On seeing FahrenHype 9/11...

It is so good to see Michael Moore's film de-bunked. For almost 0.2 seconds I had a sliver of a doubt that governments don't always do the very best thing for their people, that power corrupts, and that George W. Bush wasn't the Lord Almighty's gift to the world. It was scary to have any doubt at all and I have struggled with how to keep my faith in the face of so many facts and alternative opinions. I try to watch FOX news everyday to keep me informed so that I can fight with treasonous liberals and know what to say to counter their "facts." Thankfully, this film clears up about four mistakes in Moore's film (see below)and then makes me feel that, if I didn't believe all was well with the 2000 election, with Bush and the war on Iraq, if I didn't side completely with the president, that I would, indeed, be unpatriotic. Thank God for this film. Now I can sleep at night again!

No really, the film has some interesting points, but it is even more shamelessly propagandistic than the film it criticizes. And Ron Silver, who narrates, is even more annoying than Michael Mooore. Clearly the first film had some factual errors, but the bulk of these do nothing to counter Moore's main argument.

1. Recount: claims that the recount was settled in Florida. This is not really the case. The independent audit by several newspapers after the fact, was mostly inconclusive. the issue that both the Florida Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court said was most important was that they hadn't established a uniform method for counting the votes. The US said that, in that case, they should just stop. The Audit done by five or six major news organizations came up with several different scenarios, depending on whether overvotes and undervotes were counted. I forget all the different ways that they would have counted the votes and in which one Bush definitely won, but basically, if they had applied the same guidelines that Bush had recommended in Texas when he was governor, he would have lost. Make of that what you will. Obviously we've moved on and the bigger problem today is that the most recent election still had severe voting irregularities, compunded by the relentless gerrymandering on both sides that makes elections closer and closer. Big problems. The film doesn't talk about any of them, doesn't at all address the serious problem of African American populations being systematically disenfranchised or the scandalously inept process of purging the Florida voter rolls. As Ron Silver says in the film, there is nothing there. Stop thinking about it. (He sounds pretty serious too; I wouldn't mess with him.) Needless to say, the film is misleading here and doesn't prove anything to counter Moore's film.

2. The Pentograph--this is obviously a flop. Moore inflated a headline from a letter to the editor to make it look like a front page headline. This is probably the only really damning thing the film has to offer. But the headline was about the election in 2000 and, on balance, isn't wholly off the mark based on the evidence. It is like what Moore did in the last film, adding text to a 1988 campaign commercial: the text wasn't authentic, but it still represented a fairly true, or at least arguable statement. Here the tactics of the film maker are certainly questionable. But, as even this film points out, it was for about 10 seconds of footage.

3. Clinton is to blame for terrorism. Okay. Fine. Clinton is the Second worst president of the past decade. You win.

4. Islamofascists, yadda, yadda, yada. Okay we know. there are some serious folks out there who can hurt us. Isn't our real concern how well we're doing at fighting them? Were many of them in Iraq? (crickets, silence) Most of this segment is the ideologue gallery, with the balance of the conversation being that anyone who doesn't agree with Bush therefore doesn't believe that there are bad people and therefore (watch for jump in logic) is unpatriotic, a dope or both.
5. Saudi Arabia: as Hiedegger points out, Moore is taking most of his arguments from Unger (just like he took most of his arguments in _Columbine_ from Barry Glassner's _Culture of Fear_.) This is such a fast portion of the video it is almost laughable. There is very little substantive investigation, mostly blanket condemnations and oversimplifications. There are obviously powerful Bush supporters in the Carlyle group and there have been some suspicious relationships between them and the Suadis. The film denies anything is going on and, like the election, encourages us to dismiss these claims point blank. For a more recent Carlyle Group scandal: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041101&s=klein

As for the denial about the Afghan pipline, that is also bullshit and Moore connects it to Clinton just as readily. Here ideology and talking points basically win out over any close examination of one of the most factually rich and densely argued (if not overly so) of Moore's film. I am sure the latter made lots of mistakes and oversimplifications since that is his MO, but looking at those would require actually admitting the ones he's right about, something this film is unwilling to do. Instead it throws up all these canards about how John Kerry, George Soros and Move ON are actually more invested in Carlyle. This is presented as hypothesis, stretching logic beyond possibility, but it stands in the film as if there is some factual basis to it, making clear what the film is intended to do.

6. Bush didn't take very much vacation. And when he was on vacation, it wasn't really a vacation. Again, this is one of the places where they have probably got Moore for hyperbole. But it is hardly a damning correction and anyone who was awake during that time, found Bush's oft vacationing ways a bit unsettling. He was in Crawford, TX for all of August and HE said he was on vacation; Moore shoudl be able to call it a vacation if the president does--it's one of the few points they agree on.

7. Oregon Coast: the film points out that, contrary to Moore's assertion, the Oregon State Troopers aren't responsible for patrolling the Oregon Coast--that's the coast guard. However, it doesn't tell us if he is wrong about there being only one trooper patrolling the stretch of highway along the Oregon Coast and it implies that federal funds for homeland security wouldn't be well used in having first responders staffed to the full. this is a continuing problem and the film seems content to say that Moore stretched the truth than to examine the more substantive underlying problem.

SIDE NOTE: This is also the first time that the film makes use of the easily explicable, but key production flaw in Moore's film: He didn't shoot all of it nor was he even there for the whole thing. He bought a good deal of his footage, e.g the interview with the Trooper, interviews w/ injured soldiers at Walter Reed, footage from Iraq. The implication of this segment and every other segment that relies on this problem, is that Michael Moore, by buying existing footage rather than shooting it himself is somehow lying or misleading us. This is a total bullshit argument meant to make him look dishonest when it is standard documentary practice. All those people interviewed signed releases; the footage was owned by someone and sold to Moore. There may be ethical problems with this, but it is not Moore who is making these standards, they exist already.

