Soldier Says Moore Film Hurting Military Morale

(Talon News) -- An American soldier says that Michael Moore's agitprop film "Fahrenheit 9/11" is making the rounds among soldiers at U.S. military bases overseas and is "shocking and crushing soldiers" and making them feel "ashamed" of their service in Iraq. Army Spc. Joe Roche, serving with the 1st Armored Division wrote in a recent e-mail that the impact on morale is "devastating."

Roche says that the film affects soldiers in different ways, but often with the same results. He describes how young and impressionable soldiers recruited out of high school are unfamiliar with the college-type political debate environment and the full range of issues involved. He says they are particularly vulnerable to being hurt by a "vicious" film like Moore's.

The Army specialist points out that others who joined for reasons of money and other benefits have little knowledge of the countries and never gave full thought to the issues. He says that seeing this film has jolted them grievously because they never even knew where some of these countries were located.

Still others are suffering from being away from family and loved ones. Roche noted that these soldiers are burned out from 15 months of duty and susceptible to emotional manipulation.

But Roche says he is one of the soldiers who "want to explode in anger and rage at this abuse of the First Amendment and the way Moore has twisted reality so harshly."

Roche writes about Specialist Janecek who was feeling depressed because a close family member is nearing the end of her life, and saw the film.

Roche says that many of the comments are of absolute shock at the close connections Moore makes between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family in Saudi Arabia. A common reaction to Moore's allegations is of confusion and doubt about the commander-in-chief's credibility. He adds that anger and shame are ruining what should be a proud and happy return from 15 months of duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom -- all due to the lies and deceptions of the filmmaker.

Roche writes about Lt. Bischoff, who is angry about Moore's lies and distortions but believes "the damage is done." He says that this is the type of thing expected from angry leftists like Moore, but he wasn't prepared for the full impact this film is now having and how it has been embraced and supported by so many Hollywood elites.

Specialist Roche wonders how damaging and shocking a Moore project would have been in the 1940s making such a video of Franklin Roosevelt. He says that all the corruption and decadence in that administration would have fed such a project well. He also thinks about how damaging and shocking would such a Moore project have been to Lincoln, who wavered and shifted often in finding the right mediums and balances in pursuing the great causes of the Civil War.

Roche is clearly anguished that Moore is "hurting us, hurting America, and today I can tell you he is hurting your soldiers."

Democrats continue to embrace Moore and his film, allowing the filmmaker to have unrestricted access to the floor of their convention in Boston. The broadcast media can't seem to get enough of Moore's unshaven face, appearing frequently on nearly every network.

Leftist groups like MoveOn.org are promoting the anti-Bush film. The National Education Association showed it to its membership at a recent convention. The Washington, DC premiere of "Fahrenheit 9/11" attracted a crowd of 800 high-ranking Democrats and media figures.

One of the film's central assertions is that President Bush allowed a planeload of bin Laden relatives, unscreened by the FBI, to leave the United States while the airspace was still closed after September 11, 2001. Former counterterrorism chief and Bush critic Richard Clarke refuted all of those claims, saying that he alone authorized the flight that took place when the airspace had reopened and only after the FBI cleared all of the passengers.

I do feel for these men - they obviously feel stabbed in the back and rightly so. And Michael Moore profits.

They are made to wonder if people at home appreciate what they do and the risks they take. And Michael Moore gains.

They are discomfited by the thought that they will serve with honour, distinction and valour, to come home to an empty echo, with Michael Moore sitting on a pile of cash he has made from denouncing their efforts.

Michael Moore is a nasty piece of work - fortunately he already has the worst fate - to be who he is. Eventually, and it may ever be so slow, he will be exposed for what he is. Truth will out. Truth will triumph. Our left wing propagandist friends would do well to remember it.

Regards, Ivan

http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005402

When Punchline Trumps Honesty
There's more McCarthy than Murrow in the work of Michael Moore.
BY SCOTT SIMON
Tuesday, July 27, 2004 12:01 a.m.
Michael Moore has won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and may win an Oscar for the kind of work that got Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Jack Kelly fired.

Trying to track the unproven innuendoes and conspiracies in a Michael Moore film or book is as futile as trying to count the flatulence jokes in one by Adam Sandler. Some journalists and critics have acted as if his wrenching of facts is no more serious than a movie continuity problem, like showing a 1963 Chevy in 1956 Santa Monica.

A documentary film doesn't have to be fair and balanced, to coin a phrase. But it ought to make an attempt to be accurate. It can certainly be pointed and opinionated. But it should not knowingly misrepresent the truth. Much of Michael Moore's films and books, however entertaining to his fans and enraging to his critics, seems to regard facts as mere nuisances to the story he wants to tell.

Back in 1991 that sharpest of film critics, the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, blunted some of the raves for Mr. Moore's "Roger and Me" by pointing out how the film misrepresented many facts about plant closings in Flint, Mich., and caricatured people it purported to feel for. "The film I saw was shallow and facetious," said Kael, "a piece of gonzo demagoguery that made me feel cheap for laughing."

His methods remain unrefined in "Fahrenheit 9/11." Mr. Moore ignores or misrepresents the truth, prefers innuendo to fact, edits with poetic license rather than accuracy, and strips existing news footage of its context to make events and real people say what he wants, even if they don't. As Kael observed back then, Mr. Moore's method is no more high-minded than "the work of a slick ad exec."

The main premise of Mr. Moore's recent work is that both Presidents Bush have been what amounts to Manchurian Candidates of the Saudi royal family. Mr. Moore suggests (he depends so much on innuendo that a simple, declarative verb like "says" is usually impossible) the Saudi government, having soured on their pawns for unstated reasons, launched the attacks of Sept. 11.

----snip----

*****Mr. Moore tries hard to identify himself with U.S. troops and their concerns. But he spends an awful lot of effort depicting them as dupes and brutes. At one point in "Fahrenheit 9/11," someone off-camera prods a U.S. soldier into singing a favorite hip-hop song with profane lyrics. Mr. Moore then runs the soldier's voice over combat footage, to make it seem as if the soldier were insensitively singing along with the destruction.*****

*****In another scene, U.S. soldiers make savage jokes about the awkward effects of rigor mortis on one part of the corpse of an Iraqi soldier. I do not doubt the authenticity of those pictures. But I also have no particular reason to trust it. A few basic details, like where and when the video was shot, are considered traditional reporting techniques (especially after the front-page photos of British soldiers brutalizing Iraqi prisoners turned out to be frauds). A few other basic facts might have informed the audience. Was the Iraqi killed in battle? By a suicide bomb? Moore says the U.S. soldiers are good boys turned coarse in an immoral war. But I have also heard those kind of ugly and anxious jokes about corpses from overstressed emergency room physicians. ******

In the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote that, "Viewers may come away from Moore's movie believing some things that probably aren't true," and that he "uses association and innuendo to create false impressions." Try to imagine those phrases on a marquee. But that is his rave review! He lauds "Fahrenheit 9/11" for its "appeal to working-class Americans." Do we really want to believe that only innuendo, untruths, and conspiracy theories can reach working-class Americans?

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