http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/Fiftysix-Deceits-in-Fahrenheit-911.htm Pretty lengthy, as it was a document, and in response, Moore started his war room blog in response to this document, which these people respond back to. But basically, it's virtually every single sentence in the film. http://www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins200406290935.asp If you haven't seen the movie, here's pretty much what's in it: Exploit the ignorant: Talk to people who are inexperienced with media, and encourage them to say things that they probably should not. It is especially effective when giving a straight interview to people whose views are preposterous. The Daily Show does this regularly, and it is very funny, but hardly profound. Moore shows, among others, a woman in Saginaw, Michigan, who explains why her town could be a target for terrorism, and a clip of a hapless entrepreneur hawking an "escape chute" for emergency evacuation from tall buildings. These people were used to illustrate the irrational fears the oligarchs had conjured in order to prepare the hoipolloi for the case to invade Iraq. Congressman Jim McDermott called the fear campaign a "skillful and ugly" manipulation of the American public, underscoring the sense of paranoia that pervades the film. Stage ambushes: Track down famous people and pose difficult questions while filming them, hopefully catching them in an embarrassing moment. Moore presents congressmen with the idea that their children should be sent to fight in Iraq, his reasoning being that if the lives of the progeny of the oligarchy were placed in danger we would only fight wars that were really necessary. Unfortunately for Moore, he is too well known and instantly recognizable for the ambush to work very well, and most of the shots show his intended victims avoiding him. Perhaps he should work through proxies. Capitalize on the nonsequitur: The most noted example of this technique, and one being used to promote the film, features President Bush on a golf outing. He states to reporters, "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive." This scene got big laughs. Moore makes it appear as though the president convened the reporters in order to make a major policy statement, and then get back to his golf game. However, this was a routine press availability in which the president gave a standard answer to a stock question. Had he shown the entire Q&A it would hardly have been as interesting, but it would definitely have been more truthful. Moore also delights in running out-takes, pre-interview preparation shots, and other images that editors do not usually find newsworthy. People sometimes do strange or potentially embarrassing things before the cameras come on. For example it is not particularly edifying to see Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz coping with a bad hair experience, but apparently Moore found it significant. Juxtapose: Juxtaposition is a very important aspect of Moore's technique, but he is not very subtle. For example, he shows a clip from al Jazeera of an Iraqi woman wailing about her house being destroyed by American bombs, then cuts to a soldier talking about how they are there to make life better for the Iraqi people. The low point in the film is a series of street scenes of happy Iraqi children interspersed with shots of the attack being readied. The implicit — perhaps explicit — message is that life under Saddam was just fine. (Moore doesn't much discuss Saddam, or why Bush was out to get him, except to imply it was because Saddam had tried to kill Bush 41.) We shortly see images of Iraqi children killed or horribly wounded, an echo of the "baby-killer" rhetoric of the Vietnam era. Mess with the soundtrack: This is another form of juxtaposition, and the least clever aspect of Moore's act, the kind of technique anybody could employ. Just take a serious situation and put frivolous music behind it, or illustrate a popular song with images of your victim that place him in a bad light. Moore sometimes showed a little imagination, such as showing tape of President Bush landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln while playing the theme from The Greatest American Hero ("Believe It or Not"). However, frequently his selections were of the "cheesy sounding circus music in the background" variety, what one might call French humor, which is probably what caught the attention of the folks at Cannes. Milk the pathos: Moore appeals to emotion throughout the film, for example showing wounded servicemen, most of whom bore their situations stoically. A 9/11 victim's family member discussed at length how her life had been devastated, though she seemed to be one of the professional victims attending the 9/11 Commission hearings. Moore could have engaged in some clever juxtapositioning here by flashing up the average payment from the victim funds ($2.1 million), especially compared to the minuscule benefits paid to families of troops killed in the war. The most poignant story was Lila Lipscomb's, whose son Sgt. Michael F. Pedersen was killed April 2, 2003, in a Blackhawk helicopter crash. Moore presents Lipscomb as a proud service mother, a self-described conservative Democrat who ran the flag up every day and despised the antiwar crowd. After her son is killed, Moore documents her descent into despair. She is currently getting involved in the peace movement she used to oppose. There was one scene where I felt Moore had reached high art. He portrayed the 9/11 attacks using sounds and a blank screen. He passed up using the most compelling visuals of recent decades, appealing instead to the viewer's imagination and memory, with an auditory prompt. It was