from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Oct-23, p.A1, by John D. Stoll, with Jim Oberman contributing:

Michael Moore: A Love Story? Not So Much
Cottage Industry of Filmmakers Targets The Combative Director; a Hometown Heckler

FLINT, Mich. -- Michael Moore can dish it out. But can he take it?

The filmmaker is enjoying modest success with his most recent movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story," employing his trademark guerrilla documentary tactics to take on Wall Street and Capitol Hill. It follows films that cut a similarly sharp edge, including "Fahrenheit 9/11," a critique of the Bush administration; and 1989's "Roger & Me," about the struggle of Flint, Mich., to survive General Motors Corp.'s downsizing.

But less is known about a cottage industry that has emerged in recent years: filmmakers looking to take on the 55-year-old Mr. Moore at his own game.

There's Minnesota filmmaker Michael Wilson, who made 2004's "Michael Moore Hates America." It portrays Mr. Moore as being disingenuous to his interview subjects and profiting from their misfortune.

"Fahrenhype 9/11," written in part by former Clinton administration adviser Dick Morris, and "Celsius 41.11," directed by Kevin Knoblock, both from 2004, defended George W. Bush as he sought reelection. "Michael & Me," directed by Republican talk-show host Larry Elder, came out a year later, defending gun advocates against Mr. Moore's claims.

Then came "Me & Michael," a 2006 spoof on Mr. Moore's tactics. After director Willard Morgan pesters and follows Mr. Moore for months, mimicking Mr. Moore's style, Mr. Moore calls him a "stalker" and suggests he get medical help.

"There's been almost a dozen films that have been made against me," Mr. Moore said in a recent interview at a theater in Flint. "There's actually more films made attacking me than films I've made."

In the growing anti-Moore library, there is nothing quite like "Shooting Michael Moore," made by Kevin Leffler, a 52-year-old certified public accountant, who also teaches at a college in Flint. His 80-minute movie has similarities to the others, with a big exception: Mr. Leffler grew up in Davison, Mich., with Mr. Moore. They went to the same high school, attended the same Catholic church and both of their fathers worked at General Motors.

Local roots helped Mr. Leffler tap people in and around Davison, a middle-class suburb of Flint, who were in Boy Scouts, served on the school board and ran newspapers with Mr. Moore.

"I am doing exactly what Mike would do, except I am doing it to him," says Mr. Leffler. "And I'm doing it as a guy who knows him."

Mr. Leffler's movie, first conceived in 2004, has been redone once and had a limited run in Detroit and Miami late last year. He's spent more than $200,000 of his own money on it.

In his film, Mr. Leffler revisits some stars of "Roger & Me" -- including Rhonda "The Rabbit Lady" Britton -- who say Mr. Moore exploited them to paint Flint in an unfairly gloomy hue. Ms. Britton, whose business advertised rabbits as "pets or meat," added drama to "Roger & Me," as she killed and then skinned a rabbit on camera, while talking about ways to make money.

In one scene, Mr. Leffler rows a boat to the back of Mr. Moore's Michigan home and goes on his property, carrying a life-size cutout of Mr. Bush, which he leaves next to a hot tub.

His quest also gets personal, digging into Mr. Moore's tax statements and past stock holdings of his charitable foundation. He finds what he believes to be indications the filmmaker double-dipped on property-tax breaks and a foundation he founded once owned shares of companies he takes aim at, such as Halliburton Co. and Tenet Healthcare Corp. Public documents, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, show the foundation, the Center for Alternative Media & Culture, which listed Mr. Moore as president, held shares in Halliburton in 2000 and in Tenet in 2002, along with many other stocks.

In an email, Mr. Moore said: "I have never owned a share of stock in my life and the only time I've double dipped into anything is at the snack tray." A spokesman for Mr. Moore didn't respond to a question about the foundation owning stock.

Mr. Moore also said, "I've made a lot of enemies in all the right places and there aren't enough hours in the day to respond to either the well-financed corporate hacks or the lowly stalkers who seek to libel me or make a buck off the fact that I'm a well-known person."

Mr. Leffler, a registered Democrat, says his motivation isn't political. "It's just that as we watched Mike evolve, many people around here, including me, weren't buying his act."

Three years younger than his subject, Mr. Leffler says he knew of Mr. Moore in high school, but didn't become friends with him until later, when he worked for a crisis-hotline Mr. Moore started, answering calls from teens.

At that time, Mr. Moore's profile in Davison was already rising. He was elected to the school board at 18, running on a platform that included distributing beanbag chairs to students. His style attracted critics even then, prompting a campaign to recall him.

James Dowsett, then-head of the school board, remembers Mr. Moore always taking the opposing viewpoint on the board and doing his Eagle Scout project on how "dumpy" Davison is.

"I did a filmstrip on pollution in the Davison area as my Eagle Scout project and showed it around town," Mr. Moore says in an email. "Businesses who were the polluters were mad at me."

Mr. Leffler says he was concerned at the time that Mr. Moore's blunt manner was giving young activists a bad name. "I told him, 'You're poisoning the well, Mike.'" Mr. Leffler says Mr. Moore replied, "Tough s -- ."

While Mr. Moore's films have made millions -- "Fahrenheit 9/11" grossed $222 million internationally at the box office, making it one of the most successful documentaries ever made -- Mr. Leffler's only movie has seen limited success. This month, his distributor, Florida-based Television Syndication Co., spent time at a trade show in France, where it says there was interest in the film.

Since 2004, Mr. Leffler has poured time and funds into his movie, to the point where he says "my credit cards are melting." He traveled to hospitals in Cuba, he says, with a hidden camera in an effort to poke holes in Mr. Moore's "Sicko" documentary, which shows Americans getting stellar care there.

Recently, Mr. Leffler was divorced. "I'd be lying if I said my passion for this movie didn't play a role," he says. "It wasn't the only factor, but it played a role."

Mr. Moore expressed outrage at the movie's title and isn't interested in talking with its maker. "Anyone who suggests violence doesn't get the olive branch," Mr. Moore said. He recalls Mr. Leffler saying the title is a double-entendre. Mr. Leffler says the title only refers to shooting with a camera.

Mr. Leffler says he also goes way back with Jeff Gibbs, who works with Mr. Moore. Mr. Leffler accuses Mr. Gibbs of applying pressure to Carmike Cinemas, a theater chain, to retreat on showing "Shooting Michael Moore," even after Mr. Leffler offered to change the title to "Exposing Michael Moore."

Dale Hurst, a marketing official for Carmike, says the company had scheduled to show the movie, but pulled it. He declined to give a reason.

Mr. Gibbs declined to comment. In an email, he said, "I smell a rat."

from MTV.com, 2007-Jun-29, by Kurt Loder:

'Sicko': Heavily Doctored
Is Michael Moore's prescription worse than the disease?

Michael Moore may see himself as working in the tradition of such crusading muckrakers of the last century as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair — writers whose dedication to exposing corruption and social injustices played a part in sparking much-needed reforms. In his new movie, "Sicko," Moore focuses on the U.S. health-care industry — a juicy target — and he casts a shocking light on some of the people it's failed.

There's a man who mangled two of his fingers with a power saw and learned that it would cost $12,000 to save one of them, but $60,000 to save the other. He had no health insurance and could only scrape together enough money to salvage the $12,000 finger.

There's a woman whose husband was prescribed new drugs to combat his cancer, but couldn't get their insurance company to pay for them because the drugs were experimental. Her husband died.

