The following was originally published at Scrappleface. And for you tight-assed Moore-ons out there, this is a parody.
Spider-Man 2 Conspires to Silence Michael Moore
by Scott Ott
(2004-06-30)—Spider-Man 2 is part of “a web of deception, a conspiracy to silence” Oscar-winning documentarist Michael Moore, according to the filmmaker whose Fahrenheit 9/11 is America’s current number one box office smash.
“It’s not just the cynical timing of the release of Spider-Man 2,” said Mr. Moore, “but the movie endorses the unilateral and so-called righteous use of power to overcome so-called evil. This is a thinly-veiled rebuttal of Fahrenheit 9/11 and the entire security plank of the Democrat National Committee platform.”
Mr. Moore added that buying a ticket to Spider-Man 2 is “tantamount to voting for George Bush.”
Well-heeled western liberals and Michael Moore fans might not understand President Bush’s Middle East strategy, but the terrorists do. An authenticated al Qaeda “strategy document” lays out the organization’s plan for Iraq.
“We consider that the Spanish government cannot suffer more than two to three strikes before pulling out (of Iraq) under pressure from its own people,” said the document obtained Wednesday by AFP from Raido France International’s regional office in Beirut.
“If these (Spanish) forces remain after the strikes, the victory of the socialist party would be near-guaranteed and the pullout of Spanish forces from Iraq would be on its agenda,” said the document, distributed ahead of the March 11 attacks in Madrid.
Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, elected after the train bombings in Madrid which left 191 people dead in Spain’s worst ever terrorist attack, withdrew Spanish troops from the troubled country in May.
So, their strategy worked, as we all know. And what of the rest of the coalition?
A lengthy chapter of the document focuses on “the main allies of the United States in their aggression against Iraq: Britain, Italy, Poland and Spain, as well as some Arab countries.” ...
It called for striking US forces in Iraq on a daily basis in order to force them “to disperse on the territory, weaken their efficiency and strike the morale of the soldiers.”
“The operations should be concentrated on the Arab Sunni sector… (given) the absence of motives for the explosion of the situation in the Shiite southern regions and the Kurdish north,” it said.
The booklet, presented as a handbook for the “Mujahedeen,” called on the “Iraqi resistance (to form) a movement which gathers the factions of the Jihad… and unite in the same objective, as currently they are not united in the same organisation.”
“The Mujahedeens in Iraq should now concentrate on the complete pullout of all foreign forces from all Iraqi territory,” it said.
In other words, they will commit acts of terrorism in order to weaken and demoralize US resolve to see the job through. But the most telling aspect of the article, for me, came right at the end.
It said the US plan was “to build an Iraqi state as conceived by the United States...and enslave Saudi Arabia politically, fight against Islamic proselytism as a salafist and jihadic movement.”
“This would be (for the US) the first step toward the eradication of hardline Islam in the entire world,” it said.
This is what conservatives have been saying all along, that Iraq was simply the first step in the overall task of modernizing the Middle East and destroying Islamism. This idea has, as usual, been poo-pooed by the left-wing intelligentsia, but as you can see here, the terrorists understand what is at stake. A free Iraq, with free-flowing oil, means less money and power and influence for Saudi Arabia. (You know Saudi Arabia, the country that Michael Moore says Bush is beholden to.) A free Iraq and a weak Saudi Arabia gives America and the rest of the free world an excellent vantage point from which to “fight against Islamic proselytism as a salafist and jihadic movement.”
This is why the invasion of Iraq was and still is so essential to the broader war on terror. It is “the first step toward the eradication of hardline Islam in the entire world.”
Salafist movements are what Daniel Pipes refers to as Islamist, essentially being a form of theological fascism based upon a perverted form of Islam. This is what al Qaeda is fighting for. Lefties might not get it, but the bad guys do, and they’re willing to fight to the death. The only way to win is to kill them first.
Following up on this post, an alert reader named Christopher F. Zeineh has done some digging and come up with some evidence of his own.
Lee,
I’ve checked out your post on the Bush/Taliban conspiracy forwarded by Moore and I’ve come up with some very interesting results, particularly about Moore’s claim that Bush was especially cushy with the Taliban and passed up a chance to get Bin Laden.
First, regarding the following Moore quote about the Taliban link:
“Even though the United Nations recognized the alliance as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, the Bush administration, with oil at the forefront of its goals, decided to follow the lead of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and curry favor with the Taliban mullahs of Afghanistan.”
A few problems with this:
1. America didn’t recognize any government of Afghanistan, including the Taliban. This makes sense; even though the Taliban could not be recognized as a legitimate government because of their violent rise to power, the Norther Alliance couldn’t be recognized as such either because they did not control the country at this point. Take a look at the State Department website.
“The State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that working-level State Department officials met with Said Ramatullah Hashemi from the Taliban Foreign Ministry in Washington March 19.
“‘The meetings don’t imply any recognition of the Taliban. We don’t recognize any government in Afghanistan,’ Boucher said.”
2. The above link also shows that the Bush administration was actively pursuing an agreement to get Bin Laden transferred out of the country for apprehension, but that the Taliban did not propose anything that would adequately do so in accordance with UNSC Resolution 1333.
“There was no specific proposal, and therefore we don’t have any specific response. We have not seen from the Taliban a proposal that would meet the requirements of the United Nations resolutions to hand over Usama bin Laden to a country where he can be brought to justice.”
Remember this point for later.
3. When you’re trying to negotiate the handover of Osama Bin Laden, it would do no good getting cozy with the Northern Alliance, as they weren’t the ones harboring him. So, we logically went to the bargaining table with the Taliban. In retrospect, we should have obliterated them much earlier, but that would place blame on Clinton as well as Bush, and what fun would that be for Moore?
My second point is the big one: how Bush supposedly gave up a chance to get Bin Laden. The trick is the exact definition of “get”.
First off, if your transcript of F911 is accurate, he lifts almost two whole paragraphs verbatim from the following article from Green Press about the purported 9/11-Enron connection:
“The Taliban visits to Washington continued up to a few months prior to the September 11 attacks. The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s South Asian Division maintained constant satellite telephone contact with the Taliban in Kandahar and Kabul. Washington permitted the Taliban to maintain a diplomatic office in Queens, New York headed by Taliban diplomat Abdul Hakim Mojahed. In addition, U.S. officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca, who is also a former CIA officer, visited Taliban diplomatic officials in Islamabad. In the meantime, the Bush administration took a hostile attitude towards the Islamic State of Afghanistan, otherwise known as the Northern Alliance. Even though the United Nations recognized the alliance as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, the Bush administration, with oil at the forefront of its goals, decided to follow the lead of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and curry favor with the Taliban mullahs of Afghanistan. The visits of Islamist radicals did not end with the Taliban. In July 2001, the head of Pakistan’s pro-bin Laden Jamiaat-i-Islami Party, Qazi Hussein Ahmed, also reportedly was received at the George Bush Center for Intelligence (aka, CIA headquarters) in Langley, Virginia.
