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Introduction
This assessment reveals that Moore’s film is profoundly dishonest and misleading on a scale that even the very skeptical viewer cannot begin to appreciate without a careful analysis of each of the individual pieces that make up the narrative. For the most part, the movie does not proceed by outright false assertions: Moore is careful—often through a lawyerly precision in word choice—to avoid the simplest lies and to steer barely clear of claims that are plainly libelous. Instead, he chops up the truth and rearranges the pieces to form a thoroughly false picture of reality that is composed of genuine video and audio clips that in reality often have little or nothing to do with the point being advanced in the film, and of facts out of context and figures misrepresented. This means that while Moore’s “facts” are not all false, essentially none of his “arguments” turns out to be true.
The film is a patchwork of vague allegations, insubstantial insinuations, unrelated events patched together, and outright non sequiturs. By throwing it all at us in a vivid and often entertaining way, Moore hopes we will not examine his suggestions and connections too closely, and that we will just submit to the general premise with which he seeks to flood our perception, which is that George W. Bush and those around him are profoundly wicked people, at once appallingly stupid and diabolically clever, simpleminded and cunning, arrogant and (above all else) singularly greedy and obsessed with amassing wealth by any means. The film suggests that American foreign policy under the Bush Administration has been driven by a desire to enrich certain well-connected corporations and to serve the needs of oil-fattened Saudis and their American partners, all of whom are united with Bush and his highest officials in a grand cabal of villainy and avarice for which they will sacrifice the nation at a whim. It is a cheap and thin paranoid conspiracy theory, with all the familiar traditional symbols and ornaments of such tales, and no two parts of the story quite hold together.
The film literally closes its eyes to the attacks of September 11th, and then tries to describe what followed in all but the obvious and reasonable ways. It does its best to avoid the possibility that there really are dangers (except for American power), and there really sometimes are reasons to act in the world with real force. It couches its pacifism in a contrived righteous anger, revved up by a series of purported outrages, all of which totally collapse upon inspection.
The only way to truly appreciate the mastery of this deception is to examine the film move-by-move, claim-by-claim, and to follow up on the facts and trace the patterns of reasoning. This guide attempts to do just that, essentially narrating the reader through the film and taking up each claim. Wherever they are available, we have offered hyperlinks to news stories and other original sources that counter Moore’s claims. When hyperlinks were unavailable, we have cited other transcripts and articles, generally obtained through the LexisNexis database.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of a number of other people who have undertaken attempts to fact-check portions of Moore’s film and to offer context Moore intentionally left out. Especially useful in preparing this document have been the impressive work of Dave Kopel (http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/Fiftysix-Deceits-in-Fahrenheit-911.htm) and the “Fahrenheit Facts” blog (http://fahrenheit_fact.blogspot.com). We also welcome questions, comments, and corrections, which should be submitted by e-mail to fahrenheit911@eppc.org.
—The Ethics and Public Policy Center
October 5, 2004
I. The Election and Bush in Office Before September 11
The movie then shows selected scenes from television coverage on the night of the 2000 election, giving the impression that everything was heading in Gore’s direction, with state after state going for him until the end. But in fact, even leaving aside Florida, Bush won 29 states that night, and Gore won 20 states and the District of Columbia.
Moore then shows CBS calling Florida for Gore. He does not mention that this call was made by CBS and several other TV networks before polls had actually closed in the part of Florida that is in the Central time zone—the Western panhandle, which leans heavily Republican. Since 1980, the networks have all agreed not to call election results in any state before the polls close in that state, but in the case of Florida in 2000 they violated this agreement. The networks’ premature call—together with the fact that they repeatedly and wrongly announced during the final hour that the polls in Florida were closed—certainly cost Bush a good number of votes in that heavily Republican area. There is evidence from the 361 polling places in the Central time zone that voters didn’t show up as expected in the final hour, either because they were misled into believing the polls were already closed, or because they were convinced that their votes would not matter since Gore was already being reported as the winner in Florida. This depressed turnout very likely led to the close election result we’re all familiar with. One study (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=276278) suggests the networks’ error cost Bush about 1,500 Florida votes, and another (http://www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/050301_Perrin.htm) suggests it cost him 5,000. In either case, or any similar case, the tight race fiasco would not have happened without the TV news mistake, and Bush would have won Florida without dispute. This point is not raised in the film.
