Posted on 07/25/2004 6:22:12 AM PDT by wjersey
I HAVE long thought Michael Moore a liar, and should not have been shocked when I saw his "documentary" Fahrenheit 9/11. Even so, I was horrified. This film – breaking box-office records in the United States – is so deceitful it makes the infamous Triumph of the Will documentary by Hitler's propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl, seem balanced.
But what shocked me even more than Moore's hymn of hatred of the US and its president was the reaction to it of the small audience at the preview I saw.
Many clapped when the dis-credits finally rolled. True, this wasn't the bellowing, stamping, weeping ovation that a poisonously anti-American crowd at the Cannes Film Festival gave Moore before a jury of Leftists and nihilists handed him the Palme d'Or.
Still, it was enough to worry anyone who prizes truth and civilisation, and I looked at the people around me, and wondered: are they so cretinous or so easily misled that they do not know that Moore lies?
Or are they, like many of the Left, so immoral or frivolous as to not care that he lies, as long as his lies are sweet?
Before I tackle just some of the dozens of deceptions, distortions, evasions and half-truths Moore peddles in his film, let's look at the Big Lie he builds with them.
If there's an argument in Fahrenheit 9/11, it is this: George W. Bush stole an election to become US President, and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to please the Saudis who bribed him, the oil companies who hired him and the armaments companies who squired him.
Bush isn't fighting a war on terror – look at how pally he is with the family of al-Qaida boss Osama bin Laden.
His war is really against Americans.
This is Moore's Big Lie, and few of his fans mind that it's as incoherent as it is mad. For a start, the Saudis bitterly opposed the war on Iraq, not least because they didn't want Iraq's oil to flow again.
So if Bush has been bought off by the Saudis, he's chosen a crazy way to please them. In fact, he undermined the Saudi regime by bringing freedom to Iraq and Afghanistan, and inspiring Saudis to ask why they can't have some, too.
Let's now look at the "facts" behind Moore's Big Lie. Fahrenheit 9/11 opens with scenes from the US presidential race in 2000.
We see Democrat candidate Al Gore boogying under a big "Florida Victory" sign, as TV anchors declare he's won the vote in Florida and, therefore, the election.
But, Moore says, Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel, which hires a Bush cousin, suddenly breaks in to announce there's been a mistake and Bush has won instead. Conspiracy!
But how could Bush steal the election in Florida?
Simple, says Moore. "Make sure the chairman of your campaign (Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris) is also the vote-count woman." And knock voters off the rolls "who aren't likely to vote for you – you can usually tell them by the colour of their skin".
Lastly, get your pals on the Supreme Court to ban another recount of votes, because, as an "expert" tells Moore in the film, "under every (recount) scenario Gore won the election".
Already we're up to our knees in Moore manure.
The shots of Gore partying were taken before the polls opened.
It was not Fox, but the left-wing CNN which was the first network to say Gore hadn't won, after all.
Harris was not in charge of counting votes. Convicted felons, not specifically blacks, were cut from the rolls under a Florida law that was nevertheless widely ignored.
And a six-month study of the Florida votes by mainly left-wing media organisations, including the New York Times and Washington Post, found Gore would still have lost even if disputed votes had been counted just the way he wanted.
From the start of this lying film there is barely one "fact" that can be trusted.
Then comes September 11. Moore shows none of the bodies – not even the hijacked planes hitting the World Trade Centre.
Such unusual restraint – especially from a propagandist who later gives us pornographic close-ups of Iraqi children blown up by American bombs or shot in cross-fire.
But where in the film does Moore show any real interest in the terrorists who have declared war on the West?
Where does this grotesquely irresponsible man even hint how he would deal with fanatics who have pledged to destroy our cities with any weapon they can find – nuclear, if possible?
Instead, Moore dodges these grim truths that real leaders must confront, and whisks us into yet another conspiracy – that Bush was bought off by Saudi money, and so didn't go hard after the real villains, the Saudis.
First, the "White House" is accused of letting 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the huge bin Laden family, fly out of the US just after September 11 without even being grilled.
