Fahrenheit 9/11

[Colleen Thomas]

It seems I am the only one in these forums who qustions Moore. It is also readily apparent that no one here is willing to admit even the possibility that I might have a point. That being the case further discussion is useless, it isn't debate, it's just an argument. So I will bow out of this thread and leave it to the fan club.

-Colly

 

[Pure]

Hi Colly,

It seems you a quite aware of Bush and Saudi connections, and are willing to entertain the idea that *maybe some interesting folks were let go. That 'clout' may have greased some wheels. If you read the commision report section very closely it does not claim that those fleeing persons knew nothing of any value.

CT: But here's the 9/11 commission report. It says, "The FBI has concluded that nobody was allowed to depart on these six flights that the FBI wanted to interview in connection with the 9/11 attacks, or who the FBI later concluded had any involvement in those attacks. To date, we have uncovered no evidence to contradict those conclusions."

It speaks in terms of 'nobody ...the FBI wanted to interview'.
Well, the FBI was very lax, and very in the dark on the days just after 9-11. So that's a weak claim.

Note also the last line, about 'no evidence'. If, hypothetically, any of the fleeing persons had something to say, we don't know. Arguably the letting go itself caused the 'no evidence.'

There is also the phrase 'involvement in those attacks.' That's possibly quite narrow. Perhaps excluding passing some money along the way toward those who need it. As you know athe issue of Islamic charities, and where they get and spend their money is a complicated one.

My suspicions are aroused since the 'financing' portion of the Congressional Report was entirely blacked out, classified. It reportedly has to do with Saudi connections.

A question back to you. If you were rendering a documentary, and your central thesis was that there WAS some sort of colusion, would you present all the facts and let the watcher reach their own conclusion?

First, no film or book can 'present all the facts.' Many books of history have an interpretation or even 'thesis', so the intent of an 'objective presentation' **is not all that common, to my knowledge. I'd say that's a judicial report you're thinking of, like the Warren Commision.

I can see your point, perhaps, if I was watching a doc'y about Genghiz Khan. I might like to know the plusses and minusses of his empire.

Yet I can think of any number of documentaries, let's say about a certain polution problem or global warming. The evidence of pollution or warming is shown. The intent is to advance the interests of our grandkids, against the polluters, so that makes it propaganda. However I see no reason ONE film has to canvas the entire issue. Typically the 'other side' has little to say except, "Our emissions are at acceptable levels, according to government standards."

Such a film, to the extent it's factual, fits the definition of the Merriam Webster, which is incidentally used by the Supreme Court.

I gather a tiny bunch of scientists don't think humans have much to do with warming, in terms of producing CO2. I'm not sure that that view has to be included. Let someone else make a documentary on million year trends.

We agree that evidence must be presented in a doc. It must be
true.

By the way, Moore clearly says Fahr 9-11 is NOT a documentary, but an 'op ed' piece.

Or would you present only one side?

See above. I can see some cases where 'one side' does not bother me, if it's factual/true.

The only explanation I have for not including contrary evidence is that he is so insecure in his own decision that he can't afford to risk his watchers being unsure either. Or do you have an alternate explanation that dosen't point to the movie being political propaganda?

We agreed it was propaganda with your or Merriam Webster definition, but that does not affect its truth. If Moore is 'insecure' or 'anxious' or 'bisexual' or bipolar it does not affect the truth of the claims. It's the ad hominem logical fallacy.

Lastly, in some cases, I don't see the 'other side' can easily be presented. IF I have evidence of collusion, phone calls and emails between the parties up to no good, that may be sufficient. How would one present the 'no collusion' thesis? The parties denying it???

Surely you'd agree that like a murder charge, the collusion claim (the 'one side') will stand or fall on its own.

One cannot gather evidence of 'no collusion'. For instance, IF there were, in logs, an absence of phonecalls, letters, or emails from A to B (as is the case now with Osama and his lieutenants), that doesn't show 'no collusion.' In some contexts it means that communication likely occurred some other way.

I hope this answers your questions. Since I've not seen Fahr
9-11, I can't list all its claims. Contrary to what you say, I don't see Moore as God, and will consider alleged mistakes, yet he has this time taken extraordinary precautions using outside fact checkers. Apparently there are some errors in "Columbine", and some collaging of quotations and telescoping of events.

This upshot of all this typing is that we have no evidence of patently false statements in Fahr 9-11. We have Moore's opinion (and suspicion, with some grounds) as to collusion, and I'm not convinced--since the parties were never later talked to--about the strength of the 'no evidence' justification for the 'fast exit.'

I appreciate your thought about these issues, and your calm responses.



**if that means absence of a personal perspective, slant or judgment. 'objective' is a VERY dicey word.

 

[Pure]

bump

 

[ABSTRUSE]

I cerrtainly wasn't talking about you when I referenced the giggling cliquish straight "high school girls." I actually have read some of your posts.

Clare's going Commando today--no panties.

Can we at least pretend I'm still in College than? It was more fun back then.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

I'm proud to be a socialist.

I see the world like a giant sandbox, where the older brother takes all the toys away from his little brother and sister, just because he's big and strong and can bully them.

The world NEEDS a mother who comes and takes the toys away from the big bully and distributes them equally among the three, telling him "No, George, you mustn't hog all the toys like that! It's not fair that one person should have verything and the others nothing! You share with your siblings, or I won't let you stay out and play!"

 

[Guest]

esp. for Colly

This is long but it's my thread so I'm posting it. Very intelligent and makes sense to me, though I've yet to see a Moore film. Nearly makes me not want to see it based on his points re. the director's technique and entertainment values. - Perdita

GEORGE & ME - by DAVID DENBY, The New Yorker on-line (Issue of 2004-06-28, Posted 2004-06-21)
Michael Moore’s viciously funny attack on the Bush Administration.

In Michael Moore’s new documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” George W. Bush sets his jaw, leans forward, and tells a group of reporters that terrorism must be destroyed. Then, turning away, he says, “Now watch this drive,” and tees off. A golfer, a bird hunter, a sportive wit at gatherings of the super-rich (“Some people call you the élite. I call you my base”), the President is often at play in “Fahrenheit 9/11.” In this incendiary and viciously funny attack on the Bush Administration—a whirlwind of political charges, sinister implications, and derision—the President comes off as a betrayer and a fool who has all the substance of a stuffed doll. Moore accuses Bush of handing part of America’s sovereignty to the Saudis; he implies that the president, after 9/11, was more effective at frightening the electorate than at pursuing the terrorists. Given its mixture of anguish and contempt, “Fahrenheit 9/11” can’t miss becoming a hit, with the result that the Republican Party and its allies will be all over Michael Moore for months. I have some difficulties with Moore myself, and I’m not entirely impressed by the standing ovation and the Palme d’Or that the film received recently at Cannes, where the audience may have been all too eager to applaud its own detestation of the United States. Still, this is Moore’s most powerful movie—the largest in scope, the most resourceful and skillful in means—and the best things in it have little to do with his usual ideological take on American power and George Bush. In the last third of the film, Moore gets hold of a genuine protagonist, and he has the good sense to stay out of her way.

Her name is Lila Lipscomb, and he finds her in Flint, Michigan, the home town to which he obsessively returns—Flint, the former industrial paradise destroyed by General Motors, whose emblematic decision in the eighties to close many of its plants in the city arrived like a Biblical curse. Years have gone by since the ruination, and Lila Lipscomb is still in there fighting—she works at a non-profit agency, helping the unemployed. Lipscomb, who is white, is married to an African-American, and the couple have several children, two of whom have served in the armed forces. A conservative Democrat who used to hate antiwar protesters, she describes her family as part of the “backbone” of the country. She’s not an intellectual or analytical person, but she knows who she is and what she wants to say.

