Posted on 03/29/2003 1:03:12 AM PST by Carbonsteel
While he caused a big furor at the Oscars Sunday with his controversial remarks about President George W. Bush, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is hardly finished with taking the commander in chief to task.
According to Variety online, Moore is putting together a deal with actor Mel Gibson's production company to finance "Fahrenheit 911," a documentary that will trace the roots of terrorism against the United States.
But perhaps most shockingly, Moore will also spell out alleged dealings between two generations of the Bush and bin Laden clans, according to Variety.
"The primary thrust of the new film is what has happened to the country since Sept. 11, and how the Bush administration used this tragic event to push its agenda," Moore said in the Variety report.
Moore said the film "certainly does deal with the Bush and bin Laden ties," and "asks a number of questions that I don't have the answers to yet, but which I intend to find out." The trade paper said Moore has done research for the film for a year.
Described as a "circumstantial" tie, the Variety report said that the business relationship began with former President George Bush and Saudi construction magnate Mohammed bin Laden, the father of Osama -- a relationship that endured.
"The senior Bush kept his ties with the bin Laden family up until two months after Sept. 11," Moore said.
Moore plans to release "Fahrenheit 911" in time for France's Cannes Film Festival in 2004 -- a release timed to come before the presidential election that fall.
Variety said that Gibson's Icon Productions acquired the rights to back Moore's film by laying out an eight-figure bid in upfront cash. Moore's recent Oscar-winning documentary about the American gun culture -- "Bowling for Columbine" -- was shot for $3 million and has earned nearly $40 million worldwide.
The filmmaker received a standing ovation as he marched toward the podium for his "Columbine" win Sunday night in Hollywood, Calif. However, the atmosphere changed as Moore's defiant acceptance speech progressed.
Moore, who invited his fellow documentary nominees onstage in a show of "solidarity," said, "We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in a time when we have fictitious election results that elect fictitious presidents."
The crowd half-cheered and half-jeered with his remarks, but the sounds turned to mostly boos as he went on: "We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons, whether it's the fiction of duct tape, or the fiction of orange alerts -- we are against this war Mr. Bush. Shame on you Mr. Bush, shame on you."
The jeers drowned out the remainder of Moore's speech, as he said, "Any time you have the pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up!"
It's an old ploy -- if you don't want a story told, you buy the rights and then sit on them forever.
Think of how much money conservatives could make using this tactic to shop scripts called "The Lewinsky Cigar," "The Many Girlfriends of Hillary," "Daddy Hubbell - The Chelsea Clinton Story." The possibilities are endless.
Mel Gibson's father entertains many such conspiracy theories.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/865416/posts
Noxon also interviewed Gibson's 84-year-old father, Hutton, an author and activist whose railings against the Vatican have included books called Is The Pope Catholic? and The Enemy Is Here.
Gibson snr also publishes a newsletter that refers to the pope as "Garrulous Karolus, the Koran Kisser" and professes to such conspiracy theories as Vatican II being a Masonic plot backed by the Jews, the al-Qaeda hijackers having nothing to do with crashing planes in the September 11 terrorist attacks ("they were crashed by remote control") and denying the Holocaust killed 6 million Jews ("There were more after the war than before").
While Gibson reportedly disagrees with his father on many issues, there is no doubt he believes in a very traditional brand of Catholicism.
Former Attorney-General Ramsey Clark is a respected figure on the left, leader of the Communist-sponsored ANSWER coalition. He is also a raving moonbat conspiracy theorist on the same level of logic as moon-landing denialists and flat-earth proponents. Clark alleges, for instance, that US troops massacred more than 20,000 civilians in Panama in 1989, and that only the right-wing's total control of the "corporate" media keeps this claim from being generally accepted. He also traces current US policy to a Republican plot to conquer the world that has existed since the 19th century. As a leftist and fringe Camelot figure (via the Johnson Succession) he gets a free pass on all this from the self-same media he excoriates as a capitalist tool. Oddly enough, Clark himself is never named as a suspect in any of the many left-wing conspiracy theories surrounding the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Clark was Attorney-General at the time, J. Edgar Hoover's boss, and is almost the only major office-holder of the time whom the lefty moonbats do not accuse.
Similarly, many of the claims supporting the left's lame "blood for oil" mantra allege complex behind-the-scenes manipulations by shadowy and ruthless groups; all presented with little or no evidence beyond innuendo, circular reasoning, and the presumed authority of the accuser, i.e. classical conspiracy theories.
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