Moore then shows several networks calling the state for Gore, but then says that “something called the Fox News Channel called the election in favor of the other guy.” What really happened, however, is that the TV networks soon realized that Florida was too close to call, and never should have been put in the Gore category. So beginning with CNN at 9:55 p.m. EST, and quickly followed by CBS and the others, the TV news networks retracted their mistaken call for Gore. (For the CNN retraction: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20001108/aponline183922_000.htm. For a useful timeline of election-night “calls” by the networks: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/c2k/pdf/REPFINAL.pdf.) Fox News, like the other networks, had wrongly called Florida for Gore even before the polls were closed. They did not call the state for Bush until after 2 a.m., four hours after CNN and CBS had led the way in retracting the call for Gore. Moore is correct to say that Fox was the first to actually announce a call for Bush at 2:16 a.m., but the other networks all followed within moments. Moore works hard to build the impression that everyone believed Gore had won until Fox said otherwise, which is blatantly false.
Moore then says that the man “in charge of the decision desk” at Fox News on election night was a cousin of Bush’s. Moore doesn’t actually follow this statement with any accusation of misconduct—but by putting things this way, he obviously wants us to assume that something wasn’t right. There has never been any suggestion of anything wrong with the qualifications or conduct of John Ellis, the Bush relative in question. He was, in any case, just following the data from the Voter News Service exit poll figures—information that all the networks used. Nothing Fox News did that night differed from what the other networks did (in fact, Fox originally made the same early and erroneous call for Gore that the other networks made) and nothing Ellis did has in any way been questioned—including by the two other Fox analysts, both Democrats, who manned the decision desk with him that night. Moore’s further preposterous suggestion, that “All of a sudden the other networks said ‘Hey, if Fox said it, it must be true,’” has no basis in fact whatsoever.
Having sought to convince us (without actually offering facts) that Florida was somehow taken from Gore, Moore says “How does someone like Bush get away with something like this?” and then suggests it is because his brother was Florida’s governor, and because Florida’s secretary of state (whom Moore calls “the vote counting woman”) was an elected Republican who was co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign. He alleges no specific wrongdoing on either person’s part. The extent of his accusation against Bush’s brother is footage of Bush sitting with his brother before the election and saying he will win Florida (just as Al Gore said he would win Florida in the footage that opened the movie). In fact, Jeb Bush recused himself from everything having to do with the vote-count in Florida, to avoid any appearance of impropriety, so although he would normally have been the one in charge of the final post-election certification process, he remained completely out of it, and has never been accused by anyone of doing anything wrong (http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/11/08/election.president/).
Katherine Harris, “the vote counting woman,” was the elected Secretary of State of Florida. She was not in charge of “vote counting,” which is overseen by county officials in each of Florida’s counties, and so was done by Democrats in each of the disputed counties in the 2000 election. Harris, as secretary of state and one of three members of the state’s Elections Canvassing Commission, was only in charge of certifying the vote-count after it was completed, which she did. In any case, she too is not accused in the movie or elsewhere of wrongdoing. The movie makes no charges, only insinuations, but suggests that Bush “got away” with something (it does not say what) because these people were in power. That certainly puts forward a grossly misleading impression at the very least.
Moore then says that a further element in “getting away” with “it” was to have the state of Florida “hire a company that’s gonna knock voters off the rolls who aren’t likely to vote for you. You can usually tell them by the color of their skin.” This is a reference to the fact that following the fiasco of the 1998 mayoral election in Miami—which had to be decided by state courts after it became clear that convicted felons had been allowed to vote, in violation of Florida law—the state of Florida had hired a firm called Data Base Technologies (whose office Moore shows on the screen) to systematically remove convicted felons from the voter rolls. This process met with difficulties from the start, including issues relating to the fact that in some other states some convicted felons are allowed to vote, and Florida was not allowed to remove those people from its own voter rolls if they had moved to Florida after being released in another state. Florida’s counties were aware of difficulties in this process, and so at least 20 of the counties simply ignored the Data Base Technologies lists of felons to purge from their lists, which meant that felons were removed in some counties but not others. It is true that when they vote, convicted felons vote for Democrats more often than for Republicans (http://www.scienceblog.com/community/article708.html) but it is also clear from an analysis by members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (http://www.manhattan-institute.org/final_dissent.pdf) that too many, not too few, convicted felons voted in the 2000 elections in Florida—that is, about 6,500 felons who were not legally allowed to vote did so anyway. So the result was likely many more (not fewer) votes for Gore. Finally, there is no evidence that any of this at any point had anything to do with race, despite Moore’s implication. An investigation by the Palm Beach Post (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0527-03.htm) showed that the process used by Data Base Technologies at no point brought the race of individual convicted felons into the picture. Moore’s charge is baseless and false.
