Poor W (Michael Moore is so mean to the president)

Fairfield County weekly ^ | July 8, 2004 | Paul Bass

[presidio9]

That Michael Moore. He's amazing. With his blockbuster new movie Farenheit 9/11 , Moore did something I thought nobody could do. He made me feel sorry for George W. Bush.

You know, President George W. Bush. The cold-hearted faux cowboy who runs the country. The man who'll bomb cities, send thousands of American soldiers and Third World civilians to terrifying deaths, lie, endanger the lives of his own CIA agents, turn our nation's energy policy over to Enron, steal from the poor and hand the treasury to the super-wealthy, pick on gays, march record numbers of defendants to their deaths without giving them a fair trial, all just to settle scores or grab power and riches for himself and his friends.

Yeah. That guy.

Michael Moore doesn't like George W. Bush either. For the same reasons. Moore made his movie to try to convince millions of Americans to agree with us in time for the November presidential election.

I've delighted in Michael Moore's talent since the days he published the country's best alternative newspaper, the Michigan Voice , back in the early '80s. Moore's new movie is the ultimate alt-weekly hatchet job translated to the silver screen, a film that skewers a rich, powerful villain with humor and pathos, with embarrassing pictures and telling quotations and in-depth research woven into a passionate argument.

So like any good alt-weekly reporter, I rushed to see Fahrenheit 9/11 . I cracked up. I cheered. I followed the flood of data pinning Bush and his family to terrorists and nefarious oil companies. I felt smarter and more virtuous than the creep at the center of the story. I exulted that the film would ignite outrage in the souls of movie-goers across the country.

But something gnawed at me.

I watched scenes I'd read about in reviews, of Bush and his aides getting ready for the cameras before making grave declarations about the Iraq war. In one, Bush was supposedly making jokes and silly faces seconds before announcing the bombing. That supposedly revealed him to be an insincere goofball who pretends to take seriously the launching of massive violence but really couldn't care less. He may very well be that kind of guy. I'd put money on it. But on screen I saw someone who merely looked uncomfortable, under pressure, moments before making a big speech to a worldwide audience.

It felt like a cheap shot.

So did Moore's dwelling on the "42 percent" of working days Bush spent on "vacation" in the months before 9/11. This suggested, among other things, that a) Bush otherwise might have read briefing papers warning of the attack; and b) he'd been flailing and failing in his job, so he needed a crisis to rescue his presidency.

I knew that the Washington Post article on which Moore based his claim used the same number. But the 42 percent counted days that Bush spent away from the White House. You can work away from the White House. All presidents have done that. They broker international peace agreements at their retreats, for instance. (Well, some do. Not Bush.) Moore's own footage shows in passing that Bush met British Premier Tony Blair at his ranch. That's working.

Sure, Bush spends lots of time golfing. He has fun. So did lots of presidents. Is that a crime? He doesn't pull all-nighters like Bill Clinton. He has a more traditional CEO style: disciplined meetings, heavy reliance on trusted aides. We can despise his choice of aides. We can despise his decisions. We can detest what he and Tony Blair decide while they're working. We may prefer bosses who involve themselves in more details of decisions. But "vacations" didn't prevent Bush from reading briefing papers. Nor does his working style prove his presidency was in trouble. In fact, I don't think it was.

A having-it-both-ways feeling continued nudging its way into my delight during the film, like ants crawling around a box full of popcorn. Here was Moore attacking Bush for not pursuing Osama bin Laden intensely enough. Yeah! For not waging a more devastating offensive in Afghanistan. Score!

But wait. Michael Moore implying that the U.S. should have fought a bloodier war? He--and we--didn't sound like that in 2002. Why do we now? Just to tar Bush?

Is this the way to lead a charge to unseat a dishonest, insincere, scapegoating president? Is our hatred for a hateful president turning us into haters, too?

Such questions haunted me as I debated the film with my chums.

My friends pointed out that you can't equate Moore's techniques with the Bushies'. Plus, he's not attempting to ascend to power; he's a critic, not a wannabe politico. The Bushies have power. Bush supporters this year doctored an old photo of John Kerry to make it appear he was seated next to Jane Fonda at a Vietnam war protest. Then they e-mailed the photo to millions of voters. That's not just misleading. That's 1984 stuff. In the hands of rulers, such tactics are the route to fascism. The Bushies have attacked our constitutional freedoms in the name of protecting us.

Moore, meanwhile, didn't fabricate anything. His facts were on the money, as a review of the film's assertions by The New York Times ' Philip Shenon, who covered the 9/11 commission, bore out. He did use those facts to make some lazy and disingenuous arguments.

Still, that's different from lying or killing or brutalizing innocent populations. Outsiders' agitprop--filmmaking that goes over the line--is not the same as OK'ing the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

More important, Moore performs a service. The film resonates because it reports in an accessible way material that even the alternative press glosses over. Moore shows us chilling footage of brutal American soldiers revved by a song whose chorus yells, "Burn motherfucker!" He produces footage of Marine Corps recruiters lying to and misleading inner-city kids with little hope. Equally powerfully, he shows once-duped soldiers who refuse to continue killing for no good reason. He shows a patriotic, conservative mom who wrestles with the evil that led to her son's death in uniform in Iraq.

Those are powerful, legitimate tools in Moore's cinematic hands. They shock us out of the somnolence that enables us to ignore the massive evil perpetrated by our government in our name. We need that shock treatment. Moore's a master at it.

But the cheap shots? The disingenous, manipulative arguments? The resorting to personal hatred and humiliation?

That doesn't make Michael Moore the left-wing version of George W. Bush. (Lee Atwater, maybe.) I'm glad he made this blockbuster, in most ways terrific, movie. But I still worry about the slippery slope: In our urgency to depose the Bushies, do we risk becoming just a little too much like the villains onscreen?

[randog]

Does anyone get the feeling that this article could have been written by a German in 1946 trying to feel good about the holocaust?

[Milligan]

...attacked our constitutional freedoms in the name of protecting us. Where? How? F911 wasn't censored. Whoppie didn't land in jail for her vulgar rants. Anti-war Protestors can march. Where's the iron fist of the government? Where's the re-education camps? The ultra left are immature spoiled brats. They are still rebelling against their "parents"!

[Eagle of Liberty]

Got a response from this troll:

How did you jump to the conclusion that I said Saddam was a good guy? You have a list there of Moore's points... Did you read my article? Where I pointed out Moore's intellectual dishonesty and double standards? Yes, I liked the movie overall. Yes, I have different opinoins from yours. Maybe you're right. Maybe I am. But you totally mischaracterized my article and painted me in a mold you already had for all your ideological enemies--exactly what Moore did, and exactly what your letter accuses me of doing!