achieving political salvation requires “conditional” support for the Democratic Party.

So Moore turned himself into a caricature of the hapless “battered Democrat”; occasionally barking or howling at the party’s shortcomings and inadequacies, but nevertheless insisting that its candidates and incumbents must be supported in order to “resist” the presumptively evil, monstrous Republicans.

I think Moore may have struggled over the years with a deeper realization that this myth/belief system is (fatally) flawed. When the crisis and scandal concerning the contaminated water supply erupted in Flint, Michigan, Moore’s home town, it seemed for a while that this catastrophe might shock Moore into finally rejecting this doomed, failed approach.

Alas! even that “object lesson” failed to shake Moore loose from his inane political stance. Instead, it perversely reinforced his advocacy for “working within the system” to elect “more and better Democrats”.

Worse than that, over the years Moore confessed a personal attraction to Hillary Clinton that is downright creepy. In the heightened hysteria that began during the campaign season, and has steadily escalated ever since, Moore’s vacant politics and his lust for Hillary has metastasized into credulous lunacy.

All that said, it’s remarkable that someone who was level-headed enough to make films like “SiCKO” has degenerated to the point of becoming another cheerleader for Russophobic hysteria.

Please see an earlier critique of Moore, posted to an earlier WSWS article about Moore’s useful idiocies.

veblen • 2 days ago

At some point Moore had something interesting to say (e.g. Roger and Me) but his current political trajectory is completely reactionary. In his latest movie Trumpland he says somewhere about Hillary that “I hope she did kill Vince Foster. That’s badass,”. For Moore and his ilk, just having a female president is good enough, the criminal policies of such a president are of no concern. Now of all the things that Trump can be rightly criticized for, Moore has picked up the most reactionary way to attack Trump from the right. It is impossible to listen to this drivel.

MAIN IMAGE: M. Moore.

EDITOR’S NOTE: No material by this author or any other author published on this site should be read as a defense of Donald trump and his policies. For us Trump, the GOP and the Democrats are all part of the same malignant threat to Democracy, truth and honesty in fiscal affairs afflicting the US and the rest of the world. The purpose here is to show the partisan hypocrisy of the Democratic party and its numerous shills in Congress, media, “power ministries” (CIA, FBI, etc.) and elsewhere, all pushing for war to please their masters in the Military Industrial complex and Wall Street’s agenda of global hegemony at any cost. We should further note that these parties, if they were in office, would be implementing policies almost identical to Trump’s, so, as usual, the differences, such as they are in US politics, amount to a hill of beans and mere questions of style and topical priority.

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