disorienting and frightening, and in my opinion the best moment of the movie qua movie. Nevertheless, it was soon over, and then it was back to the shtick. Moore is the perfect person to engage in this kind of manufactured public embarrassment, largely because you cannot imagine him being embarrassed about anything. Not because he doesn't have reason to be, but because he is completely unselfconscious. Faulty reasoning, slim evidence, outright foolish statements, nothing slows him down. The film has a number of factual errors, and the 9/11 Commission, which he portrays sympathetically, has since undercut some of the pillars of his major arguments. Moore passed up a great opportunity for irony with respect to one Commission finding: The movie dwells at length on the issue of the Saudi flights out of the U.S. after the attacks, and Moore shows a clip of Senator Byron Dorgan asking who was responsible. Later when showing Richard Clarke making his argument that the president had ordered him to find Iraq responsible for 9/11, Moore could have scrolled text across the bottom of the screen saying, "Hey Senator! This is the guy!" But that might have disrupted the conspiratorial story line with unnecessary salient facts. The Democratic leadership embraced Moore at the premier at the Uptown Theater in Washington, and the heavily liberal audience applauded the film vigorously. It was a great moment of candor. Moore has the guts to say the things they think but will not utter. If the film encourages them to speak up, all the better. I cannot see Middle America finding much intellectual appeal in the film's underlying feeling of ill will and dread. It is at base very hateful. Conservatives should not protest this film; that only gives it more notoriety and makes its multimillionaire "everyman" director even wealthier. I would sooner acknowledge Moore as the intellectual leader of the Left, and this film his (and their) emblematic masterwork. This is the best they have to offer.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/ One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight. Nonetheless, it seems that an answer to this long-felt need is finally beginning to emerge. I exempt Al Franken's unintentionally funny Air America network, to which I gave a couple of interviews in its early days. There, one could hear the reassuring noise of collapsing scenery and tripped-over wires and be reminded once again that correct politics and smooth media presentation are not even distant cousins. With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note has been struck. Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl. To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery. Continue Article In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified. Something—I cannot guess what, since we knew as much then as we do now—has since apparently persuaded Moore that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama is suddenly so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a dangerous "distraction" from the fight against him. I believe that I understand the convenience of this late conversion. Still from Fahrenheit 9/11 Recruiters in Michigan Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about Afghanistan, and makes them in this order: 1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group. 2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment in the United States. 3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests. 4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape. 5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely risible in that its non-army was purely American. 6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar" film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.) It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point. Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all—the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002—or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending. And these are simply observations on what is "in" the film. If we turn to the facts that are deliberately left out, we discover that there is an emerging Afghan army, that the country is now a joint NATO responsibility and thus under the protection of the broadest military alliance in history, that it has a new constitution and is preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election, and that at least a million and a half of its former refugees have opted to return. I don't think a pipeline is being constructed yet, not that Afghanistan couldn't do with a pipeline. But a highway from Kabul to Kandahar—an insurance against warlordism and a condition of nation-building—is nearing completion with infinite labor and risk. We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular left—like the parties of the Iraqi secular left—are strongly in favor of the regime change. But this is not the sort of irony in which Moore chooses to deal. He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction. In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. In the interval between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke, Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that—as you might expect—Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration. So, that's another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic "key to all mythologies." A film that bases itself on a big lie and a big misrepresentation can only sustain itself by a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods, beefed up by wilder and (if possible) yet more-contradictory claims. President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is that about, by the way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars?) But