MichaelMoore.com recently asked readers to comment on George Bush's speech (July 2005) about the Iraq war. The White House spokesperson (Scott McClellan) had said several times before the speech that Bush was going to "talk in a very specific way" about his strategy for Iraq. Seeking to expose Bush's lack of any specific strategy for success in Iraq, Moore's web site asked readers to find and then comment on the so-called specific strategy in Bush's speech. They would then post some of the comments.
I read the text of Bush's speech very carefully. I then answered Moore's query, giving what I thought were Bush's specifics. It is clear that Bush gave specifics in his speech and that he talked in a very specific way about his strategy for Iraq. By doing this interesting little exercise, I learned something about the aministration's ideas on Iraq. I set aside the question about whether these specifics are irrelevant, insufficient, or incorrect for dealing with the problem successfully. I first just tried to take the time to understand Bush's specific strategy.
Although I applaud Moore's site for setting up this great little challenge, I was a bit dissappointed to see that Moore's site hardly addressed anything that Bush actually spelled out in his speech. Unfortunately, the site's interesting little exercise hardly produced any reasoned argument for thinking that any specific thing in Bush's speech was inadequate or incorrect. There was no effort at all to understand any specific thing that Bush said. The only comments that Moore's site posted were those that simply lampooned Bush's speech.
Instead of this unthinking Bush bashing, it would have been better to actually see some analysis of what Bush actually said -- to see detailed and specific criticisms of some of the specific things that Bush spelled out in his speech. Instead of assuming that Bush gave no stategy worth thinking about, it would be good to show it through some fair criticism of what he actually said. By forcing on its readers the mere assumption that Bush said nothing specific in his speech, Moore's site undermined the value of the whole exercise by promoting unthinking knee-jerk sarcasm and the worst sort of uncritical political bashing, exactly the sort of thing that Moore would accuse those on the far right of doing.