All this is established in two initial interviews. Then the unimaginable happens: one of Lila’s sons, Sergeant Michael Pedersen, dies in the Iraq war. And, as we find out in a letter from Pedersen that Lila reads to her family, he died without knowing what in the world he was doing in the desert. At which point, Lila gives way to unappeasable grief. Dazed and untethered, she makes a pilgrimage to the White House. In a way, she becomes a more authentic version of Michael Moore, who is always seeking to confront power. In Washington, Moore and his crew follow her around; we can guess that he urged her along, and, sure enough, some skeptical woman—a stranger—rushes into the frame and says, “This is all staged.” Lila’s response to the intruder is devastating; it goes beyond eloquence. And at last, in the street, she loses her strength, unable to move. Why my son? As everyone who’s been through the experience says, nothing can console a parent for the death of a child. And when death is robbed of meaning, and tinged with betrayal, the pain flows over the lip of ordinary grief and engulfs us all.

“Fahrenheit 9/11” has a kind of necessary shock value: it reveals the underside of the war, the bloody messes not shown on news broadcasts. Moore makes use of footage given to him by American and foreign cameramen—scenes of Americans who were blown apart near Baghdad, or of maimed and nerve-shattered men trying to put their lives back together in a Washington hospital or at their home base. One soldier achieves a memorable clarity as he says, fighting pain and incapacity, that he’s disgusted by the lying way the Republican Party conducts its business. However embroiled the movie becomes in the upcoming election, no attack can lessen the impact of these scenes or diminish the anger they create in the audience; Moore, for once, offers experience rather than attitudes, sharp immediate suffering rather than his usual exasperated nostalgia for, say, the good old days, when the unions were strong and the workingman was king. If the rest of the movie had been created with this kind of directness and force, Michael Moore would have made a masterpiece.

The great documentary filmmakers of today—Frederick Wiseman, Marcel Ophuls, and Andrew Jarecki (of “Capturing the Friedmans”)—know that truth in an absolute sense is unattainable. It’s not even imaginable. Who would validate it? Who could say that another interpretation besides the filmmaker’s was out of the question? Movies are made by men and women, not by gods hurling thunderbolts of certitude. But the great documentary filmmakers at least make an attempt, however inadequate, compromised, or hopeless, to arrive at a many-sided understanding of some complex situation. Michael Moore is not that kind of filmmaker, nor does he want to be. He calls himself a satirist, but he’s less a satirist than a polemicist, a practitioner of mocking political burlesque: he doesn’t discover many new things but punches up what he already knows or suspects; he doesn’t challenge or persuade an audience but tickles or irritates it. He’s too slipshod intellectually to convince many except the already convinced, too eager to throw another treated log onto the fire of righteous anger.

Yet Moore has talent and mother wit, and he has become a significant figure in this culture—a shrewdly manipulative humorist-crank sticking pins in the hide of American self-esteem. The persona he offers to the camera is that of a commonsense man caught in the senseless machinery of capitalism. In such documentaries as “Roger & Me” and “Bowling for Columbine,” Moore created a kind of negative utopia in which the strong and the rich enjoy a triumph marred only by the disruptive efforts of Moore himself—a discontented American Everyman who pads around with his heavy gut and his baseball cap and harasses powerful people by asking them literal-minded questions. Moore has turned pain-in-the-neck intrusiveness and self-dramatization into a political jester’s provocation. In “Fahrenheit 9/11,” he works his famous shtick one more time: in front of the Capitol, he stops congressmen who voted for the Iraq war and asks them if they would consider urging their sons and daughters to join the armed services. As polite as a wine steward, he holds out the recruiting literature. Most of the congressmen skitter away like water bugs.

This is first-rate mischief. But a lot of Moore’s teasing comes off as tricky and too easy, or as motivated by a paranoia so engulfing that it has blocked out normal skepticism—his own and (if he has his way) ours, too. The ideological framework of “Fahrenheit 9/11” goes roughly like this: America is not a democracy; America is an oligarchy in which the wealthy pull the strings behind a façade of manufactured democratic consent. The Bush clan rigged the national election in 2000; still, the new Administration was failing until 9/11, an event that the President exploited to create an atmosphere of endless fear and a practice of endless warfare. In the aftermath of the attacks, the White House allowed many Saudis, including twenty-four members of the bin Laden family, to fly out of the country after perfunctory questioning by the F.B.I. Why? Because the bin Ladens, along with the house of Saud itself, have been intimately connected for decades with the rise of the Bushes—funnelling money, in return for influence, into businesses controlled by the family or their friends. In brief, the republic has been bought. Moore implies that Afghanistan was invaded partly so that American oil interests could follow up on a deal arranged earlier with the Taliban to set up a natural-gas pipeline that would run through the country; Iraq was invaded so that military contracts would be pumped up and the Bushes’ friends enriched. On the ground, the war is fought by an impoverished class created by the ruthlessness of capitalism—men and women who, faced with dim economic chances, have no choice but to “volunteer” for the armed services.

Saying that pieces of this are true—or partly true, or true when joined to counterclaims (isn’t the Army mostly a boon for the working class?)—doesn’t settle the journalistic issue. The movie’s more radical allegations, which arrive like a shower of poison darts, are impossible to sort out and evaluate. On the Bush connections with the Saudis, for instance, Moore takes a line similar to that of Craig Ungar in his recent book, “House of Bush, House of Saud,” but Ungar cites his sources in footnotes, and you can check up on him if you want to. Moore uses documents here and there, but much of the movie is too enraged and malicious to offer proof. “Was it all just a dream?” Moore asks at the beginning, reviewing the past four years, which have taken on the character of an ominous hallucination—so ominous that most of us, he believes, can’t quite wrap our minds around it. To jolt us out of complacency, he depends on an editing method of flat-out contradiction—say, a Donald Rumsfeld claim of “humanitarian” bombing followed by shots of an Iraqi family’s home destroyed by bombs. Is Rumsfeld’s insistence that we have killed as few civilians as possible refuted by this heart-wrenching juxtaposition? No, it’s neither proved nor disproved. Moore also gathers single shots together in volleys of didactic montage—for instance, Administration figures and Saudi ministers greeting one another fervently, or images of the President’s men being made up before television appearances, a sequence implying that the Bush people are all in the grip of frivolous vanity. But this is cheap and meaningless. Everyone who goes on television gets made up.

Moore teases the powerful by playing them off against cornball pop-culture archetypes—turning the Afghanistan war into a “Bonanza”-style TV Western in which Tony Blair appears in a ten-gallon hat. How much water will that joke hold? And is this joker opposed to the Afghanistan war? (In “Bowling for Columbine,” Moore presented Bill Clinton’s intervention against Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing as a case of slaphappy American militarism.) Moore never talks about Islamic fundamentalism and training camps, obsessive anti-Westernism, or suicide terrorists and the difficulty of guarding against them; he never asks how the American government should conduct itself in a war against religious totalitarians. There are, apparently, no justifiable fears, only hysterical fears manipulated by the authorities, whose every act is purposive and conspiratorial. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Moore that people like Tom Ridge may simply not know what they’re doing and are desperately trying to appear on top of the situation.