“According to the Washington Post, the Special Envoy of Mullah Omar, Rahmatullah Hashami, even came to Washington bearing a gift carpet for President Bush from the one-eyed Taliban leader. The Village Voice reported that Hashami, on behalf of the Taliban, offered the Bush administration to hold on to bin Laden long enough for the United States to capture or kill him but, inexplicably, the administration refused.”
Regarding the mention of the Village Voice, I’ve found only two articles dealing with Hashami. (Note: Village Voice and Green Press spell it “Hashami”, other outlets spell it “Hashemi”. Keep that in mind if you do your own searches on the subject.) Both articles indicate that the Taliban was offering to keep Bin Laden in a single place for long enough so that the US could target and kill him in a bombing raid. The reason the feds refused the offer is that they wanted Bin Laden alive, which would not have been part of the Taliban offer. Here’s the link.
“On June 6, an article in the Voice by Camelia Fard and me set forth the odd doings of the Taliban’s roving de facto lobbyist in the U.S., Laili Helms, the niece of former CIA head Richard Helms. She told of getting word in 1999 from the Taliban leadership that they were willing to hand over to the U.S. all of bin Laden’s communications equipment that they had seized. That would mean the U.S. could close in and target bin Laden for bombing or a raid. When she told the State Department, according to her account, officials were at first interested, but later said, ‘No. We want him.’ “
“Early this year, the Taliban’s ambassador at large, Hashami, a young man speaking perfect English, met with CIA operations people and State Department reps, Helms says. At this final meeting, she says, Hashami proposed that the Taliban hold bin Laden in one location long enough for the U.S. to locate and destroy him. The U.S. refused, says Helms, who claims she was the go-between in this deal between the supreme leader and the feds.
“A U.S. government source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, made clear that the U.S. is not trying to kill bin Laden but instead wants him expelled from Afghanistan so he can be brought to justice. Acknowledging that Laili Helms does a lot of lobbying on behalf of the Taliban, this source said Helms does not speak to the Taliban for the U.S.”
Conclusion: Moore ripped off the Green Press article either without checking the facts or while willfully ignoring the errors. The feds didn’t “inexplicably” refuse the offer; they had good reason: they wanted Bin Laden in one piece. Besides, even if we had agreed simply to kill Bin Laden, the Taliban could have easily planted a look-alike. The blast from the ensuing bombs would destroy any evidence that we got the wrong guy, and the Taliban could still cooperate with Bin Laden while still claiming to have upheld their end of the bargain. Considering how the Taliban didn’t hand over Bin Laden even when their very existence was on the line after Bush’s post-9/11 ultimatum, I doubt very much that they would have acted on any such plan in good faith when there was much less incentive for them to do so, pre-9/11.
Moore’s entire passage is designed to make it look like Bush had absolutely no interest in pursuing Bin Laden at all. Remember that article I pointed out earlier? That’s where the contradiction lies: Not only did Bush actually try to get Bin Laden alive, he also tried to get it done via UN resolutions! So much for unilateralism.
Also, Moore doesn’t take into account how the US had passed up earlier offers of getting Bin Laden during the Clinton administration. The following article has Hashemi saying that the Taliban offered to either punish Bin Laden themselves, try him in their own courts, or keep an international group monitoring Bin Laden.
‘“In 1998, they (the US) sent cruise missiles into Afghanistan… to kill Osama bin Laden… 75 cruise missiles… missed and killed 19 students and they never apologized.” The Ambassador said his country had offered to punish Osama bin Laden if the US gave proof of his embassy bombings. The US refused. They offered to try Osama in their courts. The US refused. Next offered, Hashemi said, was an international monitoring group in Afghanistan to watch bin Laden, also refused.’
And here we see the Clinton administration pass up an offer of actually capturing Bin Laden because we didn’t think we had enough evidence to hold him, from the Village Voice no less.
“When Washington finally declined the offer˜because the FBI did not believe it had sufficient evidence to try Bin Laden in a U.S. court˜and Saudi Arabia refused Washington’s request to arrest and even execute the terrorist, the U.S. demanded that Bin Laden leave Sudan for any other country except Somalia.”
So there you go: an act of plaigarism (if he didn’t credit the Green Press), a lie, and a ton of omissions, all in two convenient paragraphs, courtesy of Michael Moore.
It’s a blogger’s round up of what some reviewers said about Passion of the Christ and what they later said about F911. Not surprisingly, everything they hated about Passion is everything they loved about F911. Here’s a taste.
William Wolf, Wolf Entertainment:
F9/11: Anyone watching it might be stirred in the face of the total picture presented, especially on the mess the nation was misled into in what increasingly been coming apparent as a giant, costly fiasco and a diversion from the real fight against terrorism.
Passion: Gibson has every right to any interpretation he chooses and to make the film he envisions. But the rest of us have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to complain about his narrowly focused, extremely violent, ultimately exploitative personal indulgence.
Just the latest example of that conservative media at work, right Moore-ons?
The Exploitation Flick Returns
By Jon Haber
06/29/2004
Fifty years ago, exploitation movie pioneer Kroger Babb lost his shirt trying unsuccessfully to hawk his premier product, an alleged sex film entitled Mom and Dad, to New York sophisticates. What might this episode teach us about Babb’s contemporary surrogate, Michael Moore, director of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11?
While contemporary readers think of “exploitation” as a generic term, historically the “exploitation film” was a product created by a largely unknown industry to fill a specific niche. During the era when many downtown cinemas (and eventually drive-in theatres) were independent and locally controlled, a film production and distribution world that existed separately from Hollywood served to fill the need for a more puerile product than Tinseltown provided.
While the number of exploitation titles produced from the 30s through the early 60s was huge and varied, they all had certain elements in common, notably:
• Exploitation films targeted subjects that were considered off limits by mainstream film producers, such as sex (She Shoulda Said No), drugs (Reefer Madness), and gore-drenched violence (Blood Feast). In many cases, these pictures were couched as morality plays, promising to teach audiences important lessons regarding the evils of pre-marital sex, teen marriage or drug-and-alcohol sodden lifestyles, by exposing movie goers to these horrid sins in graphic detail.