Moore then suggests the Bush team fought unethically in the post-election process in Florida, though he offers no specific charges, and only shows a snippet of a television interview with James Baker, Bush’s representative in the process, in which Baker says, “I think all this talk about ‘legitimacy’ is way overblown.” This implies that Baker was saying that the legitimacy of the election itself doesn’t matter. But that’s not what he was saying. The sound bite came from an interview with Baker on ABC’s This Week program on December 10, 2000. Baker was asked by Sam Donaldson whether he thought that having the Supreme Court decide the Florida recount question would take away from the legitimacy of whoever would be the winner. Baker answered:
Well, Sam, I think all this talk about legitimacy is way overblown. Whoever wins this election, and particularly if they should win it as a consequence of a decision of the highest court in the land, which everybody has said that they—that they intend to respect, I think that the country will come together behind that leader. Yes, we’ve lost 50 percent of the time normally reserved for transition. Yes, it’ll be harder than it normally is, but I don’t think that we will have questions of legitimacy about the president. Yes, there—there will be hard feelings regardless of which side wins and which side loses. But I think the country’s strong enough and our democracy’s strong enough we’ll over come that.
These are hardly the words of a heartless fiend, and Baker is not suggesting that the legitimacy of the election is irrelevant. He is, instead, arguing that the post-election process will produce a president that the American people will consider legitimate, no matter who wins. Moore’s careful cutting of this statement presents a totally misleading impression.
Moore then suggests that “numerous independent investigations prove that Gore got the most votes” in Florida. He puts what looks to be a newspaper article on the screen with the headline “Latest Florida Recount Shows Gore Won Election.” You can see on the screen that the headline is from a newspaper called The Pantagraph and the date is December 19, 2001. The Pantagraph is a local paper in Bloomington, Illinois. More importantly, the item Moore is showing was not a newspaper article, but a letter to the editor which had that title headline. It was just a reader claiming Gore had won, but not referring to any latest recount or new information. What’s more, the letter did not run on December 19, 2001, but on December 5, 2001. Here is what The Pantagraph had to say about it, following Moore’s use of their letter in the movie: “If [Moore] wants to edit the Pantagraph,” the paper told the Associated Press, “he should apply for a copy-editing job” (http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2004-08-02-moore-apology_x.htm).
Why did Moore have to resort to a misdated and re-titled letter to the editor from a local paper in Illinois to back up his claim that independent recounts showed Gore had won? Because the claim is false. In fact, the independent recounts, conducted by several universities and media organizations, showed that in every recount scenario that had been requested by the Gore campaign, Bush actually won more votes than Gore did in Florida, and therefore won the election, regardless of any court intervention. There were two major media investigations of the Florida post-election process. The first, conducted by USA Today, The Miami Herald and Knight Ridder, showed that “George W. Bush would have won a hand count of Florida’s disputed ballots if the standard advocated by Al Gore had been used” (http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2001-04-03-floridamain.htm). The second, conducted by the Associated Press, CNN, The New York Times, The Palm Beach Post, The St. Petersburg Times, Tribune Publishing, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, likewise showed that by all the scenarios requested by the Gore campaign or suggested by the Florida Supreme Court, Bush would have won (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/politics/recount/). The only ways Gore might have squeezed out a win would have involved extremely contrived and unusual methods of counting ballots, which no one had suggested (http://www.nytimes.com/images/2001/11/12/politics/recount/) Moore’s claim is misleading and his use of newspaper clippings is dishonest.