Moore can’t resist amusing his campus and conspiracy-nut following, along with the gleeful sophomore in all of us, but, as the man said, when you aim at the king you had better kill him. At the moment, the stakes may be too high for shenanigans. “Fahrenheit 9/11” offers the thrill of a coherent explanation for everything, but parts of the movie are no better than a wild, lunging grab at a supposed master plan. Did Bush, as Moore implies, allow Osama bin Laden to survive because of American financial ties to Osama’s protectors, the Taliban? (If so, the Pentagon war planners were part of the plot.) Moore is a genuine populist, but what he can’t deal with is the unpleasant possibility that Bush, as people used to say of Nixon, has made a shrewd assessment of the lack of virtue and curiosity in the American public. A lot of Americans still admire the ignorant, smirking, chest-out, crotch-forward triumphalism. Michael Moore has become a sensational entertainer of the already converted, but his enduring problem as a political artist is that he has never known how to change anyone’s politics.

 

[Pure]

{double deleted}

 

[Pure]

That's a clever piece of disparagement; it's a slick attempted hatchet job by Mr. Denby from a pseudo Olympian perspective. It offers 'faint praise' ("first rate mischief") manages to slander and demean without actually saying, in any substantial way, what the errors or problems are. (See the example below)

Its only coherent point, to me, is an accusation of lunacy.

Its essential message is that Moore is a paranoid lunatic, with a few technical and entertainment gifts. Allegedly, because of these faults, he can only reach the converted, hence is a second rate filmmaker.

As an example, Denby summarizes the 'ideological framework' thus


a lot of Moore’s teasing comes off as tricky and too easy, or as motivated by a paranoia so engulfing that it has blocked out normal skepticism—his own and (if he has his way) ours, too. The ideological framework of “Fahrenheit 9/11” goes roughly like this:

America is not a democracy; America is an oligarchy in which the wealthy pull the strings behind a façade of manufactured democratic consent. The Bush clan rigged the national election in 2000; still, the new Administration was failing until 9/11, an event that the President exploited to create an atmosphere of endless fear and a practice of endless warfare.

In the aftermath of the attacks, the White House allowed many Saudis, including twenty-four members of the bin Laden family, to fly out of the country after perfunctory questioning by the F.B.I. Why? Because the bin Ladens, along with the house of Saud itself, have been intimately connected for decades with the rise of the Bushes—funnelling money, in return for influence, into businesses controlled by the family or their friends. In brief, the republic has been bought.

Let's see: _not a democracy, but an oligarchy ruled by the wealthy, who 'manufacture consent_. Hmmmm Sounds right to me. What exactly is Denby's position? Well functioning democracy?

_exploiting 9-11 to create endless fear and a practice of endless warfare._ Sounds about right also. Again, Denby's counter thesis is unclear, except to suggest there's lots of bungling (always an alternative to a 'conspiracy' explanation). Well, there's bungling too. So it's not much of a counter thesis.

_republic has been bought_ Wow. definitely paranoid. What does Denby think? Half bought? Incorrupt?

Denby, of course, knows there's lots of truth to the above, so after insinuating paranoia, he makes a different objection: too much.

Saying that pieces of this are true—or partly true, or true when joined to counterclaims (isn’t the Army mostly a boon for the working class?)—doesn’t settle the journalistic issue. The movie’s more radical allegations, which arrive like a shower of poison darts, are impossible to sort out and evaluate.

Viewers can't sort out the allegations. Well, we'll see. Denby compares the theses with Unger, in House of Saud, and decries Moores lack of footnotes or proof. IOW, maybe it's true, but Unger does it right, and Moore's too wildly insane and bent on entertaining lefties. Denby expects a movie to do what a 1000 page book could do, and manages to play off Moore against Unger, although they have similar theses! Very clever!

Let's look at one substantive criticism with a concrete example:

much of the movie is too enraged and malicious to offer proof. “Was it all just a dream?” Moore asks at the beginning, reviewing the past four years, which have taken on the character of an ominous hallucination—so ominous that most of us, he believes, can’t quite wrap our minds around it. To jolt us out of complacency, he depends on an editing method of flat-out contradiction—say, a Donald Rumsfeld claim of “humanitarian” bombing followed by shots of an Iraqi family’s home destroyed by bombs. Is Rumsfeld’s insistence that we have killed as few civilians as possible refuted by this heart-wrenching juxtaposition? No, it’s neither proved nor disproved.

Well, if claims of limited and humane amounts of civilian casualties are NOT (partially) refuted by shots of destroyed homes and dead civilians, exactly what approach does Denby suggest? Reeling off numbers, with footnotes to the New York Times?

One simply cannot 'prove' undue Iraqi civilian casualties, in a film. Would aerial photos do? Stacks of bodies.? The point is to suggest what the evidence is.

Another counterthesis of Denby's besides bungling is
"[Bush shows] ignorant, smirking, chest-out, crotch-forward triumphalism." Again, there's something to this. Bush struts, but that does not show that economic motives are imagined by lefties.


{{Denby appears to be Republican (or Hawk PW'd Democrat) in perspective,}} {deleted 6-23}


{{Added 5-23}} Though Denby hues a conservative Republican line on this issue, he's in fact one of those tortured 'hawk' liberals. Several of them 'came out' after 9-11 to join the 'crusade.' See the characterization of him, elsewhere, at the end}}

But he has no real 'ammo' or proof of errors, hence all the sniping, snide remarks, and blanket assertions (as above) that don't bear scrutiny. He's a very intelligent lawyer type, trying to defend Bush or do in Bush's enemies mainly through obfuscation, and tap dancing.

====
{Who is Denby: Here's one characterization, from a few minutes googling}

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1021

{part of a review of Denby's book: _Great Books_, graded C+}

Denby is also a political type whom we've encountered before--the troubled liberal (see Orrin's review: In Defense of Elitism (1994)(William A. Henry III 1950-1994)(Grade: B-)). These folk tend to come from a Liberal milieu (both Denby and Henry from journalism), to which they hope to return, but have recognized something about modern Liberalism which bothers them so much as to shake their faith. The result is that they produce these fundamentally schizophrenic works wherein they shy away from pursuing their own ideas to their natural conclusion. You therefore get these stinging critique of some aspect of Liberalism, in this case the attack on the Canon, but mixed in with it you tend to get fairly disingenuous assertions of Liberal loyalty and self contradictory potshots at easy conservative targets.

Seems to describe the New Yorker piece to a T.

 

[cloudy]

I've followed this thread with interest, but so far haven't felt that there was anything I needed to contribute. However, I ran across this article today:
Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore , by Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair, and a self-proclaimed socialist.

I'm not advocating either side here, but it seems to me after everything I've read that if you're going to see the movie, see it as it is: entertainment, not something handed down from on high as absolute truth.

Just my two cents.

 

[Pure]

Nice link, cloudy! (some additions, 6-23 11:15 edt)

Well, for all the foaming and frothing, Hitchens at least gives some substantive criticisms and displays his well known intelligence. Further, his moral indignation (see reference at the end) is in high gear, and is always impressive, as is his ability to verbally skewer almost anyone.

Ultimately, he has the problems of the lefty who's 'seen the Lord' and been convinced of some US holy mission in Afghanistan and Iraq. And a few other places.:1) Who the fuck says the US is so damn moral, and 2) Where do you draw the line if world policing and 'regime changes beneficial to the citizens.'