Then there's a woman who made an emergency trip to a hospital for treatment and subsequently learned her insurance company wouldn't pay for the ambulance that took her there — because it hadn't been "pre-approved." And there's a middle-aged couple — a man, who suffered three heart attacks, and his wife, who developed cancer — who were bankrupted by the cost of co-payments and other expenses not covered by their insurance, and have now been forced to move into a cramped, dismal room in the home of a resentful son. There's also a 79-year-old man who has to continue working a menial job because Medicare won't cover the cost of all the medications he needs.

Moore does a real service in bringing these stories to light — some of them are horrifying, and then infuriating. One giant health-maintenance organization, Kaiser Permanente, is so persuasively lambasted in the movie that, on the basis of what we're told, we want to burst into the company's executive suites and make a mass citizen's arrest. This is the sort of thing good muckrakers are supposed to do.

Unfortunately, Moore is also a con man of a very brazen sort, and never more so than in this film. His cherry-picked facts, manipulative interviews (with lingering close-ups of distraught people breaking down in tears) and blithe assertions (how does he know 18 million people will die this year because they have no health insurance?) are so stacked that you can feel his whole argument sliding sideways as the picture unspools. The American health-care system is in urgent need of reform, no question. Some 47 million people are uninsured (although many are only temporarily so, being either in-between jobs or young enough not to feel a pressing need to buy health insurance). There are a number of proposals as to what might be done to correct this situation. Moore has no use for any of them, save one.

As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can't be solved by government regulation (that would be the same government that's already given us the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles). In the case of health care, though, Americans have never been keen on socialized medicine. In 1993, when one of Moore's heroes, Hillary Clinton (he actually blurts out the word "sexy!" in describing her in the movie), tried to create a government-controlled health care system, her failed attempt to do so helped deliver the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives into Republican control for the next dozen years. Moore still looks upon Clinton's plan as a grand idea, one that Americans, being not very bright, unwisely rejected. (He may be having second thoughts about Hillary herself, though: In the movie he heavily emphasizes the fact that, among politicians, she accepts the second-largest amount of political money from the health care industry.)

The problem with American health care, Moore argues, is that people are charged money to avail themselves of it. In other countries, like Canada, France and Britain, health systems are far superior — and they're free. He takes us to these countries to see a few clean, efficient hospitals, where treatment is quick and caring; and to meet a few doctors, who are delighted with their government-regulated salaries; and to listen to patients express their beaming happiness with a socialized health system. It sounds great. As one patient in a British hospital run by the country's National Health Service says, "No one pays. It's all on the NHS. It's not America."

That last statement is even truer than you'd know from watching "Sicko." In the case of Canada — which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation — a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called "Dead Meat," by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore's movie would have you believe don't exist:

A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list — this time for drug rehab.

A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery — and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.

A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he'd contacted: "As of today," she says, "it's a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation." Later, when the man and his wife both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list, they finally mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium to have the operations done there, with no more waiting.

Rick Baker, the owner of a Toronto company called Timely Medical Alternatives, specializes in transporting Canadians who don't want to wait for medical care to Buffalo, New York, two hours away, where they won't have to. Baker's business is apparently thriving.

And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian Medical Association, muses about the bizarre distortions created by a law that prohibits Canadians from paying for even urgently-needed medical treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance. "It's legal to buy health insurance for your pets," Day says, "but illegal to buy health insurance for yourself." (Even more pointedly, Day was quoted in the Wall Street Journal this week as saying, "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.")

Actually, this aspect of the Canadian health-care system is changing. In 2005, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man who had filed suit in Quebec over being kept on an interminable waiting list for treatment. In striking down the government health care monopoly in that province, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said, "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care." Now a similar suit has been filed in Ontario.

What's the problem with government health systems? Moore's movie doesn't ask that question, although it does unintentionally provide an answer. When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they're inevitably forced to ration treatment. This is certainly the situation in Britain. Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country's National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care — and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts. Last March, the BBC reported on the results of a Healthcare Commission poll of 128,000 NHS workers: two thirds of them said they "would not be happy" to be patients in their own hospitals. James Christopher, the film critic of the Times of London, thinks he knows why. After marveling at Moore's rosy view of the British health care system in "Sicko," Christopher wrote, "What he hasn't done is lie in a corridor all night at the Royal Free [Hospital] watching his severed toe disintegrate in a plastic cup of melted ice. I have." Last month, the Associated Press reported that Gordon Brown — just installed this week as Britain's new prime minister — had promised to inaugurate "sweeping domestic reforms" to, among other things, "improve health care."

Moore's most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks' vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who's reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he's finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave — and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can't have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity?

As it turns out, France can't. In 2004, French Health Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told a government commission, "Our health system has gone mad. Profound reforms are urgent." Agence France-Presse recently reported that the French health-care system is running a deficit of $2.7 billion. And in the French presidential election in May, voters in surprising numbers rejected the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, who had promised actually to raise some health benefits, and elected instead the center-right politician Nicolas Sarkozy, who, according to Agence France-Presse again, "plans to move fast to overhaul the economy, with the deficit-ridden health care system a primary target." Possibly Sarkozy should first consult with Michael Moore. After all, the tax-stoked French health care system may be expensive, but at least it's "free."

Having driven his bring-on-government-health care argument into a ditch outside of Paris, Moore next pilots it right off a cliff and into the Caribbean on the final stop on his tour: Cuba. Here it must also be said that the director performs a valuable service. He rounds up a group of 9/11 rescue workers — firefighters and selfless volunteers — who risked their lives and ruined their health in the aftermath of the New York terrorist attacks. These people — there's no other way of putting it — have been screwed, mainly by the politicians who were at such photo-op pains to praise them at the time. (This makes Moore's faith in government medical compassion seem all the more inexplicable.) These people's lives have been devastated — wracked by chronic illnesses, some can no longer hold down jobs and none can afford to buy the various expensive medicines they need. Moore does them an admirable service by bringing their plight before a large audience.

However, there's never a moment when we doubt that he's also using these people as props in his film, and as talking points in his agenda. Renting some boats, he leads them all off to Cuba. Upon arrival they stop briefly outside the American military enclave on Guantanamo Bay so that Moore can have himself filmed begging, through a bullhorn, for some of the free, top-notch medical care that's currently being lavished on the detainees there. Having no luck, he then moves on to Cuba proper.

Fidel Castro's island dictatorship, now in its 40th year of being listed as a human-rights violator by Amnesty International, is here depicted as a balmy paradise not unlike the Iraq of Saddam Hussein that Moore showed us in his earlier film, "Fahrenheit 9/11." He and his charges make their way — their pre-arranged way, if it need be said — to a state-of-the-art hospital where they receive a picturesquely warm welcome. In a voiceover, Moore, shown beaming at his little band of visitors, says he told the Cuban doctors to "give them the same care they'd give Cuban citizens." Then he adds, dramatically: "And they did."