• The most successful exploitation film succeeded by “building a ballyhoo” around the product. When a “sex shocker” like Child Bride arrived in a town, it was often accompanied by a lavish poster and leafleting campaign that promised an experience that would “dare to explain sex as never before,” sometimes segregating audiences by gender (men only for the 6 and 10 shows, women only for 8). When successful, such marketing would bring out the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency to picket the theatre, ensuring swollen crowds for weeks.
• Exploitation titles normally failed to deliver the goods. Audiences expecting to see some skin in the premarital-sex-induced-pregnancy tale Mom and Dad, for example, had to be satisfied with the skin and “naughty bits” provided in a so-called “square up” reel that featured medical footage of a baby being born (thus earning the genre the title “birth-of-a-baby” pictures). Much like the Royal Nunsuch chapters of Huck Finn, six-o-clock audiences would leave the theatre singing the praises of a film, not wanting to let on to the eight-o-clock attendees that everyone was being had.
The exploitation film industry eventually succumbed to the film genres it spawned, notably pornography and the mainstream slasher movie. The tell-tale moment arrived when Kroger Babb’s company went bankrupt trying to play a New York market with access to erotic mainstream European films that had little use for the low-skin quotient of flim-flam like Mom and Dad.
While some micro-budget film producers still produce straight-to-video pictures that follow traditional exploitation formulas, today it is Michael Moore who most embodies the spirit of Kroger Babb.
While school shootings in Columbine inspired TV melodrama, only Moore had the Babb-like audacity to take on such an untouchable subject in an exploitation manner. If the success of exploitation rested on promising the audience what they secretly desired, Moore’s innovation was to provide viewers not with forbidden (no longer) sex, drugs and gore, but with “documentaries” that pandered to political preconceptions.
With Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore has gone back to the future to fully reconstruct every element of successful exploitation. If there is one subject mainstream entertainment has refused to touch in any way, shape or form is the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath. Into this breach runs Moore who promises to “dare explain the Bush administration as never before” by hanging his film on New York’s tragedy.
By manufacturing corporate controversy regarding Disney and other Hollywood corporate villains, Moore has succeeded in building a ballyhoo around the release of his new movie, not just biting the hand that has fed him, but turning them into a contemporary Legion of Decency which all right-thinking people can fight by buying a ticket to his film.
Finally, audiences who end up seeing his picture are sure to get the same thing he provided in Columbine, a jagged, pseudo-documentary that may amuse, but could never convince anyone who did not enter the theater sharing the director’s conspiratorial view of the world. Rather than admit that the film is little more than another work from a humorous, but low-talented hack, Moore’s fans must continue to inflate the importance of his unimportant movies, if only to avoid being judged as an army of suckers.
And here is the most interesting part of the evolution of exploitation from Babb to Moore. In the 50s, it was the sophisticates of New York with access to even more sophisticated erotic movies from an enlightened Europe that brought an end to the traditional sexploitation era. Today these same sophisticates (in both the US and abroad) are playing the role of rubes to the filmmaker’s con.
Jon Haber has worked as a film writer for the Boston Globe and movie reviewer at WBUR in Boston. He now runs SkillCheck, Inc., a software publisher in Burlington Massachusettes, and occasionally finds time to write about the intersection of politics, film and culture.
Those Records Ain’t Broken… They’re Not Even Scratched
Some are saying that Fahrenheit 9/11 set records for a documentary, being the first ever to debut in the number one spot and already having the highest gross for a documentary with $21.8 million over the weekend. I looked it up, though, and it is total bunk. If marginally staged events filmed for entertainment value is what makes a documentary, then Jackass the Movie actually set those records. It debuted at number one with a gross of $22.8 million. It also had less erroneous assertions than a Michael Moore documentary.
Yeah, that’s right; we’re the blogosphere and we’ll fact-check your ass (and with Michael Moore, that’s a - ah, forget it; obvious joke)
I was on duty-call in the hospital all yesterday and I was in the ward when I heard the news that Mr. Bremer had already transferred the power to the new government two days ahead of the expected date. I was so happy about this news and I couldn’t wait until I finish my tour to celebrate the occasion.
My friends all seemed thrilled and optimistic, yet they seemed to have no interset in celebrating the event. I decided to do something so I asked one of my colleagues to cover for me for an hour; I told him that I have to get something from outside.I directly headed to the nearest bakery and ordered a nice cake and returned to the hospital as fast as I could. On the way, I didn’t see any large calibrations but I noticed that the streets were busier than usual and people looked lively and relaxed.
I invited some of my friends, one of us volunteered to get some beverages and we gathered around the cake to celebrate the happy event. I took some pictures but sadly not all the doctors (female mainly) agreed on me posting their pictures and I’ll respect their will.
Some of us were celebrating regaining sovereignty, some were celebrating the end of occupation, others were happy because they think the new government will bring safety and order. I was celebrating a new and a great step towards democracy, but we were all joined by true hope for a better future and by the love we have for Iraq.
After wards we sat for a while discussing different matters. The hall was busy and everyone was chatting and laughing loud. They had Al-Jazeera on (something I never managed to convince them to stop doing). Then suddenly Mr. Bremer appeared on TV reading his last speech before he left Iraq. I approached the TV to listen carefully to the speech, as I expected it to be difficult in the midst of all that noise. To my surprise everyone stopped what they were doing and started watching as attentively as I was.
The speech was impressive and you could hear the sound of a needle if one had dropped it at that time. The most sensational moment was the end of the speech when Mr. Bremer used a famous Arab emotional poem. The poem was for a famous Arab poet who said it while leaving Baghdad. Al-Jazeera had put an interpreter who tried to translate even the Arabic poem which Mr. Bremer was telling in a fair Arabic! “Let this damned interpreter shut up. We want to hear what the man is saying” One of my colloquies shouted. The scene was very touching that the guy sitting next to me (who used to sympathize with Muqtada) said “He’s going to make me cry!”
Then he finished his speech by saying in Arabic,”A’ash Al-Iraq, A’ash Al-Iraq, A’ash Al-Iraq”! (Long live Iraq, Long live Iraq, long live Iraq).
I was deeply moved by this great man’s words but I couldn’t prevent myself from watching the effect of his words on my friends who some of them were anti-Americans and some were skeptic, although some of them have always shared my optimism. I found that they were touched even more deeply than I was. I turned to one friend who was a committed She’at and who distrusted America all the way. He looked as if he was bewitched, and I asked him, “So, what do you think of this man? Do you still consider him an invader?” My friend smiled, still touched and said, “Absolutely not! He brought tears to my eyes. God bless him.”