the shot of him "relaxing at Camp David" shows him side by side with Tony Blair. I say "shows," even though this photograph is on-screen so briefly that if you sneeze or blink, you won't recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or at least with this prime minister, is not a goof-off. The president is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, on a golf course, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the president on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm. More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse. The other half would be saying what they already say—that he knew the attack was coming, was using it to cement himself in power, and couldn't wait to get on with his coup. This is the line taken by Gore Vidal and by a scandalous recent book that also revives the charge of FDR's collusion over Pearl Harbor. At least Moore's film should put the shameful purveyors of that last theory back in their paranoid box. But it won't because it encourages their half-baked fantasies in so many other ways. We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation." (In fact, Iraq's "sovereignty" was heavily qualified by international sanctions, however questionable, which reflected its noncompliance with important U.N. resolutions.) In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003. I remember asking Moore at Telluride if he was or was not a pacifist. He would not give a straight answer then, and he doesn't now, either. I'll just say that the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once. (Actually, that's not quite right. It is briefly mentioned but only, and smarmily, because of the bad period when Washington preferred Saddam to the likewise unmentioned Ayatollah Khomeini.) That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible. Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way: He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist "security" headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as "threatening," even if one was narrow enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.) Thus, in spite of the film's loaded bias against the work of the mind, you can grasp even while watching it that Michael Moore has just said, in so many words, the one thing that no reflective or informed person can possibly believe: that Saddam Hussein was no problem. No problem at all. Now look again at the facts I have cited above. If these things had been allowed to happen under any other administration, you can be sure that Moore and others would now glibly be accusing the president of ignoring, or of having ignored, some fairly unmistakable "warnings." The same "let's have it both ways" opportunism infects his treatment of another very serious subject, namely domestic counterterrorist policy. From being accused of overlooking too many warnings—not exactly an original point—the administration is now lavishly taunted for issuing too many. (Would there not have been "fear" if the harbingers of 9/11 had been taken seriously?) We are shown some American civilians who have had absurd encounters with idiotic "security" staff. (Have you ever met anyone who can't tell such a story?) Then we are immediately shown underfunded police departments that don't have the means or the manpower to do any stop-and-search: a power suddenly demanded by Moore on their behalf that we know by definition would at least lead to some ridiculous interrogations. Finally, Moore complains that there isn't enough intrusion and confiscation at airports and says that it is appalling that every air traveler is not forcibly relieved of all matches and lighters. (Cue mood music for sinister influence of Big Tobacco.) So—he wants even more pocket-rummaging by airport officials? Uh, no, not exactly. But by this stage, who's counting? Moore is having it three ways and asserting everything and nothing. Again—simply not serious. Circling back to where we began, why did Moore's evil Saudis not join "the Coalition of the Willing"? Why instead did they force the United States to switch its regional military headquarters to Qatar? If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other's pockets, as is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian scene with Arab headdresses replacing top hats, then how come the most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in Baghdad? The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq's recuperated oil industry might challenge their near-monopoly. They fear the liberation of the Shiite Muslims they so despise. To make these elementary points is to collapse the whole pathetic edifice of the film's "theory." Perhaps Moore prefers the pro-Saudi Kissinger/Scowcroft plan for the Middle East, where stability trumps every other consideration and where one dare not upset the local house of cards, or killing-field of Kurds? This would be a strange position for a purported radical. Then again, perhaps he does not take this conservative line because his real pitch is not to any audience member with a serious interest in foreign policy. It is to the provincial isolationist. I have already said that Moore's film has the staunch courage to mock Bush for his verbal infelicity. Yet it's much, much braver than that. From Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding and hidden disclosures, such as the capitalist nature of American society, the existence of Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," and the use of "spin" in the presentation of our politicians. It's high time someone had the nerve to point this out. There's more. Poor people often volunteer to join the army, and some of them are duskier than others. Betcha