If Moore really believes this, he may be a greater fool than even his most feverish detractors claim him to be. Nevertheless, medical care is provided to the visiting Americans, and it is indeed excellent. Cuba is in fact the site of some world-class medical facilities (surprising in a country that, as Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar noted in the Los Angeles Times last month, "imprisoned a doctor in the late 1990s for speaking out against government failure to respond to an epidemic of a mosquito-borne virus"). What Moore doesn't mention is the flourishing Cuban industry of "health tourism" — a system in which foreigners (including self-admitted multimillionaire film directors and, of course, government bigwigs) who are willing to pay cash for anything from brain-surgery to dental work can purchase a level of treatment that's unavailable to the majority of Cubans with no hard currency at their disposal. The Cuban American National Foundation (admittedly a group with no love for the Castro regime) calls this "medical apartheid." And in a 2004 article in Canada's National Post, writer Isabel Vincent quoted a dissident Cuban neurosurgeon, Doctor Hilda Molina, as saying, "Cubans should be treated the same as foreigners. Cubans have less rights in their own country than foreigners who visit here."

As the Caribbean sun sank down on Moore's breathtakingly meretricious movie, I couldn't help recalling that when Fidel Castro became gravely ill last year, he didn't put himself in the hands of a Cuban surgeon. No. Instead, he had a specialist flown in — from Spain.

from the Financial Post of Canada, 2007-Jul-17, by Peter Foster:

One sick flick

"There's no doubt that a documentary by someone of Michael Moore's stature will help the world see the deeply humane principles of Cuban society."
-- Jose Ramon Balaguer, Cuban Health Minister

Michael Moore has said he wants to make movies from which people emerge saying, "I don't believe what I just saw." He has certainly hit the mark with Sicko. His latest attack on the American way of life is, literally, incredible -- a typical combination of bent facts and leftist grandstanding. It's not that health-care policy is not an important issue in any modern society, it's that Mr. Moore does not address it in a serious way.

According to Sicko, what is scandalous about America's greater reliance on private health insurance is not that so many have no insurance, but that the system makes its profits by systematically denying the needs of its clients. Mr. Moore parades a pageant of woe across the screen: couples who have lost their homes, individuals who have lost their limbs, mothers who have lost their babies -- all allegedly due to the greed and heartlessness of a profit-based system that has the Washington political establishment bought and sold.

The American system is contrasted with the socialized medical nirvana that allegedly exists in Canada, Britain, France and, most remarkably, Cuba. In these government-run systems, wait times are short, the most technically elaborate care is instantly available and doctors make house calls.

Mr. Moore plays the heartstrings like a virtuoso. He doesn't just find sick Americans, he finds sick Americans who became sick as a result of working at Ground Zero in the wake of 9/11. He doesn't just find health care for them, he finds it in Cuba! The scene of him standing on a boat in Guantanamo Bay, demanding via loud hailer that his American heroes be given the same medical attention as al-Qaeda detainees, is a classic. When that-- obviously-- doesn't work, he takes his shipmates to Fidel Castro's Communist paradise for treatment, which is instantly, lavishly, and cheaply available. Somehow, Cuba's poverty and political repression don't make it on camera.

However, the ultimate paradise portrayed by Mr. Moore is not Canada, England or Cuba. It is France, and, in particular, Paris. To refute the notion that state care goes with high taxes, a couple are brought forth who live in circumstances that would not shame Donald Trump, but whose combined income is reportedly US$8,000 a month. The French government even sends someone round to do new mothers' laundry! Mr. Moore's take on life in Paris is about as credible as that of a far better recent movie, Pixar's Ratatouille, in which a talented rodent establishes that "anyone can cook." Mr. Moore suggests that anyone can design a health-care system. Only those money-grubbing private health-care providers stand in the way.

The fundamental problem, according to Mr. Moore, is that there is not enough "we" in the American system. The solution is simple: "true" democracy, in which the land of milk and antibiotics is achieved simply by demanding it -- screw human nature and history. To bolster this view, Mr. Moore brings on screen Tony Benn, the former English peer and Labour Cabinet minister who, significantly, is very much yesterday's man in his own country. The French system, too, is praised for its tendency to take to the streets. All this is opposed to an American electorate reputedly kept in its place by fear.

There are profound issues at the root of Sicko that demand to be addressed, but aren't. If private health care is so awful, why do so many want it? Are there no preventable deaths or examples of malpractice under socialized systems? Moreover, the "right wing" argument is not against the universal provision of basic health insurance, it is against the state monopoly of health provision. Under a purely tax-based, state-administered system, rationing and lengthening wait times become inevitable. States systems also tend to become top heavy in administration, and to provide more scope for public-sector unions who are more concerned with their members' ease than with patients' welfare.

The notion that profit should be made out of treating the sick seems to jar with a powerful belief that delivering care is a humanitarian duty. But the fact is that the self-interested principle that famously motivates "the butcher, the brewer and the baker," to the benefit of their customers, also motivates the physician, the nurse and the hospital owner/administrator.

The basic moral issue is that under a purely socialized system your body, and your life, is no longer your own. The fantasy that lies behind Michael Moore's movie is that of the caring and competent state that eschews self-interest and provides efficiently for all its citizens' health needs. Where such delusions end up is not in the airbrushed fantasy of Sicko, but in the nightmare reality of Cuba.

from the Flint Journal, 2005-Nov-20, by David Forsmark:

Politically 'hip' can be hypocrites
Author finds contradictions between celebrities' rhetoric, actions

Which well-known figure associated with Flint has outsourced jobs to other countries and used union-busting tactics?

Delphi chief Steve Miller? Hardly. Outside of cities with Delphi plants, most people still think he sang "Fly Like an Eagle." So who flew to Canada to produce his products and escape union scale? Who said he would fire his employees if they organized?

None other than Michael Moore, "the champion of the working class."

In "Do as I Say (Not as I Do)," Peter Schweizer exposes Moore's fake public persona. Moore does his film production in Canada to avoid paying union scale and threatened to fire half of his TV show's writing staff when they wanted to join the union. He's a proponent of affirmative action but never has hired a black person to do anything important on one of his projects.

Moore claims he owns no stock and only puts "what little I can" in "something the old-timers call a savings account" - yet Schweizer writes that he owns stock in defense contractors and Halliburton.

While Moore says he gives away 40 percent of his money, Schweizer reports that his tax returns show his foundations give the minimum necessary to stay tax exempt - and most of the donations go to festivals that feature his films or promote preservation around his home on Torch Lake.

Schweizer shows that Moore did more than just borrow his anti-American slant on foreign policy from Marxist guru Noam Chomsky and his anti-capitalist screeds from Ralph Nader; Moore learned from both how to adopt a po' boy persona while socking away millions in tax shelters.

Why does Schweizer focus on the left when there's enough hypocrisy to go around? He says it's because the media doesn't let real or imagined slips go by for conservatives. Who doesn't know about Newt Gingrich's martial problems, Rush Limbaugh's addiction to prescription pain medication or Bill Bennett's gambling?

But that's Schweizers' point. If Bennett's gambling is an issue because he wrote a book on virtues (even though it didn't touch on gambling), then why has there been no "60 Minutes" report on environmental priestess Barbara Streisand's strip mine?

Liberal commentator Alan Combes claims only conservatives can be hypocrites because they stake out moral stands, and Schweizer maintains this attitude is prevalent in today's media. But while conservatives may be absolutists about personal conduct, liberals attach moral weight to economic actions - or so their rhetoric goes.

Thus, Schweizer thinks it's important for you to know that Ralph Nader claims a Spartan lifestyle, but there's a $2 million home in his unemployed brother's name. Nader, who says he doesn't own any stock not only does, but he also sells short in companies he's about to attack and buys into companies that make things he's about to promote, such as air bags.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are well known for working the system in financially crass ways, though I didn't know just how predatory the legal part of their Whitewater scheme was until reading about it here. And it's highly ironic that Hillary is against laws requiring minors to notify their parents if they want an abortion but wouldn't allow her daughter to pierce her ears.