Another friend approached me. This one was not religious but he was one of the conspiracy theory believers. He put his hands on my shoulders and said smiling, “I must admit that I’m beginning to believe in what you’ve been telling us for months and I’m beginning to have faith in America. I never thought that they will hand us sovereignty in time. These people have shown that they keep their promises.”
Think about this, Moore fans. If Mike had his way these people would still be being thrown feet-first into the plastic shredder, their children would still be having their feet smashed with hammers in front of their parents, and who knows how many people would disappear into unmarked graves.
But, of course, we could have gotten another worthless UN resolution and waited another 20 or 30 years. The Iraqi people would still be suffering, but at least well-heeled western leftists would feel better about themselves.
It’s time to point out another of Michael Moore’s whopping lies and distortions. This one concerns the Taliban’s trip to Texas. (In the quoted text below, NARRATOR is Michael Moore.)
NARRATOR: Or was the war in Afghanistan really about something else? Perhaps the answer was in Houston, Texas. In 1997 while George W. Bush was Governor of Texas, a delegation of Taliban leaders from Afghanistan flew to Houston to meet with Unocal executives to discuss the building of a pipeline through Afghanistan bringing natural gas from the Caspian Sea. And who got a Caspian Sea drilling contract the same day Unocal signed the pipeline deal? A company headed by a man named Dick Cheney: Halliburton.
In 1997 George W. Bush was indeed Governor of Texas, and Bill Clinton (a Democrat) was President of the United States. Note that Moore does not state that Bush had anything to do with the Taliban meeting, because Bush indeed had nothing to do with it. He only states that Bush was governor at the time (a fact), thereby implying that he had something to do with the meeting (a lie). The Taliban’s entry into the United States was requested by the Unocal corporation and cleared by Clinton’s State Department.
As far as Unocal and the pipeline deal goes, according to everything I can find Unocal pulled out of the deal. This BBC article from May 30, 2002, states, “The US company Unocal led a consortium in the 1990s which undertook feasibility studies, but it pulled out of the project in 1998.” When the pipeline deal was signed in 2002, Unocal issued this press release denying their involvement. “Unocal Chairman Charles R. Williamson told Unocal stockholders today that Unocal has no plans or interest in becoming involved in any projects in Afghanistan, including natural gas or crude oil pipelines. He made the statement in response to recent erroneous news reports about Unocal and the pipeline project in Afghanistan.”
It breaks down like this. In 1997 the Taliban comes to Texas with the okay of Bill Clinton. This has nothing, nothing, to do with George W. Bush. In December of 1998 Unocal pulls out of the project. Then, in 2002, Afghanistan signs a a deal not with an oil company but with Turkmenistan and Pakistan to try and develop a pipeline. As the BBC article states,
The presidents of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan have signed an agreement to tap Central Asia’s huge gas reserves.
The three leaders - Pakistani President Musharraf, interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai and Turkmen President Niyazov - agreed on the construction of a $2bn pipeline to bring gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan.
So, in other words, the three leaders got together and agreed to get the ball rolling. Note that neither Unocal nor Halliburton has anything to do with this. Then, according to Moore, Halliburton got awarded work in the Caspian Sea the same say this “contract” was signed. The only thing I can find is this Halliburton press release from June 17, 2002.
Halliburton’s Energy Services Group, a business segment of Halliburton (NYSE: HAL), has been awarded a two year contract extension with Agip KCO (formerly OKIOC) for providing integrated drilling services for the Kashagan reservoir located in the northeast sector of the Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan. Agip KCO, the field operator, is expected to deliver first oil from the reservoir by 2005.
So much for some nefarious conspiracy between Halliburton, Unocal, Bush, and the Taliban. Moore then continues:
NARRATOR: And who else stood to benefit from the pipeline? Bush’s number one campaign contributor, Kenneth Lay, and the good people of Enron. (shot of BBC News website, 3 December 1997) Only the British press covered this trip. Then in 2001, just 5 1/2 months before 9/11, the Bush Administration welcomed a special Taliban envoy to tour the United States to help improve the image of the Taliban government.
This is, like most of what Moore says, a nugget of truth wrapped in a blanket of spin. The only documentation I could find about this trip was from some loony left-wing site, which is probably the same place Moore got it.
The Taliban visits to Washington continued up to a few months prior to the September 11 attacks. The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s South Asian Division maintained constant satellite telephone contact with the Taliban in Kandahar and Kabul. Washington permitted the Taliban to maintain a diplomatic office in Queens, New York headed by Taliban diplomat Abdul Hakim Mojahed. In addition, U.S. officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca, who is also a former CIA officer, visited Taliban diplomatic officials in Islamabad. In the meantime, the Bush administration took a hostile attitude towards the Islamic State of Afghanistan, otherwise known as the Northern Alliance. Even though the United Nations recognized the alliance as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, the Bush administration, with oil at the forefront of its goals, decided to follow the lead of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and curry favor with the Taliban mullahs of Afghanistan. The visits of Islamist radicals did not end with the Taliban. In July 2001, the head of Pakistan’s pro-bin Laden Jamiaat-i-Islami Party, Qazi Hussein Ahmed, also reportedly was received at the George Bush Center for Intelligence (aka, CIA headquarters) in Langley, Virginia.
According to the Washington Post, the Special Envoy of Mullah Omar, Rahmatullah Hashami, even came to Washington bearing a gift carpet for President Bush from the one-eyed Taliban leader. The Village Voice reported that Hashami, on behalf of the Taliban, offered the Bush administration to hold on to bin Laden long enough for the United States to capture or kill him but, inexplicably, the administration refused.
Okay, let’s accept this article as being true. The State Department was in contact with the Taliban government, and they permitted the Taliban to have an office. Am I missing something here? Isn’t this exactly the type of thing the State Department is supposed to do? This article is as nondescript and nonspecific as Moore. It says that some Taliban came to America in 2001, and then it makes guesses as to the motive. Did they meet with President Bush? Were they requested to come by President Bush? Or is this all simply slinging mud and hoping that some of it sticks? Moore continues:
NARRATOR: Here is the Taliban official visiting our State Department to meet with US officials. Why on Earth did the Bush administration allow a Taliban leader to visit the United States knowing that the Taliban were harboring the man who bombed the USS Cole and our African embassies? Well, I guess 9/11 put a stop to that. When the invasion of Afghanistan was complete we installed its new president, Hamid Karzai. Who was Hamid Karzai? He was a former advisor to Unocal. Bush also appointed as his envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad who was also a former Unocal advisor. I guess you can probably see where this is leading. Faster than you can say Black Gold Texas Tea, Afghanistan signed an agreement with her neighboring countries to build a pipeline through Afghanistan carrying natural gas from the Caspian Sea. Oh, and the Taliban? Uh, they mostly got away. As did Osama bin Laden and most of al Qaeda.
