Good morning and welcome to Thursday, April 9, 2026. Today is National Unicorn Day, POW Recognition Day, and National Chicken Little Awareness Day, which Alexa advises me is to remind us not to let fear make our decisions for us. (Hmmm — that last one sounds like a column unto itself. Gotta think about that.)
Snow yesterday here, and today, 70-degree highs are projected. I stand amazed that weather people do not have a higher incidence of schizophrenia. Funny, I should have mentioned Henry V just yesterday. Check the first entry in Today in History.
1413: Henry V crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey.
1768: John Hancock refuses to allow two British customs agents to go below deck of his ship, considered by some to be the first act of physical resistance to British authority in the colonies.
1872: Samuel R. Percy patents dried milk.
1939: American contralto Marian Anderson sings before 75,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.; appearance organized after Anderson denied permission to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall.
1950: Bob Hope’s first TV appearance.
1963: Winston Churchill becomes the first honorary U.S. citizen.
1971: Ringo Starr releases the single “It Don’t Come Easy,” produced by George Harrison, in the UK.
Birthdays today include: singer Paul Robeson; actor Ward Bond; Faisal, King of Saudi Arabia (1964-75); Playboy owner Hugh Hefner; satirist Tom Lehrer; rocker Carl Perkins; Jim Fowler, naturalist, zoologist and Emmy Award-winning TV presenter (Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom); actress Michael Learned (Olivia in The Waltons); record producer Terry Knight; drummer Steve Gadd; Peter Wood (English session and touring rock keyboardist, Al Stewart, Lou Reed); actor Dennis Quaid; Country great Hal Ketchum; golfer Seve Ballesteros; MS-NOW morning face Joe Scarborough; and TV exec Jeff Zucker.
If today’s your day, too, have a happy.
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If you wanted an indication of just how far off the edge of the map the left in general and Michael Moore in particular have gone, look no further than an article in this morning’s New York Post by Anna Young:
Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore torched the US as the “bad guys” in the war with Iran – while hailing the Middle Eastern nation as one of the world’s “greatest civilizations” in a deranged online tirade.
The documentarian unleashed the frenzied rant on Tuesday, calling President Trump a “terrorist” for threatening a “holocaust” after the commander in chief warned Iran that its “whole civilization” would be wiped out if the nation failed to cut a ceasefire deal to open the Strait of Hormuz and end the six-week conflict.
I know… your immediate reaction is a quiet laugh. But he’s not kidding. He’s deadly serious, apparently hoping we’ve forgotten his track record of faux documentaries.
Moore called on the US military to disobey “illegal” and “immoral” orders, urged Congress to impeach War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and demanded the 25th Amendment be invoked to remove Trump from office.
But then again, I guess it shouldn’t surprise anyone. This is, after all, the same inDUHvidual who directed Fahrenheit 9/11.
Christopher Hitchens (whom I should note I seldom agreed with about anything at all) wrote about that abomination of a film back in 2004 at Slate. (Unsurprisingly, given the time frame, his article has since been cycled off):
To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of ‘dissenting’ bravery.”
Yeah, well, that pretty much describes Moore, whom I labeled “The Great Rotundo” at the time. Mostly, I did so because he had even then become famous (or more correctly, infamous) for pulling some of the most insane arguments ever to exist out of his oversized hat. But Hitch, being Hitch, didn’t stop there:
He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval between Moore’s triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke, Bush’s former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that as you might expect, Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration. So, that’s another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic “key to all mythologies.”
So, you might imagine that when Iran, which just killed off by some estimates 100,000 of its own people, gets labeled as being one of the world’s “greatest civilizations” by this creature, my immediate reaction is to reach for a sick bag and the pink stuff. If there’s a being lower than whale poop, it would be Michael Moore.
I’m not alone in this. A couple more (Moore?) examples:
The 83-year-old commentator on the McLaughlin Group, Fred Barnes, wrote about Moore in the now deceased Weekly Standard back in 2004:
A FEW YEARS AGO Michael Moore, who’s now promoting an anti-President Bush movie entitled Fahrenheit 9/11, announced he’d gotten the goods on me, indeed hung me out to dry on my own words. It was in his first bestselling book, Stupid White Men. Moore wrote he’d once been “forced” to listen to my comments on a TV chat show, The McLaughlin Group. I had whined “on and on about the sorry state of American education,” Moore said, and wound up by bellowing: “These kids don’t even know what The Iliad and The Odyssey are!”
Moore’s interest was piqued, so the next day he said he called me. “Fred,” he quoted himself as saying, “tell me what The Iliad and The Odyssey are.” I started “hemming and hawing,” Moore wrote. And then I said, according to Moore: “Well, they’re . . . uh . . . you know . . . uh . . . okay, fine, you got me–I don’t know what they’re about. Happy now?” He’d smoked me out as a fraud, or maybe worse.
The only problem is none of this is true. It never happened. Moore is a liar.
Next, also from 2004, is a clip from the UK’s The Independent. (Unfortunately, the links for the following quotes have all since aged out, but I retained the text in my files.)
Less than 24 hours after accusing the Walt Disney Company of pulling the plug on his latest documentary in a blatant attempt at political censorship, the rabble-rousing film-maker Michael Moore has admitted he knew a year ago that Disney had no intention of distributing it.
The admission, during an interview with CNN, undermined Moore’s claim that Disney was trying to sabotage the US release of Fahrenheit 911 just days before its world premiere at the Cannes film festival.
Instead, it lent credence to a growing suspicion that Moore was manufacturing a controversy to help publicise the film, a full-bore attack on the Bush administration and its handling of national security since the attacks of 11 September 2001.
And lest we forget Moore’s foray into Canada’s unmitigated disaster of a healthcare system, we turn the pages back to an issue of the Wall Street Journal where their David Grazer wrote in 2007:
Consider, for instance, Mr. Moore’s claim that ERs don’t overcrowd in Canada. A Canadian government study recently found that only about half of patients are treated in a timely manner, as defined by local medical and hospital associations. “The research merely confirms anecdotal reports of interminable waits,” reported a national newspaper. While people in rural areas seem to fare better, Toronto patients receive care in four hours on average; one in 10 patients waits more than a dozen hours.
I myself wrote at the time:
And here’s the thing… this is a known issue. I’m sitting about 60 miles out of Buffalo, and I can tell you for a fact that the healthcare facilities are going great guns…. all of them… facilities designed and built to accommodate the Buffalo of 20 to 50 years ago. Buffalo, as you may not know, has lost roughly half of its population in the last 60 years. So, where are the people coming from that are filling these health care facilities to the brim? Canada.
These are, of course, just a few of many such examples. The point of my quoting from a much larger bin of articles on the subject of Moore and his fairy tales is that nothing at all has changed. He still to this day maintains a credibility level roughly on par with Gas Station sushi and that email from the Nigerian prince offering you several million dollars, if you could give him your bank account number so he could deposit it.
Mysteriously, the left still takes him seriously.
Thought of the day: Thursday is like that initial jolt when the roller coaster catches the chain that drags you up the first rise. You know that once it’s done its thing, the fun starts.
Take care today. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
Recommended: Donald Trump vs. Henry V
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