Outside the Beltway

MOORE ON CLARK

James Joyner · Saturday, January 24, 2004 · 2 comments

Catching up on my reading at Volohk Conspiracy, I came across this from Eugene Volokh:

Presidential candidate embraces author of book called “Stupid Black Men”: Oh, sorry — my mistake; it’s actually called Stupid White Men. Funny how an author who wrote a book Stupid Black Men (not as an ironic title) would be rightly reviled, while when he writes Stupid White Men, we hear barely a peep?

Heh. More interestingly,

And the author has also apparently slammed the very military campaign that is one of the key items on the presidential candidate’s resume.

He points to this Slate piece:

Moore hasn’t always been so taken with Clark, at least if his Oscar-winning film Bowling for Columbine is to be taken at face value. Indeed, the documentary repeatedly slams the shining moment in Clark’s career: stopping Serb aggression in Kosovo, the highlight of his tenure as NATO supreme allied commander. In fact, Moore suggests that the bombing tactics employed by NATO–and thus Clark–were in part to blame for the massacre at Columbine.

An intriguing theory, to say the least. Moore starts the case against Clark in the opening monologue of the film. “It was the morning of April 20th, 1999,” our narrator intones. “And it was pretty much like any other morning in America. The farmer did his chores. The milkman made his deliveries. The president bombed another country whose name we couldn’t pronounce.”

Read the rest of the Slate piece; it’s quite instructive.

Moore’s comparisons of the Kosovo campaign–which I didn’t support–with the Colombine murders is outrageous. But Clark’s lending legitimacy to this cretin–and, indeed, seeking to somehow enhance his own standing by accepting his endorsement–is, to say the least, not praiseworthy. And refusing to distance himself, after several days to think about it, from Moore’s calling President Bush a “deserter” is also dishonorable. I’m beginning to see what Hugh Shelton was talking about.