Here’s my latest column from The Post, taking aim at the comically dishonest anti-Wal-Mart movie by Robert Greenwald.
(Yes, Greenwald is a promiscuous octopus hater.)
Particular fun: An interview with the guy who reopened a hardware store that was supposedly crushed by Wal-Mart. He calls his store’s location (2 miles from Wal-Mart) “a gold mine.”
Snip:
In the closing minutes of the new documentary “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price,” triumphant activists proudly point to vacant lots in their various communities. Their message: They were going to build a Wal-Mart here, but we stopped it.
Vacant lots. What a victory.
And what a perfect symbol of what’s wrong not just with the anti-Wal-Mart ideologues, but the whole anti-development, anti-globalization, anti-everything left.
…
But you don’t have to like Wal-Mart to realize that its enemies are driven by faith, not facts.
For instance, the first 10-minute segment in “High Cost” — about a hardware store closing down in Middlefield, Ohio, when Wal-Mart moves in — takes such a, shall we say, relaxed approach to the truth it’s laughable.
What’s more, the real story proves exactly the opposite of the point Greenwald is trying to make.
The narrative revolves around Don Hunter, who founded H&H Hardware in 1962 and passed the business onto his son Jon in 1996. As Greenwald tells the story, everything was running smoothly until Wal-Mart’s bulldozers rampaged through the town — “Wal-Mart descends on Middlefield” the titles scream — destroying every small business in sight.
One (huge, gaping, insurmountable) problem: As first reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, H&H Hardware closed down nearly three months before Wal-Mart opened one its “supercenters” around the corner.
“I think Wal-Mart hurts a lot of small businesses,” Don Hunter told the Plain Dealer earlier this month. “But it’s not the reason we closed. Absolutely not.” Jon Hunter, according to the paper, told the filmmaker not to tie H&H’s closing to Wal-Mart’s opening.
Greenwald’s spokesmen replied to the Plain Dealer story by pointing out that the movie isn’t specific about the timeline — but that’s sort of the point. The story only works if the facts are obscured beyond recognition.
The real story is that H&H had been having financial difficulties for a few years before Wal-Mart arrived in mid-May of 2005. It closed down in February. And only five months after Wal-Mart arrived, a new hardware store opened in H&H’s old location.
I probably shouldn’t be surprised that a lefty documentary would lie so blatantly and so stupidly, but I still am.
Oh well.







I’m glad to see a number of people speaking up about this.
Nicely done. That the anti-Wal-Mart folks prefer to take the low road of factual distortion and manipulations of the truth as a means to an end is both frustrating and pathetic.
The H&H example and others like it need to be told and re-told to expose the dishonest liberal agenda of the anti-Wal-Mart effort.
Mike Thayer
Sick of Spin
www.sickofspin.com