The best stuff exposes House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat who sponsored an effort to honor union leader Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, with a national holiday. Schweizer notes that Pelosi owns a vineyard that uses nonunion labor exclusively to harvest its grapes. And the large resort hotel she owns is nonunion, too, despite the perennial support she gets from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union.

In other news, Professor Cornell West chides blacks who move out of the ghetto but owns luxurious homes in two lily-white enclaves; Gloria Steinem ridicules marriage but is a hopeless romantic; and Noam Chomsky, who trashes the concept of private property and likens the United States to Nazi Germany during a trip to Cuba, has made millions from consulting with the Department of Defense, then hides it in tax shelters.

Comedian-turned-commentator Al Franken's contradictions are too many to list here, but let's just say Schweizer shows he has no room to talk about affirmative action or racist rhetoric.

But maybe Schweizer is wrong, and it's not about hypocrisy after all. Could the reason Streisand, Franken and Moore advocate for affirmative action be because they know from looking at themselves that it is necessary? After all, if these bitter enemies of racism and sexism can't be trusted to hire a diverse group of people, what hope can there be for corporate America to do so?

Perhaps Moore rails against globalization because he knows first hand about the insidious lure of cheap, foreign scab labor.

"Do as I Say" is yet another political book that might have been better suited as a series of magazine articles. On the other hand, with another Al Franken screed climbing the charts, its timing could not be better.

Reviewer David Forsmark is a freelance writer who lives in Flushing.

from NewsMax, 2003-Apr-15, by Carl Limbacher et al.:

Michael Moore's Hypocritical 'Blue Collar' Life of Luxury

America keeps getting a clearer picture of stupid white man Michael Moore, and it's even less pretty than you thought.

Radar magazine debuts in May with a look at celebrity "Monsters," who have "distinguished themselves in the areas of physical and verbal abuse, overweening arrogance, and by the imposition of a particularly nasty influence over the culture at large." As the New York Post notes, "No hate list would be complete without pompous filmmaker Michael Moore, who acts out the shtick of a blue-collar everyman from the luxury of his $1.27 million Upper West Side apartment."

Unlike the Bushes, and just like the Clintons, the Gores, the Kennedys and countless other leftist hypocrites who oppose school choice for the unwashed masses but not for their own little princes and princesses, Moore "sends his daughter to private school." (Eek! The slovenly Hollywood hatemonger has reproduced?)

He also "fabricated a scene in 'Bowling for Columbine'" and "unsuccessfully pressured the writing staff of his 'TV Nation' not to join the Writer's Guild," notes the mag.

What? The man who ragged at General Motors for anti-union, anti-worker activities has done the same himself? Moore is a far bigger hypocrite than we'd ever imagined.

By the way, when Moore writes letters to liberal movie reviewer Roger Ebert and other media types to complain when they blow the whistle about the fictitious aspects of his pseudo-documentary "Bowling for Columbine," he signs off as "Michael Moore, Flint, Mich." Since when is crumbling Flint on the snooty Upper West Side?

from the Hartford Courant via the Bergen Record 1999-Apr-23, by David Daley:

The one-note song of Michael Moore

Michael Moore has made a career of ambushing corporate suits, doormen, and other unwitting saps unlucky enough to find themselves in the white-hot light of his working-class filmmaking shtick.

Sometimes the results are entertaining, as in his documentary "Roger & Me," built around his attempts to interview General Motors Chairman Roger Smith about plant closings in Moore's hometown, Flint, Mich. That was 10 years ago, however, and since then Moore's tired routine has devolved into a bullying, pseudo-populist "Candid Camera," most conspicuously on his twice-canceled "TV Nation."

The Moore oeuvre ranges from satirizing corporate greed, downsizing, and Republicans in "Roger & Me," to satirizing corporate greed, downsizing, and Republicans in his book "Downsize This!" He also satirized corporate greed, downsizing, and Republicans in "The Big One," a documentary about the "Downsize This!" book tour. And now, on his new Bravo series "The Awful Truth," which had its premiere earlier this month, Moore satirizes corporate greed, downsizing, and Republicans.

Given his fondness for the ambush interview, you would think Moore might be agreeable to doing an interview himself. Well, no. Despite his new show, calls to a battery of publicists, agents, and managers couldn't get Moore on the phone.

Too bad, because I had hoped to ask Moore the same question that writer Jason Zengerle wanted to pose to him for a magazine article three years ago: "How do you explain your success as a political humorist when you know nothing about politics and you're only occasionally funny?"

Zengerle went to New York and tried to ambush Moore at home and at his office. After being rebuffed by security at Moore's swanky Manhattan apartment and at Dog Eat Dog, Zengerle got Moore's secretary on the phone and explained his request. "You want to ask him right now?" she said. "Well, yeah. Isn't that how he does it?" "Yeah, but I mean it's not the same thing," she insisted.

Seems like Moore believes that about lots of things. As wonderfully scathing profiles by Salon, the New York Observer, the Weekly Standard (entitled "One-Trick Phony"), and even former friend Alexander Cockburn in the New York Press have pointed out, Moore plays fast and loose with the truth, treats many of his employees with the same tyrannical disdain he deplores in the corporate world, and swapped his working-class life in Flint for limousine-liberal digs on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

And as his own writings suggest, his political sensibilities are about as nuanced and subtle as a second-grader's.

But first, Moore and reality: "Roger & Me" didn't get an Oscar nomination for best documentary, in part because some of the film's chronology was actually fiction. As critics pointed out, the 30,000 layoffs by General Motors -- which Moore implied happened in Flint in 1986 -- actually came over 10 years in many different states.

Moore and money: He professed working-class solidarity in interviews promoting "Roger" by claiming he had never earned more than $15,000 a year. But according to Matt Labash, writing in the Weekly Standard, Moore "had been an NPR commentator, received two $20,000 grants from the MacArthur Foundation, secured a hefty advance from Doubleday for a book about Flint, and benefited from the largess of Stewart Mott, who ran a family fund out of his New York penthouse where Moore sometimes stayed." That doesn't count the $58,000 he received from Mother Jones after they fired him as editor.

Moore, the limousine liberal: As Daniel Radosh wrote in Salon, nobody would begrudge Moore his success if he "wasn't such a snob about being working-class." As Radosh quotes Moore, "Average working stiffs were willing to pay seven bucks to see my movie. If they're going to give me their money, what am I going to do with it? Get a big boat? I don't think so." Nope. He got a $1.27 million apartment instead.

Moore, the chief executive officer: The Weekly Standard article quotes former Moore employees describing their working conditions as "a sweatshop," "a repressive police state," "indentured servitude," and "a concentration camp." This "union man" also, according to "TV Nation" writers quoted in Salon, discouraged them from joining the Writers Guild. "Once they did join, writers relied on the guild repeatedly to secure them payments, credits, and residuals Moore was trying to screw them out of," Radosh reported.

Then there's this. Moore's not funny. "Downsize This!" takes edgy shots at Barney and John Tesh. And it was written in 1996, when even Jay Leno had exhausted that material.

His politics can be just as tasteless. In a new essay posted on his Web site, Moore writes: "If the new rule of waging war is that it's OK to bomb another country if they are oppressing citizens in a certain state in that country, does that mean that NATO should be bombing the mayor's mansion in New York?"