His 'argument', moreover, is very close to being merely a list of supposed instances of terrorists' use of Iraq's hospitality, and mention of links of Iraq and Palestinian militants. EVEN supposing it's as he says, 'taking down' the Saddam regime as ot was done, may not be the answer, since Iraq has gone from hospitable safe place to prime al qaeda recruiting ground.

The issue of 'better off', both in Iraq, the region, and inside the US, is far from clear. Hitchens, Bush and Blair, notwithstanding. This is weak, after-the-fact justification. It could be argued that the civilian deaths per day since US (military, then reconstruction) 'help,' is larger than the routine numbers (aside from the big frays) of Saddams regime. (Same issue in Afghanistan.).

Odd, he says Afg'n is almost rebuilt, refugees returning, infrastructure up. Other reports say the country's in chaos, and Karzai only controls the capital. Actual long range outcomes are difficult; just as difficult as it is to think of Hitchen's scene of the Taliban in power, and what evolution would have occurred.

Hitchen's cheapest shot is to suggest Moore is (may be) a US-hating PACIFIST. Wow, that's heavy. (sarcasm). And Hitchens, as a US loving ex-leftie finds that combo for some reason morally incoherent.

He's been listening to too much right wing pseudo indignation, I think. He makes pacifism sound like sitting on your hands during an Ebola plaque, and Bush's militant oversees adventures seem like exercizes in morality.

But, Htichens is far more interesting reading than Denby; he's direct rather than snide; vitriolic, rather than pseudo sophisticated. He has at least some pieces of an analysis of the problem, as compared with Denby's proposals of bungling(accidents) and crotch-grabbing.

PS Hitchens has written an excellent devastating critique of the Abu Ghraib scandal at the address below. A nice phrase, "a moral Chernobyl" is used.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102373/

 

[Spinaroonie]

By the way, Moore clearly says Fahr 9-11 is NOT a documentary, but an 'op ed' piece.

Wow, what a sliced up quote - the Correct quote is that His documentaries are not TRADITIONAL documentaries, and tend to have more of an op ed piece to them.

 

[Spinaroonie]

Re: esp. for Colly

The great documentary filmmakers of today— Andrew Jarecki (of “Capturing the Friedmans”

This one line invalidates the whole article. As good as CtF is, it doesn't set Jarecki up to be "One of the great documentary filmmakers of today" - it's his first feature and his second doc - period. He has a long way to go to become one of the greats. It also left out Errol Morris - who is either the greatest or the second greatest today depending on who you ask. The author doesn't know anything about documentary.

 

[Pure]

movie site and poster

By the way, check out

www.fahrenheit911.com

Its opening screen, a composite 'shot' of Moore and Bush holding hands, is now on one poster used to promote the film.

A trifle inflammatory.

 

[shereads]

This will be my last stab at debating the merits of a film or book with people who haven't seen it, so it will be my last post to this thread. Moore's film is brilliant, it won at Cannes, and not a single critic has been able to refute the veracity of the film's major themes. It isn't necessary to distort the truth to present on-screen what so many of us have already concluded from the evidence.

Moore's film serves the purpose of putting Bush/Cheney's lies into a coherent stream. Just as I did with my "'Hello,' he lied" thread when I used their own words to prove they couldn't be trusted. Since then, it's become clear that neither that post nor any of the half-dozen books from inside the administration, nor any film will ever make Bush's supporters admit the seriousness of what he has done to the country and the world. With one exception: Blacksnake, who had been a vociferous supporter of Bush but wrote a post in response to "'Hello,' he lied," "Good job" and didn't try to justify what cannot be justified or excused - the fact that people are dead and more are dying every day because of liars.


Having seen Chris Hitchens on MSNBC (the weaker twin of Fox News), I was amazed at the deliberate way he dodges a point that he can't refute, by using the "circular logic" employed so well by neocons like Amicus and Blarney. Hitchens premise in the interview I watched:

1. Moore said after 9/11 that Osama Bin Laden is innocent until proven guilty.
2. Now Moore implies that the Bush administration should not have allowed Bin Laden's family to leave the country so quickly after 9/11.
3. This, to Chris Hitchens, constitutes a contradiction.

No, it doesn't, you ass. Moore's point is that the Bush administration, having announced that Osama was responsible for 9/11, should not have allowed his family to leave the country so quickly after 9/11. There's no contradiction there, none at all.

I'll let someone else speak to the rest of Hitchen's silly rant. A helpful pornster sent me this link, from a site called "Hollywood Bitchslap." Here, as a farewell gesture to this poor, tired, abused thread, is a bitchslap for Hitchens:

http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=1150

Moore's fans will enjoy this. Moore's detractors will either ignore it or find something irrelevent to expose as an error. Have fun.

 

[shereads]

Oops! I lied.

Fortunately, mine won't kill anybody.

The previous post was going to be my last to this frustrating thread, but this refutal of Hichens' refutal of Moore's esposé wouldn't paste into that one. It's worth reading. Parry is my new hero, right after Michael Moore and Al Franken.

Defending Truth: Slate's Chris Hitchens does a hatchet job on Michael Moore

by Chris Parry

{excerpts; edited for length}

The partisan hacks were out for blood on Bowling For Columbine within days of its release, but with Fahrenheit 9/11, they're out before the flick is even in theaters. Slate's resident Bush apologist, Chris Hitchens, did a total kneecap job on Michael Moore yesterday with an article entitled Unfairenheit 9/11: The lies of Michael Moore. In it, he wrote all manner of allegation about Moore's new film, peeing on it from a great height and alleging that the film shared the same standards as the propaganda films of the Nazis.

Hitchens: "How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh?"

Parry: Need I say, on behalf of all those who claim a leftist affiliation out there, that when a lefty version of Limbaugh comes along we want nothing to do with it.

Hitchens: "In late 2002{snip} Michael Moore stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. Something has since apparently persuaded Moore that {snip}Osama Bin Laden is so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a dangerous "distraction" from the fight against him."

Parry: A simplistic attempt at 'Gotcha'. Allow me to explain Moore's motivation, as if it needed explaining to anyone with a concept of logic, law and due process. Bin Laden IS innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the law. But in order to prove his guilt, one much capture him and put him to trial. What Moore is saying in F9/11 is, "Why, exactly, when the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden is completely justified, have only 14,000 troops been sent after him, while ten times that number have been sent into Iraq to take over a country that had NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11?"

Hitchens: "Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about Afghanistan: 1) The Bin Laden family had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group.

Parry: How do you get 'close and convoluted' exactly? The business relationships that Moore points out run far more frequently than a single connection at the Carlyle Group. Bush's first private company was invested in heavily by Osama Bin Laden's brother when the firm was in dire financial straits. Bush promptly drove the newly funded company to bankruptcy regardless. A Bin Laden sat on the Carlyle Group's board of directors while Bush Sr was on the same board, and while that comfortable connection was growing, Carlyle gave Bush Jr an airline catering company to run... which he promptly ran into the ground. Again.On the day before September 11, Bush Sr was meeting with the Carlyle head honchos, including Mr Bin Laden, to talk business in New York, but Poppy left early for a remote part of the Midwest. The next day, the WTC towers would tumble, and three days later, while the rest of us were stranded at airports and bus stations, the Bin Ladens (including the Carlyle director) were whisked off (without questioning) to Paris 'for their own protection'.

Hitchens: 2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment in the United States.

Parry: Yes. That would include Citibank and large parts of Time Warner (the owners of CNN) and Disney (who refused to let Fahrenheit 9/11 be shown in their theaters). The Carlyle Group just yesterday purchased Loews Theaters. Hmm...