Moore then shows a quick clip from CNN in which legal pundit Jeffrey Toobin says, “If there was a statewide recount under every scenario, Gore won the election.” This is again a profoundly dishonest use of a video snippet. The clip is from a CNN program on November 12, 2001 in which Jeffrey Toobin was interviewed by Paula Zahn about election reform and a book he had written on the 2000 election. They had the following exchange:
ZAHN: But Jeffrey, if Al Gore had gotten what he wanted, which was a statewide manual recount or a recount of those four specific counties, George Bush still would have won. So I wonder and I’m going to put up on the screen now a paragraph from your book where you once said the wrong man was inaugurated on January 20th, 2001 and this is no small thing in our nation’s history. Do you still agree with what you wrote?
TOOBIN: Oh absolutely. I mean remember this is just about the under votes and over votes. There were thousands of votes that were clearly mistakenly passed. Democracy is about the intent of the voters. There are 3,400 votes in Palm Beach for Pat Buchanan. Obviously those people did not intend to vote for—did not intend to vote for Pat Buchanan. There were thousands of military absentee ballots that were not accurately counted or cast appropriately. There were 7,000 votes in Duval County in Jacksonville that were clearly intended for Al Gore. I mean you know the irony here is that the exit polls, the much-maligned exit polls, but—which really do manifest the intent of the voters—they were clearly correct that Al Gore won a very narrow vote.
ZAHN: Jeffrey, how can you say that? How can you say that given the conclusion of this analysis that Candy has set out in great detail that if Al Gore [had] gotten the manual recount with the standards that everybody seemed to agree to in this analysis, that George Bush would have won and he would have won if he had done the manual recount of the four specific counties.
TOOBIN: That’s not ...
(CROSSTALK)
TOOBIN: All right let’s concentrate ...
(CROSSTALK)
TOOBIN: Let’s concentrate on why we have elections, which is ...
ZAHN: No. No. No. You’ve got to answer my question Jeffrey.
TOOBIN: No, I’m answering your question. I mean the poll said if there was a statewide recount—if there was a statewide recount under every scenario Gore won the election.
In other words, Toobin is talking about the results of exit polls, not the result of an actual recount. He’s trying to say he knows what people intended to do based on a poll, rather than what a recount of the real ballots would have shown. This is made clear in the same CNN program, when Candy Crowley, the CNN reporter referred to above, says:
If Al Gore had gotten what he asked for, the election would have been settled a lot quicker and Al Gore, our study suggests, still would have lost. The study, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, was commissioned by CNN and seven other news organizations. Trained coders often operating in teams viewed, but did not touch disputed ballots and wrote down what they saw. While their findings point to a Bush victory under all options in play at the time, there are theoretical scenarios in which Gore might have won.
Moore’s claim that Gore would have won by any recount scenario is flatly false, and his use of the CNN video is totally and abjectly dishonest. The facts are plain: Bush truly did win the 2000 election.
Moore then mocks the Supreme Court as mere friends of Bush’s “daddy” and mocks the Democratic leaders who accepted the outcome and called on the country to accept the new president. Moore offers no facts or specific allegations to support his mockery of either group, and does not take up the actual reasoning of the Supreme Court decision (http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/supremecourt/00-949_dec12.fdf) or the question of why the Democratic leaders accepted the legitimacy of the decision.
The film then shows scenes from the congressional certification of the election results, in which a few members of the House of Representatives raised complaints about the Florida election results, but could not find a single member of the Senate to join them. Moore seems to imply that we should think the Senators were cowards for not joining the petitions of complaint, but in fact he offers no reasons why a Senator, or any responsible person, would have put their names on the petitions. He does not tell us what was in the complaints, nor whether the complaints were true and there was any reason to object to certifying the election results. In fact, the objections alleged all manner of voter intimidation, fraud, and disenfranchisement, none of which has since been proven correct and none of which were supported by any evidence that would have offered any Senator a reason to support them. (The Congressional Record transcript of the session can be found at http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2001_record&page=H34&position=all.)