If that's satire, well, it's about as funny as his "Downsize This!" essay proposing to replace the pen in Bob Dole's hand with a coat hanger, because of Dole's opposition to abortion. As political analysis, it's inane and condescending. But not as condescending as Moore's class analysis.

"We need to let the working class know we don't think we're better than them. I want you watching 'Friends.' I want you listening to country music," Moore says in his standard stump speech to college crowds. Salon quotes Moore telling one audience, "I know the music sucks, but don't you want to put yourself through some pain to see what people are feeling?"

from OpinionJournal.com/Wall Street Journal, 2004-May-19, by Daniel Schwammenthal:

Michael's Manipulations
Moore of the same at Cannes.

CANNES, France--On his way to the next film-festival interview, movie maker Michael Moore, self-declared champion of the downtrodden, lent his support to protesting show-biz workers on the Croisette, Cannes's beachwalk. He took a megaphone, screaming "a job is a human right, a living wage is a human right." Never mind that the protests were about neither jobs nor wages but small cuts to France's generous welfare checks for artists. He hasn't become a millionaire filmmaker by being too fussy with the facts.

Mr. Moore has yet to express his support, though, for another strike here, that of the staff at some of Cannes's finest luxury hotels. Apparently Mr. Moore's solidarity with labor ends when it affects his ability to get first-rate room service.

His latest "docu-fiction," "Fahrenheit 9/11," instantly became a hot candidate for the Palme d'Or, even before anybody had seen it. Until a day before the official screening on Monday, Mr. Moore was very secretive about the film, simply claiming it was so explosive, it will cost George W. Bush the elections.

But all Mr. Moore's "undercover" crew could produce was footage of some soldiers putting hoods on Iraqi detainees, mocking a drunk Iraqi's erection and saying they like to listen to some stupid rock song to fire themselves up before battle. The rest of the movie is equally anticlimactic, mostly a rehash of the conspiracy theories in his book "Dude, Where's My Country," which have been exposed as inaccurate, contradictory and confused.

He uses the manipulations he so successfully employed in earlier movies. In one such scene, the voice of President Bush announces the beginning of the Iraq war as footage supposedly shows prewar Baghdad sometime in March. The viewer sees a happy couple at a wedding, children at a playground and other urban bliss. Ah, life must have been idyllic under the butcher of Baghdad. Just when the president announces the bombardment of "selective targets," a little girl is going down a slide. In case the audience didn't get it, Mr. Moore shows gruesome pictures of injured and dead Iraqis. Elsewhere he shows the charred bodies of U.S. soldiers being further mutilated by an angry mob. Yes, war is terrible, these pictures tell us, but they add nothing to the dispute over whether this war was justified.

That didn't stop the audience in the official screening from giving Mr. Moore a 20-minute standing ovation. Outside, the crowd gave Mr. Moore rock-star adulation. At the press conference, journalists applauded when Mr. Moore entered the room, before he started speaking and at the end. The questions were often prefaced with statements expressing admiration for his work and not one challenged any of the film's wild allegations.

Mr. Moore has cleverly used Disney's refusal to distribute the film in the U.S. to get the sort of press that major studios normally budget millions of dollars for. And he did come up with a fresh conspiracy theory here that the American public will be somehow prevented from seeing his movie. The film, Mr. Moore explains, was originally to be produced by Icon, Mel Gibson's company. But only a couple of months after signing the contract, Mr. Moore's people supposedly received a call from Icon, saying they wanted out. Why? According to Mr. Moore, Mr. Gibson had received a call from some "top Republicans with close ties to the White House," saying he would never be invited to another White House dinner if he went ahead. Icon denies this.

Of course, in the same breath that Mr. Moore spun his conspiracy theory about censorship, he cockily predicted he'd soon find a distributor. He plans to release the movie in the U.S. on Independence Day. The DVD is to hit the stores in October to have maximum impact on the elections, or so he hopes. But even the most devoted audience has its limits. When he expressed his resentment about suggestions that his film's distribution saga is great publicity, he lost the crowd for a moment.

It was ready to believe that George W. Bush stole the elections, that he started the war in Afghanistan to build a gas pipeline, that the war in Iraq is just about oil and big business. But tell these film industry experts that all this publicity is "not good for the box office," and there was just silent disbelief.

Mr. Schwammenthal is an editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal Europe.

from the New York Times, 2004-Jun-26, by David Brooks:

All Hail Moore

In years past, American liberals have had to settle for intellectual and moral leadership from the likes of John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr. But now, a grander beacon has appeared on the mountaintop, and from sea to shining sea, tens of thousands have joined in the adulation.

So it is worth taking a moment to study the metaphysics of Michael Moore. For Moore is not only a filmmaker; he is a man of ideas, and his work is based on an actual worldview.

Like Hemingway, Moore does his boldest thinking while abroad. For example, it was during an interview with the British paper The Mirror that Moore unfurled what is perhaps the central insight of his oeuvre, that Americans are kind of crappy.

"They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet . . . in thrall to conniving, thieving smug [pieces of the human anatomy]," Moore intoned. "We Americans suffer from an enforced ignorance. We don't know about anything that's happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing."

It transpires that Europeans are quite excited to hear this supple description of the American mind. And Moore has been kind enough to crisscross the continent, speaking to packed lecture halls, explicating the general vapidity and crassness of his countrymen. "That's why we're smiling all the time," he told a rapturous throng in Munich. "You can see us coming down the street. You know, `Hey! Hi! How's it going?' We've got that big [expletive] grin on our face all the time because our brains aren't loaded down."

Naturally, the people from the continent that brought us Descartes, Kant and Goethe are fascinated by these insights. Moore's books have sold faster there than at home. No American intellectual is taken so seriously in Europe, save perhaps the great Chomsky.

Before a delighted Cambridge crowd, Moore reflected on the tragedy of human existence: "You're stuck with being connected to this country of mine, which is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe." In Liverpool, he paused to contemplate the epicenters of evil in the modern world: "It's all part of the same ball of wax, right? The oil companies, Israel, Halliburton."

In the days after Sept. 11, while others were disoriented, Moore was able to see clearly: "We, the United States of America, are culpable in committing so many acts of terror and bloodshed that we had better get a clue about the culture of violence in which we have been active participants."

This leads to Michael Moore's global plan of action. "Don't be like us," he told a crowd in Berlin. "You've got to stand up, right? You've got to be brave."

In an open letter to the German people in Die Zeit, Moore asked, "Should such an ignorant people lead the world?" Then he began to reflect on things economic. His central insight here is that the American economy, like its people, is pretty crappy, too: "Don't go the American way when it comes to economics, jobs and services for the poor and immigrants. It is the wrong way."

In an interview with a Japanese newspaper, Moore helped citizens of that country understand why the United States went to war in Iraq: "The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich."

But venality doesn't come up when he writes about those who are killing Americans in Iraq: "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." Until then, few social observers had made the connection between Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Paul Revere.

So we have our Sartre. And the liberal grandees Arthur Schlesinger, Ted Sorenson, Tom Harkin and Barbara Boxer flock to his openings. In Washington, a Senate vote was delayed because so many Democrats wanted to see his movie.

The standards of socially acceptable liberal opinion have shifted. We're a long way from John Dewey.