So, when the Clinton State Department brings the Taliban to America in 1997 Moore uses it as an example of then-Governor Bush’s ties to the group. But when the Bush State Department meets with the Taliban in 2001, it’s all part of Bush’s oil conspiracy. Moore wants to have it both ways.
Also worthy of note is the mention of the bombing of the USS Cole and the embassies. Odd, isn’t it, that Moore neglects to mention who was president at the time that these attacks happened: Bill Clinton, the same guy whose administration met with the Taliban in 1997. Now, the Cole attack happened on October 12, 2000. The embassy bombings were on August 7, 1998. In response to these incidents Bill Clinton did virtually nothing, launching cruise missile strikes against an abandoned training camp in Afghanistan and a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory.
Imagine, for a moment if this were the case:
President Bush meets with the Taliban in 1997.
The US embassies are bombed in 1998. Bush’s response? A couple of fruitless missile strikes.
The USS Cole is bombed in 2000. Bush’s response? Nothing.
The US is attacked on September 11, 2001.
Can you possibly imagine Michael Moore not pointing his finger at this series of events and drawing a conspiratorial conclusion? Of course he would. The fact is that there is just as much “evidence” of collusion or a conspiracy between Clinton and the Taliban as there is between Bush and the Taliban. But Moore, in his quest to do anything to make Bush look as bad as possible, only tells you a fraction of the story.
Update: There’s been an update to this story posted here.
I would now like to present some communist propaganda.
LOS ANGELES, June 29 (Xinhuanet)—Controversial US director Michael Moore said Tuesday that “Fahrenheit 9/11,” his scathing documentary about US President George W. Bush and the US-led war on Iraq, appealed to not only Bush critics, but Bush supporters as well.
“Fahrenheit 9/11,” which became the first documentary to rule North America box office over the weekend, ranked No. 1 in each state that voted for Bush in the 2000 election, Moore said in an interview on PBS TV Tuesday night.
“After seeing all the numbers, all the exit polls and surveys they do of people coming to see it, it was clear to me that a lot of people in this country want some questions answered and are unhappy about what’s going on,” Moore told talk show host Tavis Smiley.
“Fahrenheit 9/11,” which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, has set a record for a documentary by earning 23.9 million US dollars over the weekend at North America box office, more than the gross of Moore’s 2003 Oscar winning documentary “Bowling for Columbine.”
Due to its scathing attacks on Bush’s reaction to the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the launching of unprovoked war on Iraq, “Fahrenheit 9/11” has raged the Bush campaign and some Bush supporters even organized to boycott the movie. The Disney Company even refused to distribute the film due to fear of political repercussions.
But Moore said the efforts to block the film’s distribution and advertising worked to his advantage. “All they did was give more publicity for the film and made more people aware of it,” he said.
I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to determines whether the communist propaganda comes from Xinhua or Mikey himself.
The following was originally published at Strategy Page. This is the type of opinion not reported by either Michael Moore or the allegedly pro-war media.
No One Asked Us
by Stan Coerr
George Bush coalesced American support behind invading Iraq, I am told, using two arguments: Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and the capability to deliver them, and Iraq was a supporter of Al-Qaeda terrorism, and may have been involved in the attacks of 9/11. Vicious words and gratuitous finger-pointing keep falling back on these points, as people insist that “we” were misled into what started as a dynamic liberation and has become a bloody counterinsurgency. Watching politicians declaim and hearing television experts expound on why we went to war and on their opinions of those running the White House and Defense Department, I have one question. When is someone going to ask the guys who were there?
What about the opinions of those whose lives were on the line, massed on the Iraq-Kuwait border beginning in February of last year? I don’t know how President Bush got the country behind him, because at the time I was living in a hole in the dirt in northern Kuwait. Why have I not heard a word from anyone who actually carried a rifle or flew a plane into bad guy country last year, and who has since had to deal with the ugly aftermath of a violent liberation? What about the guys who had the most to lose? What do they think about all this?
I was there. I am one of those guys who fought the war and helped keep the peace. I am a Major in the Marine Reserves, and during the war I was the senior American attached to the 1 Royal Irish Battlegroup, a rifle battalion of the British Army. I was commander of five U.S. Marine air/naval gunfire liaison teams, as well as the liaison officer between U.S. Marines and British Army forces. I was activated on January 14, 2003, and 17 days later I and my Marines were standing in Kuwait with all of our gear, ready to go to war.
I majored in Political Science at Duke, and I graduated with a Masters degree in government from the Kennedy School at Harvard. I understand realpolitik, geopolitical jujitsu, economics, and the reality of the Arab world. I know the tension between the White House, the UN, Langley, and Foggy Bottom. One of my grandfathers was a two-star Navy admiral; my other grandfather was an ambassador. I am not a pushover, blindly following whoever is in charge, and I don’t kid myself that I live in a perfect world. But the war made sense then, and the occupation makes sense now.
As dawn broke on March 22, 2003, I became part of one of the largest and fastest land movements in the history of war. I went across the border alongside my brothers in the Royal Irish, following the 5th Marine Regiment from Camp Pendleton as they swept through the Ramaylah oil fields. I was one those guys you saw on TV every night ? filthy, hot, exhausted. I think the NRA and their right-to-bear-arms mantra is a joke, but by God I was carrying a loaded rifle, a loaded pistol and a knife on my body at all times. My feet rested on sandbags on the floor of my Humvee, there to protect me from the blast of a land mines or IED.
I killed many Iraqi soldiers, as they tried to kill me and my Marines. I did it with a radio, directing air-strikes and artillery, in concert with my British artillery officer counterpart, in combat along the Hamas Canal in southern Iraq. I saw, up close, everything the rest of you see in the newspapers: dead bodies, parts of dead bodies, helmets with bullet holes through them, handcuffed POWs sitting in the sand, oil well fires with flames reaching 100 feet into the air and a roar you could hear from over a mile away.
I stood on the bloody sand where Marine Second Lieutenant Therrel Childers was the first American killed on the ground. I pointed a loaded weapon at another man for the first time in my life. I did what I had spent 14 years training to do, and my Marines—your Marines—performed so well it still brings tears to my eyes to think about it. I was proud of what we did then, and I am proud of it now.
Along with the violence, I saw many things that lifted my heart. I saw thousands of Iraqis in cities like Qurnah and Medinah—men, women, children, grandparents carrying babies—running into the streets at the sight of the first Westerners to enter their streets. I saw them screaming, crying, waving, cheering. They ran from their homes at the sound of our Humvee tires roaring in from the south, bringing bread and tea and cigarettes and photos of their children. They chattered at us in Arabic, and we spoke to them in English, and neither understood the other. The entire time I was in Iraq, I had one impression from the civilians I met: Thank God, finally someone has arrived with bigger men and bigger guns to be, at last, on our side.
