Lileks is pissed. I like when Lileks is pissed. Not that I don't like target stories:

There have been many things I’ve wished to write about this week. Michael Moore went to Germany and slammed America up and down for all the usual reasons – we don’t have passports! We only speak English! Our stupid minds! Stupid, stupid! We’re not like the cultured Europeans, who – aside from their occasional continent-shattering spasms of facism – are the epp-ee-tomay of culture and enlightenment. This, in the same week that a survey of EUians named Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. (Sometimes I swear that if a European hits his thumb with a hammer when no one’s around, he shouts GODDAMN JEWS!)

Show Michael Moore a man in jeans holding a rake and a man in a suit with a briefcase, and he will not only automatically side with the guy who has the rake, he will assume that the briefcase contains plans to move the rake factory to Mexico, as well as documents that prove the company knew that its rakes gave people painful splinters at a rate 150% above EU standards. That’s what Moore sees. Could be true. Or the guy with the briefcase could be someone who runs a lawn-care company, and the guy with the rake is a parolee who did six years for murder, found Christ, and got hired when he met the CEO in the church basement for coffee after services. Could be true. But even if the latter is true in the specific example, Moore is sure it’s wrong in the greater sense.


Then Ted Rall wrote a column called “Why We Fight” in the voice of an Iraqi “resistance” fighter. I suppose it’s intended to help us understand the mindset of the enemy. Eh. The French have a saying: his head, it is filled with urine. Or they should have such a saying; I’m sure it would sound elegant and dismissive. These people aren’t the loyal opposition anymore; they’re just the opposition. They may say they love America, but they love some idealized nonexistent America that can never exist as long as there’s individuality and free will. They’re like people who say they love women and beat their wife because she doesn’t look like the Playboy centerfold. I’m sick of the lot of them. As for Rall, who cares about him? He’ll get his reward: the great yawning indifference of history. If people barely remember Kelly and Capp nowadays, what are the chances that they’ll remember someone who appeared to draw with his thumb?

Ha.