Kurt Loder seems to have gotten everyone's attention with a lame-assed, conventional-wisdom'd review of SiCKO for MTV - part of the Viacom empire. flipflopper caught the review and gave it a DailyKos once-over. About 260 of our fellow Kossacks chimed in as well.
Many of you probably asked, as I did, "what the hell is Kurt Loder still doing at MTV?!?" He's doing news and reviews, as I soon found out, and his reactionary views are sneaking in under the radar and being pumped into our kids' brains. We don't want that MTV.
It looks like MTV almost fired him a few months ago. Maybe he didn't get any more job offers. Maybe he begged to get his kiddie-time news job back. Maybe he promised Viacom he'd toe the corporate line. Who knows?
Here's the graf that stood out to me from Loder's sick review of Moore's movie:
As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can't be solved by government regulation (that would be the same government that's already given us the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles).
Where on earth did he pull the "proud socialist" garbage? Anyone who's paid the slightest attention to Moore knows he loves this country, warts and all, but just wants to fix some of the warts. The rest of that paragraph is just as stupid.
And the same goes for the review.
But this is not the only shot Loder has taken at Moore, and it seems like Kurt has a little reactionary streak to him:
First of all, how relieved were you not to be subjected to three-and-a-half hours of preening anti-war moral instruction from a parade of Malibu millionaires? Even Barbra Streisand, that lovable, out-of-control diva, limited herself to praising the American tradition of free speech, "even for artists."
(There appears to be a widespread delusion within the celebrity community that somebody has passed a law prohibiting them from declaiming their political opinions at every possible podium. Until the right-wing talk-show harridan Ann Coulter ascends to the presidency, this probably won't happen.)
Most of the war references were of a restrained, support-the-troops and pray-for-peace variety. Who could disagree? Steve Martin — one of the best Oscar hosts, back for his second go-round — dedicated the whole show to "our young men and women overseas".
The only exception, not at all unexpected, was Michael Moore, who won the best documentary feature award for "Bowling for Columbine." Moore brought all of the losing nominees in his category up onstage with him as a show of "solidarity." (Uh oh.) He then launched into a raving denunciation of "our fictitious president," which ... okay, a lot of people feel this way. But Moore's spittle-flecked ululations were so over-the-top, that even the Oscar crowd — his natural constituency, you might think — erupted in a storm of boos. This was totally unexpected.
Need we remind ourselves how correct MM was? But Loder proves how wrong he was in that cynical, Coulter-praising, Moore-hating, MTV "News" report. Maybe MTV had the right idea in firing Loder.
Now we know what the Viacom/MTV monster is feeding our kids while we're not watching: reactionary politics in a washed up teenager pretending to be a deep thinking reporter - for MTV! Kurt Loder, what a load.