White liar
Political activist/director Michael Moore has taken the Cannes Film Festival by storm with his new Bush-bashing project "Fahrenheit 9/11." Not sending roses is Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard.
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"A few years ago, Michael Moore ... in his first best-selling book 'Stupid White Men' ... wrote he'd once been 'forced' to listen to my comments on a TV chat show, 'The McLaughlin Group,' " Mr. Barnes writes in the upcoming issue of the Standard. "I had whined 'on and on about the sorry state of American education,' Moore said, and wound up 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 ... OK, 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," Mr. Barnes says. "Moore is a liar. He made it up. It's a fabrication on two levels. One, I've never met Moore or even talked to him on the phone. And, two, I read both 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey' in my first year at the University of Virginia. Just for the record, I learned what they were about even before college."
Mr. Barnes has an idea who should look into Mr. Moore's "lies and distortions." Al Franken has taken special interest in public liars, writing a best seller called "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them." Al, the Moore case is now in your court. |
