[Phlap]

So there is no Liberal Elite but there is a Vast Right Wing Conspiarcy? This woman must be a graduate of the Clinton School of Self Delusion.

Moore is clearly a member of the elite given rent utilities and groceries are not consederations of his everyday life. Is he a liberal? So much for her lies.

[bigeasy_70118]

I meant to comment on his movie, too, but the lines at my local theater are still prohibitively long.

This comment is funny on so many levels.

Why don't we give Ms. Ehrenrich a bus ticket to Tupelo, MS where I can assure you there are no lines to watch this movie?

[prion]

Sure, he has tens of millions of dollars and a corps of bodyguards and lawyers, but does that make him elite? After all, he wears a baseball cap. And his dad was an autoworker.

[Numbers Guy]

Barbara Ehrenreich will be a guest columnist for the Op-Ed page through July. Thomas L. Friedman is on book leave for three months.

So instead of goofy Friedman, who at least shows signs of being able to think for himself, the Times will feature a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. Big surprise.

[DainBramage]

Liberally Eat

[saveliberty]

There is no liberal elite because Barbara Ehrenreich doesn't want one. She's an advocate for her issues and is too dishonest to admit it.

Nothing like having her f bomb the unfortunate in the name of "good reporting" and "humanity" to really bleep the poor and have her feel good about the experience.

Hammer, hammer, hammer the unfortunate. That is what she and her buddies do.

[ICX]

The prototypical Dim response to claims of elitism.

"We're not the elite - YOU'RE the elite! And I have one quote to back it up! THPTHTPHBTPHBTPHTTPBH!"

[sauropod]

Barbara Ehrenreich has been for some time, and currently still is, an idiot.

I used to read her columns on the back page of Time magazine. For my blood pressure check.

[Cicero]

But no one can miss the fact that he's a genuine son of the U.S. working class — of a Flint autoworker, in fact.

Nicely parsed. Clintonian, even. Moore didn't grow up in Flint but in an adjacent, more afluent, suburb. So if you read it carefully you see she doesn't repeat the usual lie but gives the impression that he grew up in a working class town.

As for his costume, it's called "dressing down," something that was practically invented by the hippie generation. A man with real working class attitudes would dress for the occasion, and put on a suit and tie where they are called for.

It just pains this snob that a fat slob like Michael Moore should be admitted to her exclusive club of elite left-wing intellectuals.

[TheOtherOne]

There is more nuance to the word 'elite' that just meaning one has money.

[KellyAdmirer]

What a defensive article! I could go into major rebuttal mode, but will just point out that any author who will take President Bush's obviously joking reference to "my base" and mischaracterize it as "affectionate" rather than "humorous" isn't worth any more of my time.

[JimSEA]

Moore is Joe Six-Pack like Julia Robert is a Soccer Mom. They are both acting (and none too well, if I do say so).

[moodyskeptic]

This faux intellectual is in deep denial.

No liberal elite? Oh please.

[tallhappy]

This is hilarous.

[kcvl]

Ehrenreich obtained a PhD in biology, but decided not to become a research scientist. She became involved in politics as an activist for social change.

From 1991 to 1997, she was a regular columnist of Time. Currently, Ehrenrei

ch is regular columnist with The Progressive. Ehrenreich has also written for the New York Times, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms, New Republic, Z Magazine, In These Times, Salon.com, and other publications.

She is the vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

[kcvl]

When the Communist Manifesto was re-released on its 150th anniversary, Ehrenreich satirized the capitalist system’s effectiveness in making the tome popular again with a flashy cover. She decried the window display of Marx’s book in the Borders bookstore at the World Trade Center because it was put together by workers making $7 an hour existing in a “culture of absolute hopelessness” in the shadow of a monument to capitalism. In one C-SPAN televised debate, Ehrenreich went so far as to defend the Left’s support for the crimes of Communism and its failure to create an effective governing system by stating that the Left was only about 300 years old and still learning from its mistakes. Unsurprisingly, she is less tolerant of the shorter history of our own country’s effective government because it includes the mistakes of slavery, racism and sexism—sins that have been overcome.

During the Summer of 2003, she joined other socialists in signing onto a Campaign for Peace and Democracy statement protesting repression in Cuba—American sanctions listed as one form of repression. This statement characterized the U.S. involvement in Latin America as “criminal,” and the policy on Communist Cuba as “six decades of exploitation and imperial control of Cuba.” Ehrenreich and her fellow signatories call upon the Bush administration to withdraw completely from Cuba.

She was a regular columnist for Time magazine between 1994 and 1998, and now writes for The Progressive, The Nation, and the socialist online In These Times. In interviews Ehrenreich has made it known that she is divorced from one labor organizer and married to another, the mother of two children, that she doesn’t expect her son to marry his girlfriend even if they have a child together, that she faced no emotional pain or grief following her two abortions (just relief, she says). And, relevant to almost all her writing, she is a fourth-generation atheist.

Ehrenreich makes no effort to hide her contempt for those with religion, especially Christians. In a November 1999 article for The Humanist, she wrote that religions are the same as cults, the only difference being how many people are involved. She described Catholicism as “a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate.” According to Babs, the Republican Party is, “a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.” When Germaine Greer went off the feminist reservation with her second book, Ehrenreich worried that her next error in judgment would be to, “announce her membership in the Christian Coalition.” (Greer strayed back on with her third book.) In this screed against religion, Ehrenreich also recounts her childhood horror at having to say the Pledge of Allegiance, especially after the words “under God” were inserted.

