RUTHFULLY YOURS

Noted thinker Michael Moore told the world who would be his ideal president last week.  It isn’t Barack Obama.  It isn’t even the exhumed body of Chairman Mao.  It’s the puppet star of Team America: World Police, Matt Damon.  “I think that [Matt Damon] has been very courageous in not caring about who he offends by saying the things that need to be said here, and if you want to win, the Republicans have certainly shown the way – that when you run someone who is popular, you win,” Moore cogently explained. “Sometimes even when you run an actor, you win.  And I guess I only throw his name out there because I’d like us to start thinking that way.”

What prompted this bizarre outburst from Moore?  Damon’s comments in Boston about the evil rich.  “The wealthy are paying less than they paid at any time else, certainly in my lifetime, and probably in the last century,” Damon told a reporter.  “I don’t know what we were paying in the roaring ‘20s; it’s criminal that so little is asked of people who are getting so much.  I don’t mind paying more.”  This, of course, doesn’t stop Damon from gambling away his cash in illegal back-room poker games.  If he wants to redistribute wealth, he should start at home.

But let’s take Moore at his word and apprise the estimable Damon as a candidate.  After all, he’s been holding himself up that way for years.

First off, his background.  Like President Obama, he spent his youth surrounded by radicals, chief among them anti-American historian Howard Zinn. In fact, Damon was so in love with Zinn’s work that he read the audio version of Zinn’s leftist A People’s History of the United States and cited it in his idiotic Good Will Hunting – truly one of the most insulting films of all time.  Damon later graduated from Zinn to Zinn’s master, Noam Chomsky, apologist for Pol Pot and for Holocaust deniers, whom his character quotes at length in Hunting.

But all that would come later.  First, he attended Harvard University, where he dropped out after three years.  We’d obviously want to see his grades, since he’s made such a major point out of the intelligence of other figures, including the dastardly Palin.

Then he moved out to Los Angeles to pursue writing and acting.  He struggled for a few years, then broke out with Hunting, which was replete with his leftist calling cards – the kind of stuff typically designed to elicit oohs and aahs from the Tinseltown crowd, who think that Chomsky and Zinn are men of unparalleled genius.

Now, let’s analyze Damon’s positions.  The wealthy-beyond-all-measure, he explained in December 2006  to a tingly-legged Chris Matthews, “I don’t think that it’s fair … that it seems like we have a fighting class in our country that’s comprised of people who have to go either for financial reasons … if you’re gonna send people to war, then that needs to be shared by everybody.”  This is an old leftist trope designed to make our military into victims and hamstring our hawkish foreign policy by demanding a draft that will in turn produce draft riots.  In point of fact, as of 2009, 85 percent of the military had at least a high school diploma.  Poor economic times do not raise military recruitment, and middle-class people are actually statistically over-represented in Army recruitment.

Damon also believes that teachers shouldn’t be gauged by student performance.  “The idea that we’re testing kids and we’re tying teachers’ salaries to how kids are performing on tests, that kind of mechanized thinking has nothing to do with higher order,” he said.  “We’re training them, not teaching them.”

What the hell does this even mean?  Should we decide teacher pay by counting kumbaya circles?  Or by student feelings?

Damon didn’t stop there.  “You think job insecurity makes people work hard?” he asked.  “That’s like saying a teacher is going to get lazy when she has tenure.” Bingo!

“A teacher wants to teach,” Damon continued.  “Why else would you take a s—- salary and really long hours unless you really loved to do it?”

Well, perhaps for the money.  Or the outsized benefits.  Or the fact that you don’t work four months out of the year.  Or that you can’t ever be fired.  Or because people like Damon think that teachers are underpaid despite all of that.

So, Matt Damon for President?  He’d certainly be great on image – watch him in the fantastic The Adjustment Bureau and you can spot that in an instant.  But otherwise, forget about it.