Perhaps inspired by Moore, I got a fact wrong in my previous column. Bill Clinton did not win the evangelical vote in 1992 and 1996. I had relied on a report that was later corrected.

from Agence France-Presse, 2004-Sep-15:

'Fahrenheit 9/11' gets 'axis of evil' premiere

TEHRAN (AFP) - Cinemagoers in the Iranian capital were given their first glimpse of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' this week, but appeared to enjoy more the rare chance to watch an American movie than its assault on their regime's arch foe George W. Bush.

Michael Moore's Bush-bashing polemic may have cruised through Iran's unforgiving censors thanks to its indictment of US policy, but the premiere of the film also had the side effect of making some viewers relate the same questioning to their own state of affairs.

"The authorities obviously gave the film the green light for political reasons, in that anything against the United States must be good," quipped one of the hundreds of mainly young people who flocked to Tuesday night's opening screening.

The prize-winning documentary has been allowed out on release here to coincide with the third anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States -- which kicked off a chain of events that has seen Iran surrounded by US troops and lumped into an "axis of evil".

"They are showing this film to erase from our minds the idea that America is the great saviour," said Hirad Harandian, another cinemagoer at the uptown Farhang cinema.

The hall is one of only two cinemas in the country to be screening 'Fahrenheit 9/11'.

On Tuesday night the film was sold out and the theatre packed with close to 380 people, most of them young. Many admitted they were just out to watch an American film, and not that one in particular.

"I love to see foreign films on the big screen, and I never miss Farhang cinema shows no matter what is on," said Sima Gharavi, a 24-year-old dressed in a short bright blue coat rather than the more conservative all-black attire.

But she hastened to complain that "out of all the films people would love to see, the authorities had to go for this one -- just because this film is in line with the view of the Islamic regime."

And despite sporadic laughs here and there, most of Moore's sardonic humour appeared to fall flat. The end of the film was also greeted with some half-hearted clapping.

"The problem is the subtitles," said Sogol Zand, an English teacher. "The jokes are not as funny."

Others, obviously out for a rare taste of Hollywood entertainment, disagreed.

"It was just too political. I was bored from the middle, and I wished we had gone to see "Kill Bill" instead," said one young man, referring to the trendy Quentin Tarantino flick also being shown.

But those of the older generation appeared to relate well to the film, which succeeded in sparking some vigorous after-show chatter.

"I saw it as an Iranian who has also lived in America," said Kourosh Amini, a man in his 50s.

"It perfectly depicted the realities of American life, and they have to learn what war really looks like."

And even though his twenty-something son quipped in to say he was "disappointed" by the film and asserted "politics is not as important" for Iran's younger generation, he did envy Moore's position.

"It sure is a great country, where someone like Moore trashes the president and gets away with it -- and makes so much money!" he laughed.

Another woman said she was impressed with the scene where Moore chases US congressmen to ask them if they would send their children to Iraq.

"How many top officials here sent their offspring to fight in the Iran-Iraq war?" asked the woman, one of several who directed their frustrations at Iranian authorities -- and not President Bush.

from the Associated Press, 2004-Jul-25, by David Germain:

`Fahrenheit 9/11' sets new documentary mark, topping $100 million

[LOS ANGELES] -- Michael Moore joined the $100 million club as his political assault "Fahrenheit 9/11" became the first documentary ever to top that mark at the domestic box office.

"Fahrenheit 9/11," Moore's condemnation of President Bush's actions regarding the Sept. 11 attacks, had a weekend haul of $5 million to lift its total to $103.35 million since opening in late June.

"The American people have not been given the whole story about these last three years and they don't feel they've been given the truth from the White House," Moore said Sunday. "So they've gone to the movie theaters to look for the truth and to begin the important discussion and debate that needs to take place in this country."

The previous best domestic gross for a feature-length documentary was $21.6 million for Moore's Academy Award-winning "Bowling for Columbine." That film took nine months to hit that level, while "Fahrenheit 9/11" did more business, $23.9 million, in just its first weekend.

The polarizing effects of Sept. 11 and its aftermath, with Americans bitterly divided over Bush's invasion of Iraq, has boosted the public's appetite for political documentaries such as "Fahrenheit 9/11," "Control Room" and "Outfoxed," Moore said.

"It's really cool now to talk about politics, and this is the first time I've seen this happen in decades, really," Moore said. "Being apathetic right now is very uncool."

"Fahrenheit 9/11" won the top honor at the Cannes Film Festival in May, but the movie lost its original distributor when Disney refused to let subsidiary Miramax release it because of its political content.

Miramax bosses Harvey and Bob Weinstein bought back the film and arranged for independent distribution through Lions Gate Films and IFC Films.

Democrats have embraced "Fahrenheit 9/11," though Moore said his main goal was to create good entertainment, not dabble in politics. Moore said he has not been contacted by the campaign of Democratic candidate John Kerry and that he did not make the movie to boost Democrats' prospects of winning the White House.

The real effect of "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be to encourage normally disinterested Americans to participate this fall, Moore said.

"I believe the film is going to bring hundreds of thousands of people to the polls who otherwise were not going to vote," Moore said. "I think it's going to have a tremendous impact in that way."

Moore said he had hoped to have "Fahrenheit 9/11" out on DVD before the November election, but that the film could continue to play in theaters through year's end and into 2005.

"So I don't know really what that means now in terms of the DVD," Moore said.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Jul-27, by Scott Simon:

When Punchline Trumps Honesty
There's more McCarthy than Murrow in the work of Michael Moore.

Michael Moore has won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and may win an Oscar for the kind of work that got Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Jack Kelly fired.

Trying to track the unproven innuendoes and conspiracies in a Michael Moore film or book is as futile as trying to count the flatulence jokes in one by Adam Sandler. Some journalists and critics have acted as if his wrenching of facts is no more serious than a movie continuity problem, like showing a 1963 Chevy in 1956 Santa Monica.

---

A documentary film doesn't have to be fair and balanced, to coin a phrase. But it ought to make an attempt to be accurate. It can certainly be pointed and opinionated. But it should not knowingly misrepresent the truth. Much of Michael Moore's films and books, however entertaining to his fans and enraging to his critics, seems to regard facts as mere nuisances to the story he wants to tell.

Back in 1991 that sharpest of film critics, the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, blunted some of the raves for Mr. Moore's "Roger and Me" by pointing out how the film misrepresented many facts about plant closings in Flint, Mich., and caricatured people it purported to feel for. "The film I saw was shallow and facetious," said Kael, "a piece of gonzo demagoguery that made me feel cheap for laughing."

His methods remain unrefined in "Fahrenheit 9/11." Mr. Moore ignores or misrepresents the truth, prefers innuendo to fact, edits with poetic license rather than accuracy, and strips existing news footage of its context to make events and real people say what he wants, even if they don't. As Kael observed back then, Mr. Moore's method is no more high-minded than "the work of a slick ad exec."

The main premise of Mr. Moore's recent work is that both Presidents Bush have been what amounts to Manchurian Candidates of the Saudi royal family. Mr. Moore suggests (he depends so much on innuendo that a simple, declarative verb like "says" is usually impossible) the Saudi government, having soured on their pawns for unstated reasons, launched the attacks of Sept. 11.

"What if these weren't wacko terrorists, but military pilots who signed onto a suicide mission?" Moore asks in the best-selling "Dude, Where's My Country?" "What if they were doing this at the behest of either the Saudi government or certain disgruntled members of the Saudi royal family?" Central to Mr. Moore's indictment of the current President Bush is his charge that the U.S. government secretly assisted the evacuation of bin Laden family members from the U.S. in the hours following the Sept. 11 attacks, when all other flights nationwide were grounded. He supports this with grainy images of indecipherable documents.