But where her ideas about religion become significant to her book assigned to this year’s freshmen is the assertion that working class people hold the tradition of atheism. (In the book, Ehrenreich also refers to Jesus as a “wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.”) According to Ehrenreich, the progenitor of the trade union movement was a working-class atheism called the free thought movement, and that it sprung from “poor people whose distrust of priests and ministers was part and parcel of their hatred of bosses and bankers.” If the people with power and money are not going to hand it over to those without, then there must be no God. As Ehrenreich continues, “If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever has to be done has to be done by us.” In Ehrenreich’s worldview, that means full Socialism and the abolition of Capitalism. Where that cannot be accomplished, then we’d damn well better have a large and generous welfare program in place.

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the war on terrorism had begun, Ehrenreich defended her view that the real threats to America were not terrorists, but poverty, illiteracy, and environmental degradation. In an interview for On the Page magazine, she recoiled at the characterization of the terrorists as evil. “The word evil always makes me nervous. It’s not just a more intense form of bad; it’s usually a signal that we’ve stopped thinking.” What Ehrenreich is implying here is that if we make a value judgment about the nature of the 19 individuals who killed 3,000 innocent people, we are a bunch of brainless idiots (who must be Republican Christians to boot.)

Ehrenreich wrote in The Progressive in January 1999 that “the business of the left has always been to produce thinking citizens, not happy automons.” The implication, again, is that if you are a conservative, you have no brain. Ironically, this is written in an article about how “political movements should be emotionally engaging.” So, is it better to feel or to think? Feelings mean a lot to Ehrenreich. In a Harper’s Magazine June 1999 debate with Lionel Tiger on the decline of males in American society, Ehrenreich becomes apoplectic when Tiger won’t get emotional in his arguments. The exchange is too delicious to paraphrase:

EHRENREICH: I want to get at another level here. I want to explore your feelings about these things. You say the "decline" of males--there's a sad tone to that. I would feel sad, as a mother of a son, if males suddenly started "declining" in some serious way. Do you reel loss and regret and nostalgia? Why call it a decline? Why not say, Let's go boldly forth in this more egalitarian and somewhat de-gendered world?

TIGER: A more attractive picture to be sure, but not, however, I think, quite as accurate a rendition of the emotional consequences of what's happening. I'm not interested in characterizing my own personal psyche in this matter, solely because I think it's of zero interest to anyone. What is of interest is the fact that, as you suggested, young men and women are very concerned about these matters, one reason being that they no longer have a set of rules that they think are emotionally and morally worthwhile. Now, why should people have rules? If you study anthropology, you realize that human beings generally try to have rules, notions of how to behave. What we saw in the Clinton-Lewinsky business was some astonishing confusion between personal and public life.

EHRENREICH: You certainly got away from the issue of how you feel about it. See, I'm willing to say how I feel.

TIGER: I'm wholly uninterested in your feelings.

EHRENREICH: But I think it lends energy to what I say here, because I do feel strongly about this…

So, as long as you feel strongly about what you agitate for, you must be on the side of goodness. Going back to The Progressive column, Ehrenreich talks about this as a “pleasure” known only to the Left: “But there lies deep within the socialist (and feminist, and civil-rights) traditions the insight that some of the most profound pleasures are available to our species are those we apprehend collectively—the pleasures of solidarity and unity in the struggle.”

In Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich preys upon the sympathetic feelings of the readers by relating scenarios where we can empathize with the poor woman struggling to make it on two part-time jobs. Indeed, Chancellor James Moeser of UNC-Chapel Hill said that Ehrenreich’s book “provoked in him more sympathy and empathy for people in low-paying service jobs.” To write the book, Ehrenrich posed in a handful of low-skill, low-paying jobs to prove that the working poor cannot make it in American society. She worked as a maid, a waitress, and a Wal-Mart clerk. Of course, her point is that you can’t get by, support a family, or purchase top-end consumer goods on the minimum wage job. The point of her book—and much of her writing—is that the Capitalist system oppresses the people. The “system” forces them to remain in low-wage, low-prestige, jobs and the rest of us have no appreciation for the sacrifices these people make on our behalf. Ehrenreich uses her brief forays into the world of real workers to again rail against Capitalism, Republicans, religious Americans, and corporations in general while she weeps for an expansion of the welfare state.

[BigSkyFreeper]

He's just another in a long line of fruitcakes that won't admit he's a registered Democrat, in 2 states I might add.

[OpusatFR]

Moore is obese, sloppy, foul-mouthed, loud, obnoxious, lies, poorly educated, badly dressed and is the Europeans pet American.

They like him because he is the quintessential Ugly American.

The European elite views him as singularly American in every way and treat him like a lapdog.

[mak5]

Ms. Erenreich, want to know where the elite are? Look in the mirror. Mikey Moore, despite his "branding", is also one of the elite, riding in his limo at Cannes, living in his million dollar homes in New York and Michigan...his "branding" is no more effective than the attempts to portray Al Gore as a simple man of the people four years ago.

[Chad Fairbanks]

Actually, Moore was raised in an affluent suburb of Flint, not in Flint itself...

But hey, what's a few facts among friends?

[xm177e2]

The term "elite" is not just about money, it is about attitude and culture. Journalists and others at the NYT are certainly part of a liberal elite.