RUTHFULLY YOURS

“It has been said truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press,” Senator Zell Miller said at the Republican National Convention in 2004. “It is the soldier, not the poet who has given us the freedom of speech.”

“But don’t waste your breath telling that to the leaders of my party today,” the Democrat added.

Miller, a former Marine, was reviled by the same media trolls who had called Michael Moore’s Oscar rant a year earlier “courageous”. But there was nothing courageous in a lefty activist bashing Bush to an audience of fellow lefties.

Jimmy Carter had furiously written to Miller, “By your historically unprecedented disloyalty, you have betrayed our trust.” But Zell Miller had chosen loyalty to country, over loyalty to Carter.

Miller had crossed party lines on conscience. Moore was safely barricaded behind his party line. He took no hits for what he said, except for the booing from the upper floors where the technical personnel, To Kill a Mockingbird style, tend to sit. Instead he added more mansions and homes to his collection.

But that didn’t stop Moore from pretending that he had taken a great risk and was the victim.

Moore hired nine bodyguards, who he claimed were former Navy SEALS wearing “night-vision goggles and other special equipment that I’m convinced few people outside CIA headquarters have ever seen.”

He began retelling incidents in which his round-the-clock bodyguards stepped in to save his life that police had no record of. He claimed that a man rushed him with a knife on the stage in Nashville. “Someone had to mop up the blood after the Seals took him away.”

The Nashville police had no record of it. In New York, a SEAL took a “graphite pencil” to the hand meant for Moore. In Fort Lauderdale, a SEAL took a cup of hot coffee to the face for Moore, suffering second-degree burns. The police had no record of it.

As a coward, Moore needed to cultivate a heroic image by surrounding himself with former men of action and telling stories about how they had saved his life. In his own perverse way, Moore was validating Miller’s speech.

Underlying Miller’s speech was the question of who was the real hero; was it Michael Moore or the American soldier? Was it the man risking his life in battle or the smug media talking head?

Even while slamming soldiers, Moore wanted their aura of courage. So he bought and paid for it.

Moore couldn’t even pretend to be a hero. But, like Hillary Clinton, he wanted to pretend that he was being escorted by soldiers through enemy territory. Around every corner lurked a shadowy assailant brandishing a “graphite pencil” or a cup of coffee. And his devoted bodyguards would happily give their lives and die on that pencil so that he could survive to make another anti-American documentary.

Enemy territory for Michael Moore was the Academy Awards where he claimed he was assailed by “burly, pissed-off stagehands” as he “clutched” his Oscar with his pudgy hands “like a weapon”.

Surprisingly they haven’t made a movie out of that yet.

American Sniper has allowed Michael Moore to resurface as a man under fire. His tweet calling snipers cowards made headlines. After all snipers never had to face down burly stagehands while being armed with only a shiny trophy. And now Moore has returned to his favorite topic; his own heroic victimology.

His latest offering revisits Clint Eastwood “threatening to kill him” at the National Board of Review awards dinner. (Moore’s deadly confrontations seem to happen at award shows and banquets.)

Moore describes feeling “stunned” when he heard the 74-year-old actor and director joke that he would shoot the fat activist if he came to his home with a camera.

He had gotten to me, Moore whines now. It’s ten years later and Michael Moore is playing the victim of an 84-year-old man. It’s the very essence of cowardice, but that’s who Moore has always been.

Michael Moore is a coward who resents heroes. Even his Walter Mitty fantasies involved someone else fighting and getting hurt on his behalf.

Moore knew that Zell Miller was right. He could not defend his own freedom of speech. It wasn’t the morbidly obese activist who made that freedom possible. It was the soldier. A point that Moore proved when he claimed that he needed protection by hiring a whole lot of them to guard his massive body.

While his Hollywood fans were telling him how courageous he was, he knew that he wasn’t. The knowledge couldn’t help but breed a deep resentment of the courageous men who actually were willing to fight for freedom.

Moore’s hatred for Kyle grew out of envy. Kyle actually risked his life for what he believed. He even hates Eastwood because the director went out on a limb and made a principled movie. That is something that Moore, whose documentary skills are still those of a childish prankster, never has.

The same is true for the rest of the left.

The American left has violent tendencies, but with few exceptions it lacks the courage to follow through on them. The American leftist has chosen to work within the system. He doesn’t plant bombs, he brainwashes. He doesn’t kill, he lies. He doesn’t run gulags, he implements regulations.

Leftists fear and distrust those men who have guns and know how to use them. That is why they are so maniacally obsessed with gun control. They hate soldiers and cops because those men have the courage of their convictions that they lack.

Moore’s mythology of violent threats, from a 74-year-old man to “burly stagehands” he has to fend off with an Oscar along with the legions of killers armed with pencils and coffee, are a pathetic attempt to compensate for his own cowardice.

He wants to convince his fans that he’s a radical class warrior putting his life on the line as he shuttles between his nine homes.

The anti-war left is rooted in self-important professions whose members imagine that they are far more important than the soldier. They come out of Hollywood, with its imaginary heroics, academia, with its tenured philosopher-kings and the media with its conviction that smears are deadlier than bullets.

It is the people whom the soldier causes to feel most irrelevant who resent him the most.

During the Bush years, they pretended that they were risking their lives and their freedom by criticizing the war. They had to pretend that because the truth would have torn a hole through their hollow lives.

Unlike Obama, Bush never locked up anyone for their views. The left wasn’t being courageous when it booed soldiers and cheered on terrorists. It was being cowardly. And it proved that all over again in the years it spent licking Obama’s boots and cheering as the military was dismantled by their leader.

The American left consists of cowards who lie to themselves about their own cowardice. They need to see themselves as heroes even while they work to ban everything from guns to offensive speech. They cringe and shriek over “microaggressions” and call for “trigger warnings” and yet pretend that they are courageous types “destroying” the right with their Jon Stewart video clips and social media hashtags.

Michael Moore embodies the cowardice of the left. It is a movement of activists who dream of being bureaucrats, community organizers who tell other people what to shout through microphones and college professors who draw up plans for turning the country into a totalitarian state in their free time.

The American left remains terrified of the right no matter how much power it has. It loathes its own failure of nerve to do what the little black Che on its shirts did and hates the American heroes who remind it of its cowardice. The cowardly left hates soldiers because it envies their courage.