Hitchens: 3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests.

Parry: Moore's point was far clearer than Hitchens gives credit for. In the years before September 11 2001, the Clinton government passed a directive that no business be done with the Taliban, for they had been harboring and protecting Osama Bin Laden's al Queda organization. But when Bush came to office, not only did he send the Taliban $43m in aid, he also brought a delegation of Taliban honchos to Texas to discuss a pipeline that would take gas from the Caspian Sea to Pakistan - through Afghanistan. The prime movers behind this plan were Unocal, who Moore shows again and again Bush had majors ties to. After September 11, when we duly went in and overturned the Taliban as the rulers of Afghanistan, who did Bush put in their place? Khamid Karzai - an employee of Unocal.

Hichens: 4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape.

Parry: I'm sorry, but I thought this was considered fact. Osama Bin Laden got through the kurds, as well as the few hundred Americans behind them, and was spirited off to Pakistan where he remains to this day. He's playing X-Box and ordering pizza, people. Bush's response to that? He took troops out of Afghanistan and sent them instead to go get Saddam Hussein. Think about that - they know roughly where Bin Laden is, but rather than make his capture a priority, they went after someone else. With TEN TIMES the number of troops that they took to Afghanistan. If that doesn't warrant mentioning, I'm Dutch.

Hichens: 5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely risible in that its non-army was purely American.

Parry: I'm not even sure what Hitchens is trying to say here. Suffice to say, when the US says "jump", Khamid Karzai says, "would you like oil with that?"

Hichens: 6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted.

Parry: I have to say that I was shocked and pleasantly surprised by exactly how pro-soldier Fahrenheit 9/11 is. It shows the soldiers as just doing their job, with minimal supervision and no clear objective. It shows them asking the question, again and again, "Why are we still here?"{snip} And it shows conferences of US corporate contractors heading to Iraq, where a speaker says such things as "whatever it costs, the government will pay it," and "when that oil flows, there's going to be a lot of money there." So yeah, American lives in Afghanistan have been wasted. As they have in Iraq. The boys who went to fight for what they thought was right have been sacrificed so 'the have's and the have more's' (or, as George likes to call them, his base) can profit.

Hichens: "And these are simply observations on what is "in" the film. If we turn to the facts that are deliberately left out, we discover that there is an emerging Afghan army, that the country is now a joint NATO responsibility and thus under the protection of the broadest military alliance in history, that it has a new constitution and is preparing against hellish odds to hold a general election, and that at least a million and a half of its former refugees have opted to return. I don't think a pipeline is being constructed yet, not that Afghanistan couldn't do with a pipeline. But a highway from Kabul to Kandahar—an insurance against warlordism and a condition of nation-building—is nearing completion with infinite labor and risk. We also discover that the parties of the Afghan secular left—like the parties of the Iraqi secular left—are strongly in favor of the regime change. But this is not the sort of irony in which Moore chooses to deal."

Parry: That's perhaps because there is no irony inherent. Never in Moore's film does he say that troops shouldn't have gone into Afghanistan. If he did say that once at a film festival two years ago, it's not in his film today - so why is this the primary point of Hitchens' article? Is Moore not allowed to point out 90 truths if one of them doesn't match with something he once said during a film festival panel? Going to war with Afghanistan for harboring terrorists is one thing. Going to war against Iraq for oil is another altogether, and only someone with a partisan ax to grind couldn't (or wouldn't) see that.

Hichens: "In a long and paranoid (and tedious) section at the opening of the film, he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11. {snip} In the interval between Moore's triumph at Cannes and the release of the film in the United States, the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke has come forward to say that he took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures."

Parry: Clarke worked not for the FBI, who desperately wanted to interview those family members (as interviews with agents in F9/11 point out), rather he worked for George Bush's White House. As for the 9/11 commission having nothing to complain about, Hitchens might be better served to note that the commission has said that their only mandate is to investigate the CAUSE of 9/11 - not the subsequent actions that may have helped capture (or free) the organizers of the attack. To admit such wouldn't serve Hitchens' real point here - that Michael Moore must be smeared at all costs, so that Republicans can say "See? The movie is all crap! It's lies! Lies, I tell you!"

Hichens: "President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. {snip}

Parry: According to figures compiled by the Washington Post, to August 2003 from the time he took office, Bush had taken 250 days off. That's 27% of his presidency to that point spent on vacation. In barely 2/3 of one Presidential term, George Bush Jr took more days off than Clinton and Jimmy Carter did in a combined TWELVE YEARS! Hitchens takes issue with a shot that has Tony Blair in the background. Perhaps on one of the other several dozen vacations Bush has taken Blair wasn't present? Along with taking more vacation days than any other President but his father, Bush has also attended more fundraising functions that any other President. And all that during a time of war?

Hichens: "The president is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, on a golf course, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive.{snip}If Eisenhower had done this it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it it would have shown his charm."

Parry: Not if he'd said it while the nation was at war, it wouldn't.

Hichens: "More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then {snip} the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse."

Parry: Where is Hitchens getting his crack? You don't need to rush to war to actually be "doing something". Surely Bush could have done more, while the jets were still in the air and heading to New York City and Washington, than sit in a children's classroom for fifteen minutes reading "My Pet Goat". He heard we were under attack and he did nothing. He sat and waited it out. Meanwhile, in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, Americans were dying.

There were many things Bush could have done that day. The first one might have been to cancel the school photo op when he'd heard that the first plane had hit the WTC (he told a reporter on the way into the school, "that's one bad pilot, huh? I'll talk about it later.") He might also have got out of that classroom and hit the phones. He might have authorized the hijacked planes to be shot down by F-16's, or even make sure that F-16's were shadowing the hijacked planes (they never did, even though there was more than an hour between the first hijacking being reported and the last plane hitting a field in Pennsylvania). He might have pulled a Rudy Giulliani and got on the TV to tell us all that it was going to be okay.
But he did nothing. And Hitchens, in trying to say that the only thing he could have done that day was rush to war, is not just being disingenuous, he's being totally and morally dishonest. And YOU know it, no matter who you vote for.

Hichens: "I'll just say that the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once. (Actually, that's not quite right. It is briefly mentioned but only, and smarmily, because of the bad period when Washington preferred Saddam to the likewise unmentioned Ayatollah Khomeini.)"

Parry: If I were an editor who wanted to twist Hitchens' words here, I could have changed the above passage to: "Moore mentions the 30-year record of war crimes and repression of Saddam's Baath Party, while pointing out that the Bush cabinet members that very much wanted to go to war against him also once sold him chemical weapons, financed his army and called him their great friend in the Middle East" - and it wouldn't be a lie. That's exactly what Moore says, but Hitchens prefers to twist it so he looks eville. Hitchens is essentially admitting the same thing Moore is saying. But he says it in such a way that anyone who hasn't seen the film could say "Yeah! That Michael Moore, he's a liar!"

Which is the title of the piece yet, remarkably, we haven't actually got to a single lie yet. Let's see if any pop up in the rest of the article...