didn't know that. Back in Flint, Mich., Moore feels on safe ground. There are no martyred rabbits this time. Instead, it's the poor and black who shoulder the packs and rifles and march away. I won't dwell on the fact that black Americans have fought for almost a century and a half, from insisting on their right to join the U.S. Army and fight in the Civil War to the right to have a desegregated Army that set the pace for post-1945 civil rights. I'll merely ask this: In the film, Moore says loudly and repeatedly that not enough troops were sent to garrison Afghanistan and Iraq. (This is now a favorite cleverness of those who were, in the first place, against sending any soldiers at all.) Well, where does he think those needful heroes and heroines would have come from? Does he favor a draft—the most statist and oppressive solution? Does he think that only hapless and gullible proles sign up for the Marines? Does he think—as he seems to suggest—that parents can "send" their children, as he stupidly asks elected members of Congress to do? Would he have abandoned Gettysburg because the Union allowed civilians to pay proxies to serve in their place? Would he have supported the antidraft (and very antiblack) riots against Lincoln in New York? After a point, one realizes that it's a waste of time asking him questions of this sort. It would be too much like taking him seriously. He'll just try anything once and see if it floats or flies or gets a cheer. Still from Fahrenheit 9/11 Trying to talk congressmen into sending their sons to war Indeed, Moore's affected and ostentatious concern for black America is one of the most suspect ingredients of his pitch package. In a recent interview, he yelled that if the hijacked civilians of 9/11 had been black, they would have fought back, unlike the stupid and presumably cowardly white men and women (and children). Never mind for now how many black passengers were on those planes—we happen to know what Moore does not care to mention: that Todd Beamer and a few of his co-passengers, shouting "Let's roll," rammed the hijackers with a trolley, fought them tooth and nail, and helped bring down a United Airlines plane, in Pennsylvania, that was speeding toward either the White House or the Capitol. There are no words for real, impromptu bravery like that, which helped save our republic from worse than actually befell. The Pennsylvania drama also reminds one of the self-evident fact that this war is not fought only "overseas" or in uniform, but is being brought to our cities. Yet Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is everything. Moore has announced that he won't even appear on TV shows where he might face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times of June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself against attack. He'll sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or his pet. Some right-wing hack groups, I gather, are planning to bring pressure on their local movie theaters to drop the film. How dumb or thuggish do you have to be in order to counter one form of stupidity and cowardice with another? By all means go and see this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the conversation. However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that "fact-checking" is beside the point. And as for the scary lawyers—get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let's redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let's see what you're made of. Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It's only a movie. No biggie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver Stone. It's kick-ass entertainment. It might even help get out "the youth vote." Yeah, well, I have myself written and presented about a dozen low-budget made-for-TV documentaries, on subjects as various as Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie theaters. So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (…), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised. At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage. Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following: The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States … And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history. If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0361596/trivia When it comes to the definitions of "maligns the film" or "damages his reputation", Moore's definition would no doubt be different from the norm.
Now that's a bit more like it. Sorry about that third red nipple, 4-2-4, but you've contributed constructively to the debate. The Koepel blog was interesting, especially as he seems to have point-for-counterpoint arguements against each of Moore's points. Unfortunately for our purposes, all that does is turn the discussion into a he said-she said. At least it does so far in my reading. If there's something there that disproves one of Moore's points, vice simply refuting (iow: "x cannot be possible because of y", rather than "source a may suggest x is true, but source b over here says y"), that'd be even better. There may be, and I just haven't gotten there yet. If someone has the time/inclination to find it, do let us know. The National Review review summarized nicely what I was going on about earlier about Moore's style. And yes, from a Right-wing perspective, I can see how they'd like to have Moore as the standard-bearer of the Left. The only thing he's done positively (from a Left perspective) is to force the Right to come up with answers, rather than letting them (yet again) frame the debate. Other than that, though, he's simply useless. I'll take boring and accurate over shrill and attention-seeking any day, thank you very much.
