The Best Medicine
This may be the best story of the year. Michael Moore contributes 20 Gs to help bail out Jullian Assange. Moore (pretty blithely) assumes the sexual assault charges against Julian Assange are trumped up, and that the authorities are out to get him. He goes on to defend Assange's work:
This effects American lives. We should know about these things. And… I think these leaks will save lives. [....] Those secrets… they kill people. They take lives. That's why I’m a huge supporter of what WikiLeaks is doing.
And now, here's the latest from WikiLeaks:
Cuba banned Michael Moore's 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a "mythically" favourable picture of Cuba's healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a "popular backlash", according to US diplomats in Havana.
This makes sense. Cubans get rotten health care. They'd recognize immediately what Moore puts on screen is nonsense. Moore's claims are still freely floating out there in the rest of the world, however, so it's good that he's been exposed. Who knows how many lives this will save.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:57 AM
6 Comments:
How will it save lives? No one in Cuba will know about it, and neither will anyone in the United States.
People in America already know about it. Now his lies about Cuba will be exposed, which will make it less likely that America and others will follow the mistaken path to worse health care that he proposes.
Now next time you see Moore, ask him how preventing diplomats from negotiating secretly will save lives.
My guess is he'd answer, "their negotiations will be colored by the knowledge that the kinds of deals they would be embarrassed to have made public -- extraordinary renditions, payoffs that are publicly denied, and the like -- will be less likely to get done. That is for the good of all." I don't happen to agree, but it's a legitimate argument.
That's pretty much the rationale for earmarks and most other things in Congress--make it transparent, make them publish things a week before they vote on them, and all of a sudden they start renouncing their own bills. There's a decent argument for diplomatic secrecy, but there's no argument for congressional secrecy.
And as far as people in the US already knowing about it, depends on what you mean. Tea Partiers, maybe. Readers of the NYT don't know it, and a solid majority of officials would still be arguing for Castro's way; at best, they'd say he implemented it poorly, or just has bad pr.
Code word: howle
For the record, Moore denies it all.
Yes, and I'm not surprised he denies it. What else would he do?
I have no idea what the truth is, just as I have no idea if any of the information released by WikiLeaks is true.
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