Hichens: "Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. {snip}

Parry: As an objective writer, I have to point out when something that doesn't help my side of the argument is factual, and this is indeed a blooper from Moore. Certainly I know what the filmmaker was trying to say - that Iraq was no threat to us on or after September 11 2001, but he said it in a way that makes him easy to shoot down. Saddam Hussein often boasted of offering rewards to the families of terrorists. Saddam's men tried to off Poppy Bush after he'd been removed as President of the United States. Iraq took US citizens hostage during the Gulf War. But the following must be added: *Israel-directed terrorism was never the focus of our war on Iraq. The 9/11 terrorists were, and as we now know in a big way, Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. In Bush's own words, "We have no evidence that Saddam was involved in the September the 11th." * While Saddam's agents tried to off Bush Sr, that was after Iraq had been told by Bush Sr's government that the US took "no position" on the country's dispute with Kuwait. Then we called him a villain and attacked him. * Yes, Iraq took hostages during the war (who were all released unharmed) and Americans died fighting in the conflict - but they WERE no threat to Americans until we doublecrossed them and decided to invade. So yeah, Moore overplays the case with his statement, but it's certainly defensible.

Hichens: "Thus, in spite of the film's loaded bias against the work of the mind, you can grasp even while watching it that Michael Moore has just said, in so many words, the one thing that no reflective or informed person can possibly believe: that Saddam Hussein was no problem. No problem at all."

Parry: He says no such thing.

Hichens: "We are shown some American civilians who have had absurd encounters with idiotic "security" staff {snip} Then we are shown underfunded police departments that don't have the means or the manpower to do any stop-and-search: a power suddenly demanded by Moore on their behalf that we know by definition would at least lead to some ridiculous interrogations. Finally, Moore complains that there isn't enough intrusion and confiscation at airports and says that it is appalling that every air traveler is not forcibly relieved of all matches and lighters.

Parry: If Hitchens can't see Moore's point in all this, he's either trying hard not to or he's just flat out dumb. By pointing out the ridiculous stories of encounters with overzealous security staff, then pointing out that the State of Oregon only has eight state troopers on duty at certain times through the week, leaving huge swathes of coastline unprotected, then pointing out that three matchbooks and two lighters is a-okay to take on a plane but four matchbooks and two lighters is not (despite the evidence showing that shoebomber Richard Reid would have succeeded in blowing up a civillian flight if he'd had access to a lighter), Moore is making a very salient point: homeland security is a JOKE. You can see that, right? Because I saw it clearly.

Hichens: "Circling back to where we began, why did Moore's evil Saudis not join "the Coalition of the Willing"? Why instead did they force the United States to switch its regional military headquarters to Qatar?"

Parry: Because the Saudi royals are far from 'in control' at home. Their close ties to the US are the subject of much local dissension, and bombings of US buildings in Saudi Arabia are a regular occurrence. For many years those bombings were blamed on westerners who the Saudis accused of running 'illegal alcohol rings." They arrested random westerners and held them in prison for years, torturing them for confessions, all so they could put forth the spin that there was no internal problem in Saudi Arabia. Well, there is. There's a big problem, and had the Saudi leaders allowed America to run its attack on Iraq from that country, chances are you'd have seen open revolt against the house of Saud. That's why they didn't let the US base their forces there, and that's why Osama Bin Laden got annoyed with the US in the first place (along with the call for a Palestinian homeland, Bin Laden's big demand is that the US get out of Saudi Arabia, which is considered the Arab holy land). It's also why the US didn't make a bigger deal about the refusal - in essence, they understood the delicacy of the situation.

Hichens: "There's more. Poor people often volunteer to join the army, and some of them are duskier than others. Betcha didn't know that. Back in Flint, Mich., Moore feels on safe ground. There are no martyred rabbits this time. Instead, it's the poor and black who shoulder the packs and rifles and march away."

Parry: Is Hitchens really going to hang his hat on this? In F9/11, Moore follows a couple of Marine recruiters as they hit the local shopping mall (the poorer mall, where the minority folks shop) in search of new blood. They can be heard talking about how to corner someone trying to get away from them, they're seen taking down the name and address of someone who says they're not interested, "so we know not to bother you again..." Puh-lease. The recruitment candidates are mostly black, mostly unemployed, mostly people who have nothing going on in life and are being offered schooling, which they can otherwise in no way afford.
The truth is that the people serving in Iraq are, by and large, either volunteers from poor backgrounds trying to get some sort of possibility of education in their lives, or middle class white folks who signed up to the National Guard back in the day when doing so meant you WOULDN'T be sent overseas. There's also another contingent in the US armed forces that perhaps you didn't know about - the foreigners. America's armed forces now feature Mexicans who want citizenship in the US and are prepared to be shot at to get it. Foreign nationals in America's armed forces - but hey, Moore shouldn't point such things out because whitey might feel slighted, right Hitchens?

Hichens: "In the film, Moore says loudly and repeatedly that not enough troops were sent to garrison Afghanistan and Iraq. (This is now a favorite cleverness of those who were, in the first place, against sending any soldiers at all.)"

Parry: Uh, no. He doesn't. He says not enough troops were sent to Afghanistan - which is correct, evidenced by the fact that we didn't catch Osama Bin Laden, who killed 3000 of our own. But Moore is NOT saying there should have been more troops sent to Iraq, he's saying that the US went in underprepared. There's a big difference between the two positions - one says "we should flood the country with our men and get the bastards!" while the other says, "You idiots, you sent our kids in there, in numbers too small to effectively control the place, when you shouldn't have been sending in troops at all!" The latter is Moore's point, and it's a very clear one.

Hitchens is being intellectually dishonest on a grand scale. He's pulling the right wing move that we've seen time and again where you manipulate words and scenarios to suit your own needs, and anyone who sees Moore's movie will see that this is the case.

And they really will.

A woman who sat next to me during this film, a respected newspaper writer, cried out loud at what she saw on screen. Is this woman so weak of mind that she could be snowed by some clever editing and emotional background music? Of course not. What she saw were images we're not allowed to see as a matter of course in American life any more. She saw babies covered in burns, missing limbs, being thrown on trucks. She saw US soldiers singing "the roof is on fire" as Baghdad buildings burned behind them. She saw soldiers standing in the desert wondering what the hell they got themselves into, and why.

And she saw a pattern of deception, hubris and elitist manouveuring that saw the western world descend into war for NO REASON other than the profit of a small number of people. She saw lives destroyed so that Halliburton could see their stock rise. She saw parents grieving, caskets returning, and innocent Iraqi civilians calling for our deaths because, heck, after you've flattened someone's home with their family inside, they tend to get a littly pissy.

Hichens: "However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that "fact-checking" is beside the point."

Parry: No sir, fact checking IS the point when you accuse someone of lying. And you, sir, have not proved one single lie here. Hitchens claims lies have been told, but can only find one statement that could even be inferred as untrue, and even that's a stretch. As for the rest, he seems to think if he can smear a little doody on Michael Moore's reputation at the top of the article, he doesn't have to prove it in the bottom.

This Slate article, good people with brains in your heads, is some of the shoddiest 'journalism' I've seen. And it comes to you from a guy who wrote an article not long ago defending Ahmad Chalabi, double agent to the Iranians, fabricator of WMD stories, and wanted bank defrauder, saying "if there has to be a 'Mr. Shiite' in Iraq, I can think of worse candidates than Chalabi."

I can't.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

But when one side of the political equation is making death threats to theater owners (and they have been) that will be showing this film, it is the civic duty of everyone who values freedom of speech and open political discourse to act as a counterbalance to those threats

Kinda like the pro-lifers who bomb abortion clinics, killing off not only mothers, but also the babies they claim they want to save...

Right-wingers are anti-democratic. Being fair isn't as important to them as being rich and having the power to tell others what to do with their lives.