This is what the left can't deal with. Their only hope in their minds of getting a president elected was to go off the deep end about Iraq. Stir up the anti-war rhetoric from the Vietnam days, attempt to divide the country. Valiant effort guys, next time follow Clinton's advice, and hell I may even vote for a Democrat.
DoyleG, you sound like you are defending Moore in this post. You've been spending way too much time with liberals, mate...
Perhaps my syntax isn't clear. In other words, he's only done one thing right: frame a set of arguments such that the Right is on the defensive rather than the offensive. He has not, however, won any of these arguments, nor has he contributed to the Left at large winning any of these arguments. His sound, fury and bluster hinder, rather than help, in my humble opinion. Saying the one thing Moore's done right is frame several debate points is rather like saying the one thing the Mexican MNT did right in its WC 2002 match against the United States was maintain ball control. Dig it: Me = way the hell out there leftist = not a big Michael Moore fan. Capiche?
He's also introduced the possibility of a different reality (this is, in essence, your "frame the debate" argument) to those getting their information solely from the nightly news. Thousands of people saw things, and saw them in a way, that they would have never seen them from mainstream media, and maybe that will plant some seeds of active, critical viewership that might serve us well down the line, if we make it past the weapons-possessed petulance and infanity of the neocon Age.
Good point. If Moore gets one more kid to take a critical eye to US foreign and domestic policy, he's done an actual service. However, my fear is that for every kid he may have put on the front lines at demonstrations, he's also put another mile between the target of those demonstrations and the "free-speech" zones they're given.
Say, rather, that he has introduced a different reality. Some may like what he has to say, but it is not real. Well, to each their own. The lonely have porn, the geeks have Star Wars, and the fringe left has Michael Moore. I should add that, unfortunately, outside the USA his work is not just harmless entertainment. The crowd which hates America with a passion loves Michael Moore. I have seen it in Argentina, I have seen it in South Korea, and I am sure it is true in other places as well. Michael Moore's work is gospel to some of these people. It seems to help them rationalize their hatred for the USA, and even inflame it.
You Democrats just don't learn, do you?? If I didn't know any better I'd say Moore is on the GOP payroll.
As demonstrated by 9/11, much of the world has been angry at the predominance of America pop culture for quite some time. So pardon me for questioning the sincerity of your professed concern over this cause/effect prompted by this one particular film whose political content, coincidentally enough, differs from your own. ASF, you exhibit a certain grace in dealing with many matters that other conservative types simply lack. At the same time, you’ve got this Eichmann in Jerusalem thing going on and it kinda freaks me out. Just curious, how did you family arrive in Argentina? Nevermind. Your anxiety of the “hate America” crowd abroad is well noted and it is indeed a legitimate concern. But why do you get more worked up over foreign reaction to a movie depicting events leading up to a war than the demonstrably false reasons the administration had presented for actually inflicting that war? As citizens, its only logical to place within our immediate concern those matters are within our immediate control. For instance, demanding accountability from our own elected officials. One’s lawful exercise of his 1st amendment right is not properly within our immediate control and, therefore, effectively useless when discussing national policy. F 9-11’s main premise was that a web of deceit induced the present war and human beings are suffering mightily as a consequence. Your anxiety over Moore’s portrayal of Bush’s war footing would be more believable if you had EVER exhibited a scant trace of concern over the discredited reasons that caused our involvement. The best we get is, “we recklessly relied on bad intelligence. Woops. And any investigation beyond this analysis necessarily invites a grave threat to our very safety.” Bull****. How is the main thrust of this film “not real”? Has Iraq been found rife with WMD? Is there video of Saddam giving shiatsu to Osama? This is far greater than Michael Moore. What about the expressions of anger from the mothers of the fallen in the film? Must their voices be squelched because they threaten our domestic security? Does their grief somehow negate their right to express their opinions? More to the point, who are you to draw the line? Those who “hate America” will hate us whether or not some fat slob with a camera releases a damn movie. The intimation that this guy somehow threatens our security is insulting; 100,000 civilian deaths at the hands of a foreign nation sufficiently engender global scorn irrespective of that nation’s motives, much less its cinema. The stated reasons for this war are “not real”. But blind denial of this fact is very real. And both of these facts are equally sad
I guess this is the appropriate thread... Someone has got more news on this subject ? (conspiracy stuff) 2 say they found 9/11 'black boxes'
1. F9/11 is not a consistent film, but its good parts are fantastic. 2. Moore is our Rush (altho because he operates much more in the mainstream, and is subject to much more media scrutiny due to the medium he works in*, he's alot more accurate.) He should be judged on that level, not in comparison to conservative-biased journos like Brit Hume or Wolf Blitzer or Lou Dobbs. *On the one hand, the media do give right wing nutters a pass. OTOH, it's asking alot of the media to listen to Rush for 3 hours a day, every weekday, to call him on his most egregious lies. Moore produces 1 two hour film a year.