But on our show on Saturday, Richard Clarke, the government's former counter-terrorism adviser and no apologist for the Bush administration, told us that he had authorized those flights, but only after air travel had been restored and all the Saudis had been questioned. "I think Moore's making a mountain of a molehill," he said. Moreover, said Mr. Clarke, "He never interviewed me." Instead, Mr. Moore had simply lifted a clip from an ABC interview. Perhaps Mr. Moore just didn't want to get an answer that he didn't want to hear. (See how useful innuendoes can be?)

In what is perhaps the most wrenching scene in the film, an Iraqi woman is shown wailing amid the rubble caused by a bomb that killed members of her family. I do not doubt her account, or her sorrow. I have interviewed Iraqis about U.S. bombs that killed civilians. People who agree to wars should see the human damage bombs can do.

But reporters who were taken around to see the sites of civilian deaths during the bombing of Baghdad also observed that some of those errant bombs were fired by Iraqi anti-aircraft crews. Mr. Moore doesn't let the audience know when and where this bomb was dropped, or otherwise try to identify the culprit of the tragedy.

Mr. Moore tries hard to identify himself with U.S. troops and their concerns. But he spends an awful lot of effort depicting them as dupes and brutes. At one point in "Fahrenheit 9/11," someone off-camera prods a U.S. soldier into singing a favorite hip-hop song with profane lyrics. Mr. Moore then runs the soldier's voice over combat footage, to make it seem as if the soldier were insensitively singing along with the destruction.

In another scene, U.S. soldiers make savage jokes about the awkward effects of rigor mortis on one part of the corpse of an Iraqi soldier. I do not doubt the authenticity of those pictures. But I also have no particular reason to trust it. A few basic details, like where and when the video was shot, are considered traditional reporting techniques (especially after the front-page photos of British soldiers brutalizing Iraqi prisoners turned out to be frauds). A few other basic facts might have informed the audience. Was the Iraqi killed in battle? By a suicide bomb? Moore says the U.S. soldiers are good boys turned coarse in an immoral war. But I have also heard those kind of ugly and anxious jokes about corpses from overstressed emergency room physicians.

---

In the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote that, "Viewers may come away from Moore's movie believing some things that probably aren't true," and that he "uses association and innuendo to create false impressions." Try to imagine those phrases on a marquee. But that is his rave review! He lauds "Fahrenheit 9/11" for its "appeal to working-class Americans." Do we really want to believe that only innuendo, untruths, and conspiracy theories can reach working-class Americans?

Governments of both parties have assuaged Saudi interests for more than 50 years. (I wonder if Mr. Moore grasps how much the jobs of auto workers in Flint depended on cheap oil.) Sound questions about the course, costs, and grounds for the war in Iraq have been raised by voices across the political spectrum.

But when 9/11 Commission Chairman Kean has to take a minute at a press conference, as he did last Thursday, to knock down a proven falsehood like the secret flights of the bin Laden family, you wonder if those who urge people to see Moore's film are informing or contaminating the debate. I see more McCarthy than Murrow in the work of Michael Moore. No matter how hot a blowtorch burns, it doesn't shed much light.

Mr. Simon hosts NPR's "Weekend Edition Saturday" and is the author of theforthcoming "Pretty Birds," a novel about the siege of Sarajevo, from Random House.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Jul-23, by Daniel Henninger:

Carpet-Bomb Filmmaking
"Fahrenheit 9/11" feeds the smugness of bicoastal elites.

Michael Moore is right where he wants to be: top o' the world. Hollywood gave him his Oscar for "Bowling for Columbine," a French film festival gave him a prize for "Fahrenheit 9/11," and the entire Republican firmament is raving at him for making a duplicitous movie about George Bush that is packing them in as a general-release feature. "Fahrenheit 9/11" has put him over the top, all right.

I saw it last Friday night in Manhattan's Gramercy Park neighborhood, and when it was over a full house cheered and applauded. Moore takes his politically prepackaged audience on a roller-coaster ride, starting them on TV-studio outtakes of administration officials just before they're about to go on television--Bush, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft. Some are getting daubed with pancake makeup. They all look a little vacant, as everyone does in the minutes before airtime. It's a yuk.

Then he's into the morning of September 11 in downtown New York--showing clips of the dust and debris-filled air, but in melodramatic slow-motion, a gratuitous slathering-on of emotion that I haven't seen in any other 9/11 documentary. My sense was that even this audience wasn't wholly comfortable with what he had done here. No matter; he gets them off the hook when he introduces the war in Afghanistan by imposing the opening credits and music from the popular 1960s TV Western "Bonanza." A big laugh.

The mood darkens when Moore's camera (or someone's camera) gets inside Walter Reed hospital in Washington, showing military amputees from the Iraq war. The rush of raw images is disturbing, no matter what your views, but the politics are brought quickly into focus by a thin soldier with nerve damage, who has a message: He used to be a Republican, but when he gets out, he's going to work hard to elect Democrats. The tour through the amputee ward at Walter Reed is just a set-up, a shtick, to deliver an anti-Bush punch line.

Sometimes Moore himself delivers the punch lines, but more often he programs his film's characters to deliver them. Even if they're dead. In the movie's big moment, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, sitting surrounded by her family, reads his last letter home in which, among other things, he says that he hopes everyone will vote to defeat George Bush. By this point, it's hard not to notice that the theater smells of stale popcorn.

---

Virtually everyone in "Fahrenheit 9/11"--and it doesn't matter which side they're on--is a dupe or a stupe in Michael's world. A long segment features a Fresno peace group, supposedly infiltrated by an undercover cop. Filming in their meeting room, Moore makes them look like goofy, witless innocents, and just so you don't miss the point, he runs tinkly soda-pop music beneath their scenes.

A young Oregon state highway patrolman looks like a fool, because he's standing guard on a highway in the middle of nowhere. Residents of Tappahannock, Va., commenting on a bureaucratic snafu over their town's name, sound like bewildered country yokels.

Moore's on-camera characters are invariably lower middle class and inarticulate. In fact, no one is physically attractive or stylish, which allows Moore's big-city target audience to stay inside its normal film-going comfort zone of smirking condescension.

The U.S. soldiers who speak onscreen in Iraq come across as bloodless killers with Southern accents. They sound stupidly unfeeling about the war's destruction. It wasn't clear to me that even this audience was in sync with the filmmaker's willingness to make a mockery of American soldiers. Moore's misanthropy is equal opportunity; he shows a greasy white guy in Flint, Mich., with a tattoo on his arm, whose thoughts on domestic security are that you can't trust anyone anymore, even people you know. That got a big laugh. All the people in Moore's beloved Flint--which appears in "Fahrenheit" as a few bombed-out housing blocks--are either dopey white trash or oppressed blacks. Two Marine recruiters walking around a U.S. shopping center are manipulative and opportunistic. They're made to look bad.

To make some point about domestic security, he shows a passenger's encounter at check-in with an improbable airport security guard--a befuddled, older woman in glasses, curly white hair and a Midwestern accent. Moore doesn't give this woman the courtesy of identifying where she works. She's nowhere.

Even the Iraqi victims in Baghdad are props. A baby's corpse is lifted from a dumpster, bloodied limbs are shown, people wail--but in a succession of quick frames. Moore never spends any time with these people. They just, so to speak, blow by.