8. The patriot Act: again, the balance of this is just that there are never any problems: it's a good thing; don't worry about it. The problems that Moore's film points out aren't addressed, such as the Peace activists in CA that are infiltrated by a local sherrif. Ann Coulter, however, does brag about all the "terrorists" being rounded up by Bush's administration, noting that it "isn't public knowledge" but failing to note, as one poster has already, that they have about a 0 to 5000 conviction rate. None of their evidence will hold up in court: this isn't a problem with the courts, who are just enforcing the constitution, but with the unconstitutional methods being employed to arrest people. Perhaps some folks see this as a good thing--then the terrorists don't win! But the truth is, if we're abandoning the constitution to do this, they've already won.

9. Saddam/Iraq: Here the film almost competely leaves Moore's text to speak to general arguments about the war. The most interesting argument, and probably the only one that has anything more than ideological support for it, is that France, Germany, and Russia had oil deals with Iraq. I am sure this is true. But the argument is a bit like little Billy beating the shit out of some kid on the street and then saying that the reason he did it was that none of the other kids would help him beat up this kid because this kid had bribed them not to agree to beat them up. The question of whether the kid should have been beat up in the first place is gently overlooked. This is done by dividing the problem into two halves. France, Germany, etc., wanted to lift the sanctions on Iraq and didn't want to go to war to disarm him because they had something to gain. Therefore we couldn't go through the UN to disarm him. Okay, fine. But then jump ahead in the film...Bill Morris is asking Ed Koch--great foreign policy expert that he is--if we should have gone to war even though there were no weapons. This of course leads to all the diatribes on how bad Saddam was. (Telling quote here: Koch says that they've found 300K bodies in mass graves, "they expect ot find one million--we can't walk away from that anymore." Anymore? Yes. Anymore--like we did when he did it in the early 90s. well, Koch doesn't say this, but let's just pretend he did.) Anyway, on balance, the argument is that Saddam is the equivalent to some copperheads Zell Miller found under a rock in his garden. They are a threat and he shouldn't have to ask the city council or even his wife before he goes in there and chops their heads off with his hoe. Beautiful. Ann Coulter says that, even if everything Moore and "liberals" say is true, Iraq was "a purely Humanitarian war." Leaving aside the fact that these are basically the things we've all heard before and it presents absolutely nothing new in the way of facts or voices, the glaring gaping hole in this segment is that everything after the france-germany-russia bit basically admits that there were no weapons and we knew there weren't any weapons. So why shoudl we fault France-Russia-Germany for not supporting our resolution to disarm him of weapons he didn't have: because we're right, dammit!

The only other fact pointed out in this segment is that Clinton signed some policy that said Iraq regime change was US policy. Here's the deal, for all you republicans who think this is about you: Bush is taknig the heat because he's in the white house. But most of us don't find Clinton to have been any gift to humanity. He bombed Iraq incessantly; His secratary of state Albright sid that the lives of 500K children who starved or died because of the sanctions we're "worth the cost" of keeping Saddam isolated. The NAFTA and WTO, both Clinton brain children, were a gift to corporations and plenty has been written on his economic policies: check out Contours of Decent by Robert Pollin. Clinton is an asshole too. He was just nicer about it. Moore gave him plenty of shit in the last movie he made when he connected Columbine to the largest bombing day in Kosovo. The problem is that the people who made this movie think that Republicans=patriotic americans and therefore anyone who critiques the government (especially while republicans are in charge of it), must not be a patriotic American and, since you're either with us or against us, you must be a democrat aka unpatriotic aka terrorist. This is a brilliant way to make any argument you make criticizing the government actions easily dismissed. This is basically the perspective that the film is coming from; one speaker even says that "Terrorists count on people like Moore to make his films this way."

And that is basically the thrust of the film. The last section of the film begins with calling Moore a propagandist. This is, in a way, fair game, since it is the same sort of tactic Moore himself uses. Except this time, instead of using footage from the press, speeches by the president or quotes by government officials to back up these sentiments (something that Moore did well--by reminding us just how over the top the press was about the war) they use footage from Hitler's propagandists and explicitly say that Moore is working to help the terrorists win. This is basically ridiculous for anyone who has seen the film, as is the claim that Moore doesn't respect the military or the ethos of "America" (remember, that means "war" "support the president" "Republican.") Though Moore is just as ridiculous in the last part of his film, this one is almost denying that that segment even exists. It critiques of Moore's depiction of US soldiers have no factual basis and totally depend on your perspective. It is also difficult to tell if these people even saw the film. That is okay because these filmmakers have made this film for everyone who didn't risk seeing the original and has just been waiting for something to rebut its arguments. Then they can simply deny Moore's legitimacy, overlook any substance to his argument, and go on believing what they did in the beginning.

Finally, before anyone claims that this film won't be premiered because of a liberal bias I will say this: if this film doesn't appear in theatres it is not because the people who own the movie distributors or movie theatres don't agree with it. It will be because this film is surprisingly dull and is basically just fodder for anyone who vehemently wants a quick way to deny anything critical about the past four years. Unlike F 9/11 which makes pains to be funny and use pacing and the interweaving of clips and quotes to keep things moving, this film is basically an extended chant or mantra. Though Moore definitely had a point and his humor might be lost on those who disagreed with him, at least he tried to make it entertaining. This film is just dull by comparison. And dull, ideological mantras don't fill the theatre seats.