Twenty years after “Roger & Me” introduced Michael Moore to the world as a politically engaged documentary maker with a strong knack for showmanship, “Capitalism: A Love Story” sums up his disgust with corporate America and its devastating effect on the lives of ordinary people.

The title is great and the balance of this Reuters article is reasonably well-balanced, but “[corporate America's] devastating effect on the lives of ordinary people?”

That seems awfully strong. Corporate America is responsible for the $1 double cheeseburger that I saw on a Burger King billboard today. I am pretty ordinary and I don’t think that’s devastating. But then again, that is just anecdotal, and wouldn’t hold up to the rigorous standard of circumspection and adherence to facts that Michael Moore continues to set.

I think I am correctly calling it “ironic” when I note that the most generous corporate health and retirement program in the USA, General Motors– a program so generous ($1525 per vehicle produced) that GM lost over $1bn in the first quarter of 2005 and, despite being the largest automaker in the world, is now valued less than Best Buy– is the same company that Michael Moore (currently filming a movie “Sicko” in support of nationalized health care) skewered in his first major film, “Roger and Me.” What a fucking ridiculous fuck.

GM is inordinately generous to its employees in terms of healthcare and retirement.

Shouldn’t this serve as a model for Moore, who purports to look out for lower income workers? Of course not. GM is a for-profit enterprise, and moreover a Corporation– that peculiarly diabolical form that sends liberals into fits– and therefore deserves not to exist. Michael Moore is pretty nakedly (eww… maybe that’s not a good word to use) a socialist. It is staggering how much positive attention he gets.

One more thing– Michael Moore will no doubt include scenes in “Sicko” of Canadians, Brits, Scandinavians, etc. briskly shuffling through an osentibly fair and free national health system. I am certain that somewhere he will find his trademark anecdotal encounter with somebody whose experience supports Moore’s claims. And in further trademark Moore fashion, he will ignore the profound dissatisfaction with socialized health care systems that exists in these nations.

Watching the British candidates for Prime Minister field questions from a “nationally representative” audience on the show “Question Time,” it was amazing to hear the complaints leveled at the NHS. (Check out a typical horror story.) Indeed, Tory candidate Michael Howard proposed, to modest audience approval, a plan whereby the British government would pay 50% of the cost for private health care given 1) the comparative excellence of private care, and 2) the protracted waiting and inferior quality associated with NHS care.

Now, do you think there is any possibility that Michael Moore will ever even mention the strengths of U.S. health care or the weaknesses of nationalized health care elswehere? Of course not. He is going to give us a simplistic, cynical, anecdotal, propagandic mess. I fucking hate this man.