Let there be no mistake, those of you who don’t believe in this war: the Ba’ath regime were the Nazis of the second half of the 20th century. I saw what the murderous, brutal regime of Saddam Hussein wrought on that country through his party and their Fedayeen henchmen. They raped, murdered, tortured, extorted, and terrorized those in that country for 35 years. There are mass graves throughout Iraq only now being discovered. 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, out of Camp Pendleton, liberated a prison in Iraq populated entirely by children. The Ba’athists brutalized the weakest among them, and killed the strongest. I saw in the eyes of the people how a generation of fear reflects in the human soul.
The Ba’ath Party, like the Nazis before them, kept power by spreading out, placing their officials in every city and every village to keep the people under their boot. Everywhere we went we found rifles, ammunition, RPG rounds, mortar shells, rocket launchers, and artillery. When we took over the southern city of Ramaylah, our battalion commander tore down the Ba’ath signs and commandeered the former regime headquarters in town (which, by the way, was 20 feet from the local school). My commander himself took over the office of the local Ba’ath leader, and in opening the desk of that thug found a set of brass knuckles and a gun. These are the people who are now in prison, and that is where they deserve to be.
The analogy is simple. For years, you have watched the same large, violent man come home every night, and you have listened to his yelling and the crying and the screams of children and the noise of breaking glass, and you have always known that he was beating his wife and his children. Everyone on the block has known it. You ask, cajole, threaten, and beg him to stop, on behalf of the rest of the neighborhood. Nothing works. After listening to it for 13 years, you finally gather up the biggest, meanest guys you can find, you go over to his house, and you kick the door down. You punch him in the face and drag him away. The house is a mess, the family poor and abused? but now there is hope. You did the right thing.
I can speak with authority on the opinions of both British and American infantry in that place and at that time. Let me make this clear: at no time did anyone say or imply to any of us that we were invading Iraq to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction, nor were we there to avenge 9/11. We knew we were there for one reason: to rid the world of a tyrant, and to give Iraq back to Iraqis.
None of us had even heard those arguments for going to war until we returned, and we still don’t understand the confusion. To us, it was simple. The world needed to be rid of a man who committed mass murder of an entire people, and our country was the only one that could project that much power that far and with that kind of precision. We don’t make policy decisions: we carry them out. And none of us had the slightest doubt about how right and good our actions were.
The war was the right thing to do then, and in hindsight it was still the right thing to do. We can’t overthrow every murderous tyrant in the world, but when we can, we should. Take it from someone who was there, and who stood to lose everything. We must, and will, stay the course. We owe it to the Iraqis, and to the world.
Stan Coerr is a Super-Cobra attack helicopter pilot and Forward Air Controller, and was recently selected for Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve. He lives in San Diego, and can be reached at [email protected]
*UPDATE* from JimK - Comments to this post have been disabled due to the lack of respect displayed by our resident Moore fans. My apologies to those of you you were mature enough to be respectful.
He’re a good example of Moore carefully crafting language to give you an impression that is, to put it bluntly, not the truth. This is not a lie per se, but rather a distortion, a manipulation, a gentle nudge and a wink to make you believe something sinister is going on so that you take the rest of his allegations all the more seriously. I am going to categorize it in “F911 Lies” and “Polemics” since it is straddling the fence of both categories.
The scene: Moore and Craig Unger are standing across the street from the Saudi embassy in D.C. Uniformed officers congregate across the way, confer for a moment and one of them makes his way to Michael, where he asks if they’re making a documentary about the Saudi Arabian embassy. Moore says that are making a documentary, and part of it is about the Saudis.
Then comes the voiceover:
“Even though we were no where near the White House, for some reason the Secret Service had shown up to ask us what we were doing standing across the street from the Saudi Embassy.”
What. A. Crock.
Let’s examine the language. Moore has carefully crafted this to imply something nefarious...but let’s break it down.
“Even though we were no where near the White House.”
So? Completely inflammatory language designed to have you connect theses police officers with having been somehow “sent” by Bush to “silence” Moore.
“for some reason the Secret Service had shown up”
For some reason? We covered this awhile ago here at MOOREWATCH, and it took me five. That’s 1, 2, 3, 4, FIVE minutes with Google to get the full story on who that guard is. You can read all about it for yourself, right here.
If Moore has such a fantastic team of fact checkers, and he’s so concerned with accuracy, why is he maligning the Uniformed Secret Service? Why is he implying that they should not be be where they are?
Their mandate:
In 1970, Public Law 91-217 expanded the role of the White House Police, newly named the Executive Protective Service, to include protection of diplomatic missions in the Washington, D.C.,area. Congress later added the protection of the Vice President’s immediate family to the Executive Protective Service’s growing responsibilities in 1974.
After several name revisions, the force officially adopted its current name, the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division in 1977. While protection of the White House Complex remains its primary mission, the Uniformed Division’s responsibilities have expanded greatly over the years.
They now protect the following:
* the White House Complex, the Main Treasury Building and Annex, and other Presidential offices;
* the President and members of the immediate family;
* the temporary official residence of the Vice President in the District of Columbia;
* the Vice President and members of the immediate family; and
* foreign diplomatic missions in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and throughout the United States, and its territories and possessions, as prescribed by statute.
Why is it that I, some doofus sitting in a living room in Hamden, CT, can find this information that clears up the “some reason” why a Uniformed Secret Service officer would be asking what a camera crew is doing outside a foreign embassy, but Moore cannot seem to explain it?
And finally,
to ask us what we were doing standing across the street from the Saudi Embassy.
And? That would be their job. Did Moore stand across the street from any other embassy that day, filming, pointing and conferring with another guy only to be ignored by the Uniformed Secret Service? Consider the fact that a terrorist or a militia nut might do the same damned thing in order to case the building. If the building, or any embassy, had been attacked by someone who scoped it out by behaving the same way Unger and Moore behaved, everyone would wonder what the cops didn’t at least stop and ask the guy why he was filming an embassy.
What we have here is a segment that lasts 2:28. As we’ve been told, 7 minutes is an eternity, so 2:28 is a significant chunk of a film to devote to this segment. One problem, though...the only thing wrong in this segment is the words chosen by Moore in the voiceover. Moore and Unger did nothing wrong by filming the buildings and talking, and the officers did nothing wrong by asking him what he was doing.