 

[shereads]

[

Right-wingers are anti-democratic. Being fair isn't as important to them as being rich and having the power to tell others what to do with their lives.

You should be jailed and maybe executed for saying that.

As for the clinic bombers, everyone knows that unborn people are more valuable than born ones, who have already had their chance.

 

[Svenskaflicka]

Behave, COMRADE!

 

[shereads]

He isn't presenting all of the facts and leaving the decision to the viewer, he is presenting the facts he wants, providing one side of an issue, without the slighest concern for objectivity.

How can you possibly know the degree of Moore's concern for objectivity?

Tons of sources who will tell you that Moore twists the truth, and they will site examples that may, themselves, be distortions of the truth. Just as there are neo-Nazi groups able to site evidence that the holocost didn't happen.

These same sources will defend Bush's direct contradictions until they turn blue. A lie is a lie, and Moore is rather more skillful at documenting the lies of others than they have been at finding his. As you will see if you read the response to Chris Hichens that I posted above.

I am not willing to buy it from Michal Moore, the source is tainted. Tainted by an admittedly personal grudge

I have a grudge against Bush for the same reasons Moore has, and they are not personal reasons. Neither Moore nor I have been sent to Iraq and shot. If we had been, you could say that our grudges were personal. Rather, we begrudge the Bush family the right to use armies for personal gain.

and his penchant for playing fast & loose with the facts.

He doesn't play fast and loose with the facts. He presents facts that are contrary to what our government has led us to believe. Thank God someone bothers.

Tainted by his admission of leaving out pertinent facts

Really? See the Parry article, above, regarding Hichens' review of F9/11, and then show me some evidence that Moore leaves out facts that would alter people's conclusions about the premise of his film. I haven't seen anything yet refutes the the essential themes of this film or Columbine. What I do see happening in reponse to this latest film - to be expected, because its message is almost too terrifying and tragic to accept - is the same sort of war that was waged effectively against Al Gore in 2000. If you say something enough, it becomes true: "He is a liar, and here is an example; when the example is refuted, I will not retract my statement, in fact I'll repeat it. Eventually, it will be accepted as a commonly known facet of this man's character." If something is repeated often enough, and the retractions don't receive the same degree of publicity, they must be true.


As for how he elicits statements from unwilling witnesses? Misleading people to get them to say incriminating things is a common investigative technique. Like recording people when they're not aware they're being recorded, it sounds and is a bit sleazy. But if you're faced with trying to get evidence of something that is essential to know, it's the lesser of two sleazes. The truth is the truth, even if it was blurted out unintentionally by someone who later complains that he was mislead.

"Mr. Doe, we are giving away a million dollars to people who admit they murdered their wives. Did you kill yours, and can you prove it?"

"Yes. The body is buried under the basement floor."

There's no million dollars. But if the body is under the basement, aren't you glad the misleading interview technique worked?


If the intent of a documentary were to simply inform, there would be no dramatic use of music; no casting of narrators with a certain type of voice; none of the things make a film compelling. We would not watch such films; neither would anyone bother making them. If there were an audience for the type of documentary you're envisioning, without a point of view and without dramatic effect, the McNeil-Lehrer Report would be every American's favorite TV news source. Hardly any explosive graphics, not a lot of production value, just talking heads saying informative things. If people won't watch it in the comfort of their own homes, what makes you think they'd drive to a theater to watch it. Moore performs a service no less essential than print journalism: he puts forth hidden truths, in a format that is entertaining enough to keep an audience's attention.

The saddest part of this is that I think you, Colly, are one of the people who would appreciate his films. Despite what you've read, they use understatement to brilliant effect and most scenes simply speak for themselves. Like the scenes of the World Trade Center collapsing, we understand by watching that an unspeakable evil has been done. Hearing the facts that the other side would like us to hear wouldn't lessen the impact, nor should it.

Here's a suggestion: rent Roger & Me some evening. It's not about anything controversial unless you are either an unemployed auto worker whose job has been sent to Mexico, or the CEO of the company who closed the plant. It's Moore's first film, made on a shoestring budget, and there is very little prosthelitizing in it. It's funny and heartbreaking, and though we didn't know it at the time, it was a portent of the future.

 

[Pure]

Actually in my view that there's creeping fascism in the US, I'm rather startled that Moore's film--even if it's mediocre-- *made* the theaters!

Anyone have any info, besides the Disney thing, about trying to shut down Moore's movie? Any threats of criminal charges, treason, 'revealing secrets,' working for Osama?

I've watched too many thrillers about rogue agents with high powered scopes to their rifles that disassemble (The Jackal).
(And that one with Eastman trying to stop Malkovitch.)

Even in France, for example, it's illegal to be too nasty to the Pres, in print.

In a sense it's a real tribute to good old USA that the thing, even if it's trash--can be shown. In how many countries could its counterpart be shown? five? ten? Are there 50, out of the hundreds of nations?

Award for the best guess!! (with documentation).

 

[Clare Quilty]

Carlyle Group buys Loews

An investment group including the oligarchic Bush/Bin Laden associated Carlyle group have recently purchased the Loews cinema chain. "Fahrenheit 9/11,” which lambastes the hush-hush rightwing cabal, is scheduled to show on 59 screens of the Loews chain. Coincidence or instance of a vast rightwing conspiracy to silence Michael Moore, which say you?

Carlyle goes to the movies
Jeff Clabaugh
Staff Reporter

District-based investment firm The Carlyle Group is one of three investors that have agreed to buy Loews Cineplex Entertainment from Onex Corp. and Oaktree Capital Management for $1.46 billion.

The buyout is being led by Bain Capital, an investment firm started in 1984 by Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney. Spectrum Equity Investors is also part of the buyout team.

Loews is the third largest movie theater chain, with about 200 Cineplex operations worldwide. It operates 17 theaters in the Washington area. The company, founded by Marcus Loew in 1904, started life as a nickelodeon in New York. At its peak, it had 365 locations.

The Carlyle Group has more than $17 billion in assets under management. Last month it agreed to buy Verizon's Hawaiian business for $1.6 billion.

Carlyle was founded in 1987. Its directors have included former President George Bush, Collin Powell, James Baker and former British Prime Minister John Major.

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

It comes as no surprise to me that Christopher Hitchens tried to do a hatchet job on Michael Moore. Hitchen’s cheek is legendary.

Hitchens attacked Mother Theresa both before and after her death. One of his claims being that her work “served no higher a purpose than for the world's privileged to be able to see someone, somewhere, doing something for the Third World.” How the fact that the rest of society was not accompanying Mother Theresa on her mission, could become a reason to castigate her mission, makes sense only to someone with a diseased mind.

He used the popularity of Princess Diana, and extravagant mourning at the time of her death, to broadcast snide commentary about both the character of the deceased and her mourners, as some kind of justification for his anti royal sentiments.

He courageously restricted this commentary to American outlets, where legal protection against slander is not extended to the deceased.

Much of Hitchen’s career is founded upon scurrilous attacks against unlikely and often harmless victims.

I had intended to ignore Hitchen’s contribution to the Fahrenheit 9/11 controversy, but since I haven't been able to, I appreciate Chris Parry’s masterful rebuttal.

Thanks, Sher.