What Moore doesn't say is that these Saudis were allowed to leave by the Bill Clinton-appointed counter-terrorism boss at the time, Richard Clarke, whom Moore uses elsewhere in the film to dish dirt on Bush.
Also not mentioned is that 30 of the Saudis were closely interviewed by the FBI before being allowed to leave.
But why spoil the Big Lie?
Moore then says an old friend of Bush, James Bath, managed money for members of the huge bin Laden family (which is estranged from Osama) and Bath "in turn invested in George W. Bush" and his oil company.
Again, not mentioned is that Bath insists his $50,000 investment was all his own money, not the bin Ladens'.
Moore also implies Bush was guilty of insider trading, selling more than $A1 million of shares in Harken Energy, of which he was a director, just two months before it posted a big loss. Moore typically fails to say that this loss was caused largely by factors not known when Bush sold, and the shares' value still doubled within a year.
He next claims the Saudis invested almost $A2 billion in the Bush family, their friends and associates through the Carlyle Group, a private investment firm that has Bush's father as an adviser of its Asian arm.
Is it rude to suggest that when the Bush family wakes up in the morning they might be thinking about what's best for the Saudis instead of what's best for you?" he leers.
In fact, about 90 percent of that Saudi money was invested in Carlyle before Bush Sr joined it.
Carlyle's boss, and many other advisers, aren't Bush Republican cronies, but former officials of Democratic presidents. What's more, George W. Bush has done few favours for Carlyle.
In fact, a Carlyle company was one of the few to have a big defence contract scrapped by Bush – the $A15 billion Crusader self-propelled gun project.
But I'll say it again: What do facts matter to the conspiracists of the Left?
Take Moore's claim that the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban dictatorship and its al-Qaida allies was "really" to help America's Unocal company get a gas pipeline built across that country.
Look, Moore says – Taliban envoys visited Texas when Bush was governor, the new Afghan president Hamid Karzai worked for Unocal, and a gas pipeline is now indeed being built.
Here we go again: Bush didn't meet the Taliban team, Karzai never worked for Unocal, Unocal scrapped its project three years before the war, and the pipeline Moore shows now being built is a different project with different partners in a different bit of Afghanistan.
So many deceits. So many wickedly doctored quotes. So many half-truths.
No, Bush didn't cut anti-terrorist funding to the FBI. No, his Attorney-General was never told terrorists were training as pilots in the US. No, Bush didn't fail to read a report warning of al-Qaida attacks.
No, the Saudis do not own anywhere near "7 percent of America".
No, that was not a dead Iraqi being mocked by US soldiers, but a drunk.
More deceits: no, the US soldiers who died in Iraq were not disproportionately blacks.
No, the coalition of the willing which freed Iraq didn't just include tiny countries with no army, but Britain, Australia and Italy, none of which Moore mentions.
And on and on.
But perhaps Moore's foulest distortion is to portray Saddam's Iraq as a happy, harmless country.
Iraq before the war is all laughing children. Boys fly kites and ride bikes, giggling girls cuddle smiling mothers. Nice men sip tea.
Moore shows not a single sign of Saddam's mass graves, his gassed Kurds, his torture centres, his official rape rooms, his critics with their tongues cut out – nothing to suggest, as Amnesty International said in 2002, that Iraq was a place of "all-pervasive repression . . . and widespread terror".
Instead, Moore suggests, that terror came only with the US bombs and bullets – in an onslaught so savage that every US soldier he shows seems shocked or warped by the devastation.
From his film, you'd think not one soldier backs this war, never mind one Iraqi.
But how carefully Moore must step to avoid knocking over his cardboard fiction.
We're shown, for instance, US National Guardsman Peter Damon, who's had his hands blown off, but we're not told he's furious to find he appears in this foul film.
Likewise, Moore shows us the burial of US Air Force Major Gregory Stone, without adding that Stone's grieving relatives say he remained a "totally conservative Republican", and by exploiting his death Moore is a "maggot that eats off the dead".