So why even use the footage? No one did anything wrong or anything that could be misinterpreted as wrong. What is the point?
The point was to connect the Secret Service with guarding the Saudis, and to plant the impression that Moore was being harassed, possibly by the White House, since that’s where the Secret Service should be according to Moore.
A simple Google search...35 seconds of his time, would have resulted in this segment being rendered useless.
Unless…
He already knows the guards are supposed to be there. And he’s hoping, once again, that the American people will be too dumb or too lazy to find out the truth.
Here’s the first actual lie I found in the movie transcript. Not only is it factually untrue, but it’s also wrong in spirit. The Presidency travels with the President. He had daily security briefings ( except sunday). His staff was with him, along with a bunch of reporters. He did work most days, and TRAVELED away from the ranch.
He did not stay at the ranch for the rest of August. He was in and out.
FROM THE MOVIE:
George Bush spent the rest of August at the ranch where life was less complicated.
This is said to give the impression that Bush wasn’t working for a whole month,and never traveled away from the ranch.
BUT.............
From the Official White House Press Briefing for August travel arrangements;
While in Texas, he will have a working vacation there. I was going to do this at the end of the briefing. Let me give you some information now. But the President will travel for approximately two days a week each week during his visit to Texas. The upcoming week, he will travel one day to build a house in nearby Waco, Texas, to participate in a Habitat for Humanity event.
The following week, the President will travel to Colorado and New Mexico. The week following that, the President will travel roughly three days to Wisconsin and other locations TBD. He’ll also travel to Pennsylvania that week.
The following week, the President will have an event in nearby San Antonio, and you can also anticipate travel overLabor Day weekend to some unnamed cities as of this point.
Now, before you asshats say “Is that the best you can do?”
I must say , yes.
That’s the best I can do with the first 4 minutes of the movie.
Former mayor of New York City Ed Koch has penned an op-ed about Michael Moore and F911. If there is ever anything that sheds light on the type of person Michael Moore really is, it is this exchange relayed by Koch.
A year after 9/11, I was part of a panel discussion on BBC-TV’s “Question Time” show which aired live in the United Kingdom. A portion of my commentary at that time follows:
“One of the panelists was Michael Moore, writer and director of the award-winning documentary “Roger & Me.” During the warm-up before the studio audience, Moore said something along the lines of “I don’t know why we are making so much of an act of terror. It is three times more likely that you will be struck by lightening than die from an act of terror.” I was aghast and responded, “I think what you have said is outrageous, particularly when we are today commemorating the deaths of 3,000 people resulting from an act of terror.” I mention this exchange because it was not televised, occurring as it did before the show went live. It shows where he was coming from long before he produced “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
We’ve known where Mikey was coming from for a long time, and his anti-American hate fest of a film shows it. And lest any of you Moore-ons accuse Koch of lying, let’s apply the very same standard you use constantly in defense of your hero: if it wasn’t true, Mikey would have sued him for libel.
- Keep your answers short and on topic
- Anyone changing the subject or going off on tangents will find their comments removed. You are welcome to respond again under the above guideline if your comment is removed.
- Do not speculate in the comments as to what these questions are about. Just answer them truthfully.
If you already know where this is going, my fellow MOOREWATCHERS...keep it to yourself. I want to see real, honest, unaffected answers here with no back and forth nonsense or other people trying to influence or argue.
Just answer the questions simply and honestly.
1. Is Michael Moore’s persona, meaning his values, his personality, his politics, the way he presents himself, part and parcel of having grown up in Flint, Michigan?
2. Does being from Flint, which is so economically distressed and has been for decades, define a lot of who he is at his core?
3. Is it important, or perhaps even inspirational, to you that Moore has come up from the despair of Flint to become such a successful filmmaker?
The ass-kissing mouthy kid in class just spoiled it for the rest of us. Remember how annoying that kid was?
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Enjoy.
And yes, profanity is allowed. We’re adults, not fucking toddlers. Adults can swear, it’s one of the perks of getting older, having a mortgage and losing your hair. Not that I am losing my beautiful mane...but I do got that mortgage. :)
An intreipd blogger has assumed the arduous task of transcribing all of F911, since Mikey won’t produce a transcript himself.
If you read through this and find a lie, distortion, or other factual deficiency, if you send it to us we’ll post it on the site, fully accredited to you of course. Let the fisking begin!
A popular statement around MOOREWATCH from Mike’s fans is that there are no lies in F911. Tracking down all of Moore’s claims about financial dealings will take time. However, there is one easy-to-catch lie, and we all know about it already. Mike himself gave us the information needed to catch him in this lie.
In the film, Michael Moore confronts Congressional Representative Mark Kennedy and asks him to help get Congress to sign up their kids for the Army, Marine Corps, etc. Mark Kennedy looks at him funny, and there is a badly-placed jump edit right there. Moore then moves on to asking other members of Congress, who all appear to ignore him and walk away.
And then we get the voiceover:
“Of course, not a single member of Congress wanted to sacrifice their child for the war in Iraq.”
Look at that again. “Of course, not a single member of Congress wanted to sacrifice their child for the war in Iraq.”
Is that factually accurate? Let’s look at the exchange between Rep. Kennedy and Moore, which was provided by Moore himself:
CONGRESSMAN KENNEDY How are you doing?
MM: I’m trying to get members of congress to get their kids to enlist
in the army and go over to Iraq. Is there any way you could help me
with that?
CONGRESSMAN KENNEDY: How would I help you?
MM: Pass it out to other members of congress.
CONGRESSMAN KENNEDY: I’d be happy to. Especially those who voted for the war.
CONGRESSMAN KENNEDY: I have a nephew on his way to Afghanistan.
MM: Because there is only one member who has a kid over there in Iraq.
This is Corporal Henderson, he is helping me out here.
CONGRESSMAN KENNEDY: How are you, good to see you.
MM: There it is, it’s just a basic recruitment thing. Encourage
especially those who were in favor of the war to send their kids. I
appreciate it.
CONGRESSMAN KENNEDY: Okay, bye.
Well, well, well. Look at that. Let’s look closely at this exchange.
MM: Is there any way you could help me
with that?
CONGRESSMAN KENNEDY: How would I help you?
MM: Pass it out to other members of congress.
CONGRESSMAN KENNEDY: I’d be happy to. Especially those who voted for the war.
This exchange was edited out of the film entirely, and instead Kennedy’s meeting with Moore is lumped in with all the Congressmen that seemed to be ducking him. Now that could be considered a lie of omission. He made Kennedy look like all the the Congressmen who didn’t stop.