Moore then says that on inauguration day people pelted Bush’s limo with eggs, and prevented the president from taking the usual walk outside his car that normally ends the inaugural procession. It is true, as this BBC story demonstrates (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1127937.stm), that “one protester threw an egg at the new president’s motorcade.” But as the same story also demonstrates, in the very next line, it is also true that “Mr Bush delighted supporters by getting out of his limousine and walked the last block of the parade, holding hands with his wife Laura.” Moore also claims that “no president had ever witnessed such a thing on his inauguration day.” Whether this refers to the true part (the egg) or the false part (no walk) of Moore’s earlier claim, it is certainly not true that no such thing had been seen at past inaugurals. At Nixon’s 1973 inaugural parade, for instance, protestors burned American flags, booed and cursed at the president and his wife, “and deluged their car with sticks, stones, beer cans, and bottles” (Randall Bennett Woods, Fulbright: A Biography, p. 501, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521482623). According to a history of the U.S. Secret Service, Nixon kept his limousine’s windows open during the parade even though protestors “opened up with a barrage of eggs and rotten fruit” (Philip H. Melanson and Peter F. Stevens, The Secret Service: The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency, p. 297, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786710845).
Moore then asserts that “things didn’t get any better” over the first eight months of the Bush presidency, and makes a series of false claims about those months. He claims President Bush “couldn’t get his judges appointed,” which is not true: Justice Department records show that judges nominated by Bush were getting Senate hearings and confirmations throughout the summer of 2001 (http://www.usdoj.gov/olp/confirmed107.htm).
Moore claims President Bush “had trouble getting his legislation passed,” which is true insofar as any president has some trouble with Congress, but is not true if it aims to give the impression that President Bush was not having success getting major legislation through. In the period Moore talks about, the president got his very significant across-the-board tax cut through Congress, and began to get his “No Child Left Behind” education legislation through the process (it was passed in the House before September 11, and in the Senate shortly after). In both cases, President Bush got them through almost as he had wanted them, a feat that would please any president at any time.
Moore claims Bush “lost Republican control of the Senate,” which is only true in the sense that Republicans lost control of the Senate after formerly Republican Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont (shown briefly on-screen) became an independent in early 2001.
Moore claims Bush’s “approval ratings in the polls began to sink” and shows a graph on the screen suggesting Bush’s job approval rating was 45%. This is certainly a distortion. Bush’s ratings in the first few months fluctuated up and down, as do those of most presidents in most times, but the 45% figure Moore shows was clearly an aberration. As this chart of approval ratings in various polls (http://www.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Approval.htm) shows, President Bush’s approval rating rose quite substantially in April (when he overcame his “trouble getting his legislation passed” and got the tax cut passed in Congress) and throughout the eight month period in question his approval rating was in the 50% to 60% range, as it had been when he took office.
Moore completes this parade of distortion by saying “he was already beginning to look like a lame-duck president” which of course is an absurd thing to suggest about a president in his first few months of office.
Moore then says that Bush responded to all this by going on vacation. He cites a Washington Post story (available here: http://www.dke.org/haginranch.html) that had noted that Bush spent 42 percent of his first seven months in office “at vacation spots or en route.” Moore does not explain that this figure counts “full or partial days” as vacation days—so that, as one online critic put it, if President Bush “got up at six in the morning at Camp David, had a cup of java, then flew to the White House, that was counted as a day at Camp David” (http://www.scoopy.com/fahrenheit911.htm). Moore also does not note that the Post article also says that, “Many of those days are weekends, and the Camp David stays have included working visits with foreign leaders.” If you exclude weekends from the Post’s calculation, Bush spent just 13 percent of his days “on vacation.” And of course these weren’t truly vacation days, either—in fact, one of the pictures Moore shows to back up his claim that Bush was loafing around (“relaxing at Camp David,” as Moore puts it) is a picture of Bush meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Moore also shows Bush in a polo shirt answering a question about what he’s doing that day, saying, “Uh, Karen Hughes is coming over we’re workin’ on some things—and uh, she’ll be over here. We’re workin’ on some things. I’m working on some initiatives—we’re uh—you’ll see. I mean I’ve got—there’ll be decisions that I’m going to make while I’m here and we’ll be announcing them as time goes on.” The viewer is supposed to get the impression that Bush is struggling to sound productive during a time when he is just goofing off. But Moore undoes his own design here by noting with a caption on the screen that this Q&A took place on August 8, 2001. This was one day before Bush announced his new policy governing funding of embryonic stem cell research, a major policy initiative, on which Bush and the White House staff had been working for weeks in Texas and Washington. Bush announced the policy, from Crawford, Texas on August 9, in his first nationally-televised primetime address (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/08/20010809-2.html), and he had in fact been hard at work on the speech with Karen Hughes and others in Texas the day before. (To Moore’s way of thinking, these all count as vacation days.)