Moore ends his film by quoting George Orwell: "The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects . . . to keep the very structure of society intact."
Bush's America is the true terrorist, Moore argues, at war with its own people. But to believe that, you must believe every foul smear, every childish deception, in his deeply deceitful movie.
Sadly, though, many smart people do want to believe it. Facts mean nothing – they just want to hate the country that has fought hardest against tyrants and terrorists, from communists to Islamists. They will not even wonder what it means that the Hizbollah terrorist group has offered to help distribute this film they so love.
So heaven help America. Heaven help its allies, too, and all who defend freedom.
• Fahrenheit 9/11 will open in Australia on Thursday
The 9/11 report nuked any of Moore's arguments.
As far as the crowd you were with... most hate Bush no matter what. The blind leading the blind!
Heaven help us all.
If Gore won the election, like many dems claim, and should have been President, then why isn't he the shoo in nominee? This election should have been a cake walk for him. Where is he now?
Perhaps it was Gore who tried to steal the election... hhhmmmmmmmm....
This is one of the best summaries of Moore's libel that I've seen. Too bad it was not in a US paper.
BOLOGNA!
That one gets my vote.
Wow ... I don't have to go see this piece of trash now ... this review gave me an excellent run-down of the excrement it contains.
Each new generation of voters is a new page ready to be imprinted with the arguments of those who know history.
Moore is following a prescription to deceive the young before they can think for themselves.
Those that know the truth do not have the apparatus of Hollywood that Moore is given. Whose fault is that?
If Moore is successful in turning in 3-4% of votes to the left, he and his backers may take the credit for swinging the election. Yet there is nothing to significantly counter Moore in the media. Whose fault is that?
"Too bad it was not in a US paper."
Thank heavens for the internet, a few years ago most of us would never have seen this.
In fact, I'm going to print it out and give it to my daughter, she needs help in straigtening out some of her miss guided friends.
Summed up very well. Thanks for posting.
Bingo!
I think most of the people who are seeing this film were already koolaid drinkers.
Heaven help us if slanderers like Moore are successful in deluding enough people to defeat Bush in November.
My brother fits this category
He is a true believer
This article will be included in my letter of facts to him
The tragically hilarious thing about Moore's crockumentary is that every one of his main anti-Bush "arguments" has been refuted. Supposedly Moore bragged that his evidence was irrefutable and was echoed by his lackeys in the press and Big Media. Upon further examination it is found all his allegations were absurd. Only total fools would believe his garbage...or liberals.
What it does it legitimatize what the crapweasels dems have been doing for years and finally creates a label we can all use.
To the dems, there has always been truth, lies and that spin area where they rationalize something in one of the first two categories and claim that, therefore, it is part of the other. Now, they call that area of truth/lie ambiguity "documentary."
And, we should all be OK with that. When I tell you that a trusted member of Clinton's personal staff (to be named later) met with a Colonel from the Iraqi Intelligence Service and one of Osama's key advisors (and sx of his Saudi bodyguards) in a restaurant in Damascus on a Thursday afternoon, in August, 1997 and accepted a small brief case full of used US $100 bills (total= $1.5 million) as payment for missing Osama twice in the past and once more in the future, you do not need to know the source, only that it is part of a documentary.
I feel for you, my brother is a koolaid drinker also...
makes life hard, and the worst part is, that fat fu*k Moore can destroy relationships, while sitting in his lazyboy, eating cheesburgers, and drinking tall glasses of koolaid, and thinks nothing of it...
I am convinced that this Jabba the Hutt brouhaha only underscores the dire need for two major reforms in American politics.
1. The stupid and ignorant will be tolerated, but any major damage to another will mean jail time.
2. Anyone with an IQ of under 50 will not be allowed to vote under any circumstances
Get real.
There are hundreds (thousands?) of porno films produced annually that I will not go see.
I do not need the approval of morons who have manufactured a need to see this one. I always walk around dog poop on the sidewalk. If this outrages them, too freepin' bad.
That is not surprising. What is surprising is the magnitude of self-deception; ignorance; incoherence; cognitive dissonance.
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