Except that Kennedy not only spoke to him, but he offered to help. He has family in the military, on who, in Kennedy’s own words, is deployed. Not just enlisted, but deployed. He did not say where, but deployed has a specific meaning that doesn’t equal “one weekend a month” in the National Guard.
Cue the voiceover: “Of course, not a single member of Congress wanted to sacrifice their child for the war in Iraq.”
No matter how you try to spin that, it’s a lie. Moore himself admits that there is in fact ONE member of congress with a child in Iraq.
Is it a major, life-altering, call-your-momma lie? No, but most of Moore’s blatant lies aren’t. Stack a hundred of these little lies up, and you got yourself a movie though, don’t you? A sensationalistic campaign attack ad that purports to be 100% truthful.
Well, however minor, I’ve proven here that there is indeed one rock-solid lie in F911. And Moore’s own words, and the release of the transcript with Kennedy, make the case in a way that no one can deny without looking like a fool. Moore lied. Plain and simple. Kennedy was willing to help recruit Congressional member’s children. He has a nephew that is deployed as we speak. Moore himself admits that there is one other Congressional child serving.
That’s out of a base of 550 people, not all of whom have children.
Mikey, I beg of you...get your “war room” fired up and try to dispute this. I’d love to see the good Congressman get up in your face on national television can have you call him a liar to his face. Bottom line, Mikester, if you say no one offered to help, you’re lying. If you admit Kennedy offered to help, which you have...you lied in the film.
I feel sorry for the people you fool with that “Of course, not a single member of Congress wanted to sacrifice their child for the war in Iraq.” crap. Two of them are, and Kennedy was willing to help you recruit. But that blew the screen value of your little piece. Instead of being an HONEST filmmaker and including it...you simply took off the part that didn’t fit what you wanted.
You owe everyone, but most of all Representative Kennedy, an apology.
The following was originally published at Bloomberg.
Will `Fahrenheit 9/11’ Burn the Democrats?
by Andrew Ferguson
June 29 (Bloomberg)—A political activist rang me up and told me I had to see the new documentary about the president.
``It’s chilling,’’ he said. ``It shows what a slimeball this guy is.’’
So I saw the movie, and it was—how to put this?—a crock. Watching it I thought: Whoever produced this slanderous mess deserves to be run out of polite society.
That was 10 years ago, and the documentary was a slapdash confection of lies and innuendo called ``The Clinton Chronicles.’’
It accused Bill Clinton—slyly and indirectly—of drug- running and worse. There was no evidence but lots of insinuation, a series of meaningless coincidences presented in breathless tones so the weak-minded might connect dots that weren’t there.
Now the U.S. is being treated to the same kind of exercise, on a much grander scale, with Michael Moore’s scabrous ``Fahrenheit 9/11.’’ And once again weak-minded ideologues are lapping it up like hungry pups.
There’s a big difference, though. Polite society, especially the mainstream press, recognized the producers of ``The Clinton Chronicles,’’ a California-based group called Citizens for Honest Government, as the fools they were. After hawking the film on his TV show, the televangelist Jerry Falwell never quite recovered what little reputation he had once enjoyed. Years later, he was still apologizing in TV appearances for associating himself with the movie.
Now, however, the paranoid strain has so thoroughly saturated U.S. politics that Moore’s cinematic slander can be feted and extolled—not only by mainstream movie reviewers but, more ominously, by the same Democratic Party establishment that Moore accuses of colluding with President George W. Bush.
At the Washington premiere of ``Fahrenheit 9/11’’ last week, Moore was conspicuously greeted for the cameras by Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
``There might be half the Democratic Senate here,’’ Senator Bob Graham of Florida told the New York Times.
Unlike the Democratic Party, Moore has always prided himself on his radicalism. So who’s changed—Moore or the Democratic Party?
Surprised by Surprise
I saw the movie at an early showing on Saturday afternoon in a packed theater in my heavily liberal Washington suburb. As the film unspooled, the audience laughed, fell silent, and tut-tutted to Moore’s heavy-handed cues with Pavlovian discipline.
I, on the other hand, was unmoved. (Maybe you’ve noticed.) But I was surprised by the movie—and surprised by my surprise.
Shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Moore posted this on his Web site: ``We, the United States of America, are culpable in committing so many acts of terror and bloodshed that we had better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have been active participants.’’
So I wasn’t surprised that Moore is, um, skeptical about U.S. motives for invading Iraq. To the extent he has an explicit thesis at all, it’s that the invasion was a scheme to divert attention from the Bush family’s involvement with the family of Osama bin Laden.
Shadings of Fact
And having followed Moore’s career, I wasn’t surprised by his shadings of fact. When he says that ``many studies’’ showed Al Gore won the vote in Florida, for example, he neglects to mention that many more, including recounts by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, say Gore did not.
And I wasn’t surprised that when he ridicules Bush for sitting passively in front of a classroom of schoolchildren directly after learning of the attacks, he omits the reaction of the school principal.
``I don’t think anyone could have handled it better’’ than Bush did, the principal, Gwendolyn Tose-Rigell, told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
And I wasn’t surprised that Moore accuses—if ``accuse’’ is a synonym for ``insinuate’’—Bush of approving the flight of the bin Laden family from the U.S. after Sept. 11. Why, the family’s passports weren’t even checked, Moore says, even though ``that’s what would happen to you or I.’’
I wasn’t surprised that they don’t teach grammar in film school.
Moore’s Method
What did surprise me, though, was the crudity of Moore’s method. Moore calls his movie an ``op-ed,’’ but it is written in Crayola, with a heavy grip.
He mostly avoids straightforward factual assertions—which makes the movie harder to confront and argue with—in favor of ellipsis and misdirection. The music is alternately creepy (that’s how you know he’s being serious) and chipper (that’s how you know he’s being sarcastic). His cultural allusions show the depth of the Baby Boomer satirist, ranging from TV reruns like ``Dragnet’’ to TV reruns like ``Bonanza.’’
The movie’s only powerful moments—of soldiers in Iraq, of the immediate aftermath of the Twin Towers’ collapse—come in footage Moore has acquired from other sources.
Party Embrace
Will anyone care that the movie, viewed as either art or journalism, is a mess? ``Fahrenheit 9/11’’ has a Palme d’Or from the Cannes film festival—and now the implicit endorsement of the Democratic Party establishment.
This embrace of Moore’s crackpottery is great news for Moore, very bad news for Democrats—just as the GOP’s kooky flirtations under Clinton did damage it has yet to recover from.
By the way, I eventually lost track of my political-activist friend, but I heard about him the other day. Apparently he’s urging people to boycott ``Fahrenheit 9/11.’’ It’s the work of an extremist, he says. And who would know better?
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