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Here's a better one:

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

Time Magazine
May 31, 2004

The Art of Burning Bush;
Michael Moore whipped Cannes into an inferno with Fahrenheit 9/11, but did he make a good film?

Richard Corliss/Cannes

(snip)

For all those eight-figure earners, the largest presence at this French film fete was a fellow from Flint, Mich., who's usually seen in a scruffy beard and duck-hunter couture. Michael Moore was prowling the Riviera, and this time the game he aimed at was George W. Bush. Bull's-eye! His Fahrenheit 9/11 captured Cannes's highest prize, the Palme d'Or, from a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino. "What have you done?" the winner asked in benign shock. "You just did this to mess with me."

(snip) ... in his acceptance speech, he scolded the President for invading Iraq. So Cannes was primed for his latest movie Molotov cocktail. Its first screening, on a Monday at 8 a.m., got total team news coverage; a dozen or so radio and TV crews circled the U.S. critics to get their early reaction as Miramax Films co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, whose Disney bosses had forbidden him to release the film, paced nearby and chortled, "They say I've lost my edge? Have I lost my edge?" He had not. He spent the rest of the week negotiating with a flock of U.S. distributors hoping to profit from the film's marketable notoriety.

(snip)

The film details, with Moore's usual mix of flippant comedy and moral outrage, the case for the prosecution in the left vs. Bush: the Bush Administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq, its Patriot Act clamping down on civil liberties and its cozy relationship with the ruling families of Saudi Arabia, including the bin Ladens. Moore is particularly indignant that the President had a chummy White House visit on Sept. 13, 2001, with Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia, from whose country 15 of the 19 hijackers had come, and that in the dire days after 9/11, when U.S. flights were grounded, two dozen of Osama bin Laden's relatives were flown out of the country without the FBI being allowed to question them.

Much of the material is familiar. The film buttresses its arguments from reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post, Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud and Moore's own best seller Dude, Where's My Country? But Moore, a master propagandist and incorrigible entertainer, knows how to assemble footage in piquant ways. He shows a news clip of Bush on a golf course saying sternly, "We must stop the terror," then reverting to country-club form by adding cheerfully, "Now watch this drive." Moore precedes his section on the Patriot Act by noting that Attorney General John Ashcroft had lost his U.S. Senate seat in 2000 to the recently deceased Governor of Missouri: "Voters preferred the dead guy." There's a shot from a few years back of Moore elbowing his way to talk to then Texas Governor Bush, who recognizes him and says, "Behave yourself, will ya? Go find real work."

Moore's work here is to show the corruptive influence of the war in Iraq: coarsening some Americans abroad, killing others. The film contains previously unseen footage of U.S. soldiers' abuse of Iraqi detainees last Christmas Eve. Toward the end, Moore returns home to Flint to grieve with the parents of a dead soldier, then goes to Washington in a quixotic attempt to badger members of Congress into volunteering their sons and daughters for military service.

(snip)

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

Morning Star
April 21, 2004
Pg. 8

Rude awakening;
OPINION: As he puts the finishing touches to his latest film, MICHAEL MOORE looks at Bush's claims on Iraq.

MICHAEL MOORE

I HAVE never seen a head so far up a Presidential arse - pardon my Fallujah - than the one I saw last Wednesday at the "news conference" given by George W Bush.

He's still talking about finding "weapons of mass destruction" - this time on Saddam's "turkey farm." Turkey indeed. Clearly, the White House believes that there are enough idiots in the 17 swing states who will buy this. I think that they are in for a rude awakening.

I've been holed up for weeks in the editing room finishing my film Fahrenheit 911. But, after last Wednesday's Lyndon Johnson impersonation from the East Room - essentially promising to send even more troops into the Iraq sinkhole - I had to write.

First, can we stop the Orwellian language and start using the proper names for things? Those are not "contractors" in Iraq. They are not there to fix a roof or to pour concrete in a driveway.

They are mercenaries and soldiers of fortune.

They are there for the money and the money is very good if you live long enough to spend it.

Halliburton is not a "company" doing business in Iraq. It is a war profiteer, skimming millions from the pockets of average US citizens. In past wars, they would have been arrested - or worse.

The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "the enemy." They are the revolution, the Minutemen and their numbers will grow - and they will win.

Get it, Mr Bush? You closed down a friggin' weekly newspaper, you great giver of freedom and democracy! Then all hell broke loose. The paper only had 10,000 readers! Why are you smirking?

One year after we wiped the face of the Saddam statue with our US flag before yanking him down, it is now too dangerous for a single media person to go to that square in Baghdad and file a report on the wonderful one-year anniversary celebration.

Of course, there is no celebration and those brave blow-dried "embeds" can't even leave the safety of the fort in downtown Baghdad.

They never actually see what is taking place across Iraq - most of the pictures we see on TV are shot by Arab media and some Europeans.

When you watch a report "from Iraq, " what you are getting is the press release handed out by the occupation force and repeated to you as "news."

I currently have two cameramen/reporters doing work for me in Iraq for my movie unbeknownst to the army.

They are talking to soldiers and gathering the true sentiment about what is really going on.

They Fed Ex the footage back to me each week.

That 's right, Fed Ex. Who said we haven't brought freedom to Iraq!

The funniest story my guys tell me is how when they fly into Baghdad, they don't have to show a passport or go through immigration. Why not?

Because they have not travelled from a foreign country - they're coming from the US to the US, a place that is ours, a new US territory called Iraq.

There is a lot of talk among Bush's opponents that we should turn this war over to the United Nations.

Why should the other countries of this world, countries who tried to talk us out of this folly, now have to clean up our mess?

I oppose the UN or anyone else risking the lives of their citizens to extract us from our debacle.

I'm sorry, but the majority of US citizens supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe - just maybe - God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.

Until then, enjoy the "pacification" of Fallujah, the "containment" of Sadr City and the next Tet Offensive, oops, I mean "terrorist attack by a small group of Ba'athist loyalists, " followed by a "news conference" where we will be told that we must "stay the course" because we are "winning the hearts and minds of the people."

Don't despair. Remember, that the people of the US are not that stupid. Sure, we can be frightened into a war, but we always come around sooner or later- and the one way that this is not like Vietnam is that it hasn't taken the public four long years to figure out that they were lied to.

Now, if Bush would just quit speaking in public and giving me more free material for my movie, I can get back to work and get it done.

I've got three weeks left until completion.