O'Reilly vs. Moore

So last night Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore went at each other The O'Reilly Factor, a clash of titans not seen since Godzilla mixed it up with Mothra or Liza Minelli took on David Gest. The fair and balanced folks at Fox News have posted a transcript here.

Now I can't stand Moore. But as a critic of the war and an occasional guest in the No Spin Zone who routinely has his mike cut off whenever I appear, I have to admit I was sort of pulling for the left's crying on the outside clown. I hoped at the very least that he would have held up his considerable end of the argument. But he didn't; more than that, his grasp of the facts seemed pretty weak or nonexistent.

Especially annoying to me--and again, I say this as someone who was against the invasion of Iraq--was Moore's insistence that the U.S. was somehow "sacrificing" its "children" in Iraq. I would do anything possible to persuade my kids not to join the armed forces (just as my father, a WW2 infantryman who "won" a Purple Heart in Europe) did everything to make sure I never signed up. But Moore's rhetoric falls flat when you're talking about an all-volunteer army that's made up of legal adults. Of course, that doesn't mean the U.S. should feel free to send soldiers everywhere, but it does undercut the Moore's implicit characterization of US soldier as 15 year old draftees.