Regards, Ivan
Posted on 06/28/2004 4:14:09 PM PDT by MadIvan
Excited about Fahrenheit 9/11? It's the Palme d'Or-winning and soon-to-be Oscar-winning documentary from average blue-collar multi-millionaire Michael Moore, and it opens in Britain next week. I saw it over the weekend on my side of the Atlantic, with an audience comprised wholly of informed, intelligent sophisticates.
I knew they were informed, intelligent sophisticates because they howled with laughter at every joke about what a bozo Bush is. They split their sides during the patriotic ballad – eagles soaring, etc – composed and sung by John Ashcroft, the famously sinister US Attorney-General. Moore reveals – and if you feel that knowing the plot would spoil the movie, please skip to the next paragraph – that Bush is a privileged simpleton under the control of war-crazed Big Oil interests who arranged to have the 2000 election stolen for him. I hadn't heard that before, had you?
Once Moore gets past his recounting of the Florida recount, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I agreed with in the movie. For example, he's very hard on the Saudis, and the unique access to the Bush family enjoyed by their oleaginous ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar. He's also very mocking of the absurdities of post-9/11 airport security, alighting on a poor mom forced to drink a beaker of her own breast milk in front of passengers before boarding in order to demonstrate the liquid wasn't anything incendiary.
As we left, the couple ahead of me said they thought Bush would have a hard job responding to these shocking revelations. I didn't like to point out they could have heard about all this stuff years ago just by reading yours truly. I mentioned the breast-milk incident in this very space on August 10, 2002. I called for Prince Bandar to be booted back to Saudi in a Spectator column from November 2002, and I've been urging the dismantling of the kingdom – Washington's out-of-control Frankensaud monster – for almost three years now, since within a month of 9/11.
So in theory I ought to welcome Michael Moore as a comrade in arms. But the trouble with Fahrenheit 9/11 is that you don't come away thinking about the Saudis or America's useless bureaucracy, you come away laughing at Bush.
And, if feeling snobbishly superior to the President isn't your bag, what's left is an incoherent bore. Moore follows his GUT, by which I mean his Grand Universal Theory: Bush is to blame for everything. Because of Bush, the Saudis secretly run US policy. Because of Bush, the Taliban were in bed with Texas energy executives. Because of Bush, the Taliban got toppled.
Whoa, hold up a minute, I thought he was all pals with the Taliban. The Saudis certainly were, which is why they opposed the liberation of Afghanistan. But by now Moore's moved on to pointing out that Bush's Afghan stooge Hamid Karzai used to work for the Texas energy company panting for that big Afghan gas pipeline.
But hang on, I thought the Texan energy guys already had the Taliban in their pockets and were funded by the Saudis. "Connecting the dots" is all very well, but not when you've got more dots in your picture than Seurat.
Bush has always been the issue for Moore. On September 11 itself, his only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and DC instead of Texas or, indeed, my beloved New Hampshire: "They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC and the plane's destination of California – these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"
The fellows at the controls of those planes were training for 9/11 when Clinton was president and Gore was ahead in the polls, and they'd have still been in the cockpit had Ralph Nader been elected. Though Mohammed Atta took flying lessons in Florida, he apparently wasn't as exercised about its notorious hanging chads as Michael Moore. Mr Moore is guilty of what I believe psychologists call "projection".
The "Why didn't you terrorists kill the Bush voters?" line is not reprised in the movie, but the strange preoccupations it betrays drive the entire picture. Here's the way it works: if Bush is wearing the blue boxer shorts, they're a suspicious personal gift from Crown Prince Abdullah. If Bush is wearing the red boxer shorts, it's a conspiracy to distract public attention from the blue ones he was given by Crown Prince Abdullah. If he's wearing no boxer shorts, it's because he's so dumb he can't find his underwear in the morning.
So, shortly after 9/11, Moore wrote that footage of one of the World Trade Centre planes showed that it was being trailed by an F-16 – ie, the government could have shot it down but chose not to, so it could hit all those Al Gore voters. Imagine if, on September 11, the USAF had blown four passenger jets to kingdom come. Moore's film would be filled with poignant home movies of final Christmases and birthday parties and exploitative footage of anguished parents going to Washington to demand the truth about what happened that day and an end to the lame Bush spin about "threats" to public buildings.
Midway through the picture, a "peace" activist provides a perfect distillation of its argument. He recalls a conversation with an acquaintance, who observed, "bin Laden's a real asshole for killing all those people". "Yeah," says the "pacifist", "but he'll never be as big an asshole as Bush." That's who Michael Moore makes films for: those sophisticates who know that, no matter how many people bin Laden kills, in the assholian stakes he'll always come a distant second to Bush.
I can understand the point of being Michael Moore: there's a lot of money in it. What's harder to figure out is the point of being a devoted follower of Michael Moore. Apparently, the sophisticated, cynical intellectual class is so naïve it'll fall for any old hooey peddled by a preening opportunist burlesque act. If the Saudis were smart, they'd have bought him up years ago, established his anti-Saudi credentials, and then used him to promote the defeat of their nemesis Bush.
Hmm. Maybe they don't need to. Stick him in a headdress and he looks like King Fahd's brother. All I'm saying is connect the dots.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
Using the faux pas of idiots in the ariports to produce a hit piece on the president is despicable.
I just can't like Michael Moore. Don't ask me why.
Not many people I feel a twinge of envy for, but I wish i could write as well and as often as this guy.
Michael Moore ping!
Michael Moore, American Hatriot.
Your wonder how that much ego can be contained within his own skin.
Because he's a loathsome human pinata making a fortune fleecing the gullible by trashing the country that allows such a mediocrity to prosper?
Anyhow, that's why I despise him.
Well ... maybe not ... there's a whole lotta skin there ...! ;)
Uh, because he has acres of his own skin?
Thanks to MadIvan for an unexcerpted Mark Steyn!
I believe this to be true:
The Unocal plan was defunct long before 9/11, and Karzai never worked for them - the latter a myth started by Le Monde.
Now I know that the skin on human beings is highly elastic, and can stretch LOTS, but there is still a finite limit before it blows out like an overextended cheap balloon.
Moore has stated that American's are stupid. That is precisely to whom he's marketing this movie.
And if W were to walk on water, Moore would claim that he's too dumb to have learned how to swim.
Anyone interested in a little project?
One of my favorite words.
Has anyone seen a mainstream review that agrees with the movie and that everything is Bush's fault and that the US is run by an oil oligarchy bent on taking over the world?
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