 

[Christopher Titus]

Four things:


ONE
Everyone here seems to have an extremely warped view of Conservative principles ( example: “Right-wingers are anti-democratic. Being fair isn't as important to them as being rich and having the power to tell others what to do with their lives”). No true Conservative believes this. Any Republican who would do, or think, such a thing is not a subscriber to the Conservative Ideology. I’m am sure there are indeed some Reps that do think like this, but they are in complete and utter violation of the principle in which the majority of Reps believe in.


TWO
Through many discussions (both in person and through the internet), I have learned that Capitalists and Socialists will never, and I mean NEVER, agree. The two ideologies are like oil and water. The importance of this is that most (all) European nations, and in my experience, Europeans, are Socialist. Which in turn means they simply will not agree with 90% of the USA’ policies. But instead of seeing this as a difference of opinions, some people (on both sides) come up with the notion that the other is ‘evil’. But the world has yet to see an ‘evil’ democracy. And that’s the true point; where all democracies. If one sovereign democratic nation decides to do something for their national interests, it is there right, and it is, without a doubt, an injustice for any other peoples to try to overrule the Democratically reached decision. (unless of course the other ‘peoples’ decide to declare themselves an enemy of the nation).


THE MAIN TOPIC:
There are thee kinds of ‘disagreeing’ people in this world: people you very much disagree with but are such upstanding men or women, and they’re arguments are so eloquent and well put together, that you still deeply respect them; then they are people who, you disagree with and you simply don’t like, you don’t think they’re lunatics, but still you dislike them; then there are peoples who’s arguments make absolutely no sense, and who’s way of presenting these arguments is deeply offending to you.
In my book, Michael Moore is of the last subject for me, ever since he made a political statement in an extremely non-political forum (Oscars), I have not only disliked the man, I have found both the way he presents his arguments, and the actual matter of his arguments to be of a very distasteful manner in my opinion. For example, I have yet to hear a argument put forth by George Soros, so until I do, he is, in my book, simply I man I disagree with, and whom I believe to be mistaken. But I have heard Moore’s arguments, and they have nearly drove me to hate the man. (and I hate no one).

AND LAST (and probably most important):
Why the hell can’t anyone have a political conversation without resulting to name calling, and hatred? Despite my dislike of him, Michael Moore is not ‘evil’. Ted Kennedy is not ‘evil’. Bill O’Reilly is not ‘evil’. And certainly George Bush is not ‘evil’. It’s all just differing opinions. (and truthfully, none of them may be the right way).

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

Four things:


ONE
Everyone here seems to have an extremely warped view of Conservative principles ( example: “Right-wingers are anti-democratic. Being fair isn't as important to them as being rich and having the power to tell others what to do with their lives”). No true Conservative believes this. Any Republican who would do, or think, such a thing is not a subscriber to the Conservative Ideology. I’m am sure there are indeed some Reps that do think like this, but they are in complete and utter violation of the principle in which the majority of Reps believe in.


TWO
Through many discussions (both in person and through the internet), I have learned that Capitalists and Socialists will never, and I mean NEVER, agree. The two ideologies are like oil and water. The importance of this is that most (all) European nations, and in my experience, Europeans, are Socialist. Which in turn means they simply will not agree with 90% of the USA’ policies. But instead of seeing this as a difference of opinions, some people (on both sides) come up with the notion that the other is ‘evil’. But the world has yet to see an ‘evil’ democracy. And that’s the true point; where all democracies. If one sovereign democratic nation decides to do something for their national interests, it is there right, and it is, without a doubt, an injustice for any other peoples to try to overrule the Democratically reached decision. (unless of course the other ‘peoples’ decide to declare themselves an enemy of the nation).


THE MAIN TOPIC:
There are thee kinds of ‘disagreeing’ people in this world: people you very much disagree with but are such upstanding men or women, and they’re arguments are so eloquent and well put together, that you still deeply respect them; then they are people who, you disagree with and you simply don’t like, you don’t think they’re lunatics, but still you dislike them; then there are peoples who’s arguments make absolutely no sense, and who’s way of presenting these arguments is deeply offending to you.
In my book, Michael Moore is of the last subject for me, ever since he made a political statement in an extremely non-political forum (Oscars), I have not only disliked the man, I have found both the way he presents his arguments, and the actual matter of his arguments to be of a very distasteful manner in my opinion. For example, I have yet to hear a argument put forth by George Soros, so until I do, he is, in my book, simply I man I disagree with, and whom I believe to be mistaken. But I have heard Moore’s arguments, and they have nearly drove me to hate the man. (and I hate no one).

AND LAST (and probably most important):
Why the hell can’t anyone have a political conversation without resulting to name calling, and hatred? Despite my dislike of him, Michael Moore is not ‘evil’. Ted Kennedy is not ‘evil’. Bill O’Reilly is not ‘evil’. And certainly George Bush is not ‘evil’. It’s all just differing opinions. (and truthfully, none of them may be the right way).

ONE I think most of the bashing is over the neocon movement rather than a bashing of conservative or libertarian viewpoints. Many know what true conservatism means and that it is generally a financial viewpoint in that the government should be prudent about its spending. The other conotations come from the political game and who wears its mask. Thus, the scuffle. It's nothing personal and I'll apologize for the liberals when I say "We're sorry if we slip and send out a blanket statement on conservatives"

TWO Aren't capitalism and socialism eonomic systems? In essence what they argue against is capitalism and those that back it against the rights of the workers. I don't see the neccesity of them being anti-democratic for in essence, what the theory strives for is a pure democracy. The fluctuations in fact show the weakness of theories however. (Don't attempt to discern my economic viewpoints from this post. Though many people named Amicus have called me a commie, I'm far from it.) The argument of "evil" democracies and democracies doing things with the real will of the people is debatable. Just look at the takeover of Hitler, UK going into war with a heavy anti-war majority in the country and other cases of democracies going over the heads of the people. Still I agree there is too much "the other side is evil" thinking in politics and debate.

THE MAIN TOPIC He's just a man. Just a human being with less of a pull on current events than people seem to think. He's at least no worse than Ann Coulter. And he's far better than Rush.

LAST It's an election year lad, evil is the buzzword and fashion. Everyone's evil these days and everyone's a moron. Welcome to politics boy. It's where I summer.

P.S. Welcome to the forum (Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name)

 

[Christopher Titus]

ONE
Excellent Reply.

TWO
You missed my point slightly. Capitalism and Socialism are economic systems, but it seems nearly everyone (on both sides) thinks it's more then that. My point was that it isn't.

THE MAIN TOPIC
Everyone's just a human being, they all have to be judged on their merits, from Jesus to Hitler.

He's about equal with Coulter.

Coulter far worse then Rush. Though they're both a guilty pleasure for me (much like porn).

LAST
I know, this truly is my own fault. Sometimes I seriously believe I have no comprehension for negative emotions.

PS
In my 'MAIN TOPIC' I mentioned people who you disagree with, but are so eloquent in their presentation, you have to respect them. I think your one of the prime examples, LC, you reply couldn't have been more open minded and fair. (Something many seem to lack)

PPS
I though my first post may have sounded a little… wishy-washy, so I want to reiterate: there’s nothing wrong with have extremely strong political views, I do indeed have many (I’m really bitting my tongue on some of these Iraq topics), but that doesn’t mean you have to present them in an anger fashion. (Michael Moore, Ted Kennedy, Al Franken, Ann Coulter, Al Gore, Hilary Clinton, and nearly every Republican during the Clinton administration) In a tip-of-the-hat to John Kerry, he is extremely tactful political speaker (boring, but no one’s perfect).

EDIT: Oh, and I coundn't guess your name. (I suck at that stuff)