I think Rush is largely seen by the mainstream media as a joke, something to be taken unseriously. Just some kind of howl at the moon demonized conservative. Where as Moore is still potrayed as some kind of visionary. I don't have a problem with nobody taking Limbaugh seriously. Somehow though when somebody like Rush makes outlandish claims that happen to be conservative he is completely demonized, deemed hatefull and ignorant. Somebody like Moore makes outlandish claims that happen to be progressive and he's, 'Really pushing the envelope, changing the tone of the debate, etc etc.'
It is a personal and sincere concern on my part, and I can tell you that some of my US-hating relatives in Argentina have been duped by the likes of Moore. I have been told by my cousin (a very nice guy and decent profesional soccer player) that in America we are a bunch of criminals who went to Afghanistan only because we wanted to build an oil pipeline so that we, along with our Saudi friends, can increase our riches and power. He asserts that Bin Laden was nothing but an excuse. You should see his anger when he talks about it and how, and he is not the only one who feels that strongly. Gee, I wonder where they get those ideas. Do you? As far as I know, my Dad's maternal grandparents came from Andalucia, Spain, looking for work and 'the Argentine dream'. His other side, they came to Argentina from Paraguay and not much is known about them. On my mother's side, it is claimed that they were from a British noble family, (people would recognize the name if I say it) and that their grandfather fled to Argentina because he fell in love with and married a commoner, and the family dissowned him. The other maternal grandparents, one was from Southern France and the other one from Northern Spain. (They must have met somewhere across the border.) I have gone through it in detail elsewhere, but let me say that I always argued that my personal reasons for supporting the effort to remove Saddam Hussein and for considering it a positive development are different from the reasons (given or implied) by the Bush administration. Let me ask you, who oppose the war: Are your reasons for opposing the war the same reasons that Jacques Chirac has for opposing it? Probably not, yet you still support his position, right? Just because you dissagree with the government or (as some of you) you distrust the media, doesn't mean that you should endorse somebody who produces a documentary which makes accusations which have no basis on reality. The whole premise of the film is BS, or at best, it is not supported by the evidence in the film. Shaking hands with sheiks is not evidence, and conjuring up a dream is not evidence. Showing some Taliban guy in Washington is not evidence and neither is having a fat woman tell the camera that we have 50 percent unemployment. And picking on politicians by showing them at their most unfavorable (like licking their hair or closing their eyes) is nothing but a spiteful childish trick. Moore has some material with which he could have used to say something significant about the cost of war and also about the line between freedom and security, but he missed his target widely in his attempt to plant hatred. I think you are overestimating the deaths, although every death is a tragedy, regardless of how we feel about the mission itself. But you certainly are underestimating the power of a film among people who are looking for validation of their feelings. It helps fuel the fire, at the very least. If you believe that to be true then by all means make that argument, but basing your argument on lies and exagerations and camera tricks, as Moore does, is not the way to do it.