Here is a sample of what Bush did on one particular week of his “vacation” in August of 2001, drawn from White House documents available online and collated by Scott Marquardt for Dave Kopel (http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/Fiftysix-Deceits-in-Fahrenheit-911.htm):
Monday, August 20
- Spoke concerning the budget while visiting a high school in Independence, Missouri.
- Spoke at the annual Veteran’s of Foreign Wars convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
- Signed six bills into law.
- Announced his nominees for Chief Financial Officer of the Department of Agriculture, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Financial Management, member of the Federal Housing Finance Board, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Disabled Employment Policy, U.S. Representative to the General Assembly of the U.N., and Assistant Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development for the Bureau of Humanitarian Response.
- Spoke with workers at the Harley Davidson factory.
- Dined with Kansas Governor Bill Graves, discussing politics.Tuesday, August 21
- Took press questions at a Target store in Kansas City, Missouri.
- Spoke with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien on the matter of free trade and tariffs on Canadian lumber.Wednesday, August 22
- Met with Karen Hughes, Condi Rice, and Josh Bolten, and other staff (more than one meeting).
- Conferenced with Mexico’s president for about 20 minutes on the phone. They discussed Argentina’s economy and the International Monetary Fund’s role in bringing sustainability to the region. They also talked about immigration and Fox’s planned trip to Washington.
- Communicated with Margaret LaMontagne, who was heading up a series of immigration policy meetings.
- Released the Mid-Session Review, a summary of the economic outlook for the next decade, as well as of the contemporary economy and budget.
- Announced nomination and appointment intentions for Ambassador to Vietnam, two for the Commission on Fine Arts, six to serve on the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry, three for the Advisory Committee to the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation, one to the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and one to the National Endowments for the Arts.
- Issued a Presidential Determination ordering a military drawdown for Tunisia.
- Issued a statement regarding the retirement of Jesse Helms.Thursday, August 23
- Briefly speaks with the press.
- Visited Crawford Elementary School, fielded questions from students.Friday, August 24
- Officials arrive from Washington at 10:00 a.m. Briefly after this at a press conference, Bush announced that General Richard B. Myers will be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and General Pete Pac will serve as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He also announced 14 other appointments, and his intentions for the budget. At 11:30 a.m. these officials, as well as National Security Council experts, the Secretary of Defense, and others, met with Bush to continue the strategic review process for military transformation (previous meetings have been held at the Pentagon and the White House). The meeting ended at 5:15.
- Met with Andy Card and Karen Hughes, talking about communications issues.
- Issued a proclamation honoring Women’s Equality Day.Saturday, August 25
- Awoke at 5:45 a.m., read daily briefs.
- Had an hour-long CIA and national security briefing at 7:45.
- Gave his weekly radio address on the topic of The Budget.Sunday, August 26
- Speaks at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
- Speaks at the U.S. Steel Group Steelworkers Picnic at Mon Valley Works, southeast of Pittsburgh. He also visits some employees still working, not at the picnic.
Some vacation. But rather than tell us any of this, Moore then shows various images of Bush on vacation, talking about his dogs and the like, which of course can only leave us with the impression that if Michael Moore himself were followed around by cameras and asked questions constantly for months and years on end, the only thing he would ever talk about would be serious issues of the day.
Finally, we are told, Bush went to Florida on September 10 (though Moore suggests, falsely, that he went there straight after an extended vacation in Texas).
As the opening credits roll, we are treated to a series of images of Bush Administration officials preparing for interviews or speeches, having microphones attached, having their hair combed, and talking to people off camera. It is part of Moore’s effort to make Bush and those around him seem somehow vaguely ridiculous—as if serious people would never behave this way before going on camera.