In a sequence on the U.S.'s allies, Romania is depicted with a movie-stock Dracula figure (these are the people who freed themselves from Ceausescu), and Morocco is represented by monkeys scampering along the ground. That got a laugh, but not a big one.

---

It's hard to know whether Moore's filmmaking is sloppy or some sort of sleight-of-hand. Other than the Weinstein brothers and Moore, the film's official credits list only 15 people. Either "Fahrenheit" is a tape-and-paste job, or some colleagues have gotten short shrift. The director's cut must be huge.

Weirdly, the only people Moore seems to treat with simple respect are politicians who ape his agenda, such as Sen. Byron Dorgan and Rep. Jim McDermott. By "Fahrenheit's" end, you conclude that Moore sees the world as full of mostly useful idiots, including the audience (and probably the audience cheering him at the Oscars).

This is moviemaking for bicoastal cultural elites. They get to look down at the opposition, at "Bush," but they also get to feel superior to their own foot soldiers in the proletarian heartland. With no need to distinguish truth or detail, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is moral carpet-bombing from 10,000 feet.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

from the Boston Globe, 2004-Jul-19, by Cathy Young:

Moore's anti-US populism

WITH "Fahrenheit 9/11" still riding high at the box office and a new book titled "Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man" soaring to the best-seller lists, Michael Moore continues to be at the center of public debate. (So much the worse for public debate.) While many agree that Moore traffics in one-sided, nasty agitprop and factually shaky innuendo, quite a few people are willing to recognize him as a scrappy David battling the Goliath of the Bush propaganda machine, a hero who may bend or stretch a few facts but is right about the larger truths. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott even called him "a credit to the Republic."

So who, exactly, is this populist hero?

Moore isn't just antiwar and anti-Bush; he is also virulently anti-American. That's a label some right-wing pundits tend to slap on anyone critical of the war and of President Bush. In Moore's case, however, the label fits.

Moore, the 50-year-old filmmaker and author of several books, has made a career of traveling round the world talking about how stupid, brainwashed, selfish, greedy, and otherwise rotten Americans are. He regales British audiences with tales of a National Geographic survey which found that many young Americans cannot find Iraq or England on the map -- neglecting to mention that the survey results for British youth were quite woeful as well. Inviting an audience at Cambridge University to share some packs of Doritos, he comments, according to an account in The New Yorker, "It's still your way, right, to share? You don't want to turn into us -- a society where the ethic is me me me me me me me, [expletive] you."

If Moore believes that Scandinavian-style social democracy is preferable to American capitalism, that's his right. But in his world view, the United States is judged by a blatant double standard compared to other nations. In a July 4 piece for the Los Angeles Times, Moore asks the pro-Bush Americans he regards as mindless flag-wavers, "Are you proud that nearly 3 billion people on this planet do not have access to clean drinking water when we have the resources and technology to remedy this immediately?" Note that the other wealthy countries of the world are not told that they must either remedy the problems of the developing world this very minute or be ashamed of themselves.

In "Fahrenheit 9/11," Moore weeps crocodile tears for the American soldiers killed in Iraq and for their loved ones. Yet in an April 14 message on his website, commenting on proposals that the administration of Iraq be turned over to the United Nations, Moore had this to say:

"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 Americans 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."

In his 2003 book "Dude, Where's My Country," Moore expresses sympathy with the Palestinians who danced in the streets to celebrate the fall of the World Trade Center: after all, America supports Israel, which kills innocent Palestinian children. Then, he makes a statement so mind-boggling that when I saw it on an anti-Moore website, I thought it might be distorted. It was not:

"Of course many Israeli children have died too, at the hands of the Palestinians. You would think that would make every Israeli want to wipe out the Arab world, but the average Israeli does not have that response. Why? Because in their hearts, they know they are wrong, and they know they would be doing just what the Palestinians are doing if the sandal were on the other foot."

Moore's dishonesty in stringing together his narratives has been amply documented (see, for instance, the website www.spinsanity.org, which is dedicated to exposing both left-wing and right-wing spin and not known for pro-Bush sympathies). But Moore's problem is not just with facts, it's with basic decency.

In one of his "satirical" routines in England in 2002, Moore derided the passengers on the planes hijacked on Sept. 11 as white middle-class wimps. According to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a writer for the London Independent, "If the passengers had included black men, he claimed, those killers . . . would have been crushed by the dudes, who as we all know take no disrespect from anybody."

This isn't polemical boldness or satirical hyperbole; this is obscenity. After this, is there really anything else we need to know about Michael Moore?

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her column appears regularly in the Globe.

from The Guardian, 2004-Jun-17, by Samantha Ellis:

Fahrenheit 9/11 gets help offer from Hezbollah

The controversy over Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 just won't go away. The film, which is being advertised with the strapline "Controversy? What controversy?", has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America, meaning no one under 17 can see it. Distributors Lions Gate Films and IFC Films, opening the film next week, are appealing against the decision. The rating came partly because the film shows images of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, images Moore says he had long before the scandal erupted. He told Associated Press he kept quiet because he thought he'd be accused of "just putting this out for publicity for my movie".

Anger at Moore is building up, too. Pro-military lobby group Move America Forward is campaigning to "Stop Michael Moore from profiting in his attacks on America and our military"; Michael Wilson is making a documentary called Michael Moore Hates America; and the website www.moorelies.com is out "to expose America's fakest pseudo-muckraker".

Meanwhile, in the United Arab Emirates, the film is being offered the kind of support it doesn't need. According to Screen International, the UAE-based distributor Front Row Entertainment has been contacted by organisations related to the Hezbollah in Lebanon with offers of help. All in all, Tony Blair must be relieved that Moore is not going to make a film about him; Moore rebuffed the rumour in a message on his website headlined: "Sorry to scare you, Tony. Michael Moore was just kidding."

from WorldNetDaily, 2004-Jul-2:

Moore's film gets rave -- from Communists
Stalinist Reds love 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' Maoists love it, too

The Communist Party USA and the Revolutionary Communist Party had a nasty ideological split years ago as one faction lined up behind Moscow and the Soviet Union and the other with and China's Mao Zedong.

They still have violent disagreements over goals and tactics, but they agree on one thing. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" rules.

The film got a rave review yesterday in the Communist Party USA's newspaper People's Weekly World. The paper noted the controversial film that rakes the Bush administration over the war in Iraq was packing theaters across the country. The Communist Party USA is fielding no candidate for president, as it usually does, in favor of forming a "united front" for unseating President Bush.

"The movie is a documentary that the American people themselves are a part of," explained the paper. "It follows the dark history of the Bush administration, hatched from the rotten egg of a stolen election. It shines a light on the dark corners of the Bush family's brazen disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of African American voters in Florida, the Bushes' early -- and oily -- alliance with the ruling Saudi families, including the Bin Ladens, and the unspeakable toll on America's working-class families."

A companion story, reported on a party member who sat in on a conference call chat with Moore organized by Moveon.org in which it claims 54,975 people participated.

"Adopt five people who don't normally vote, Moore told us by speakerphone, to make sure they get to the polls," the story said. "Make arrangements now to take off Election Day. Every resident of the U.S. lives within driving distance of one of the 'battleground states,' he said, so set aside an autumn weekend to pack up the family and be in one of them, manning phone banks and precinct walking."

The story urged others to sign up on Moveon.org's website for a July 11 phone bank project.

Meanwhile, the RCP's Revolutionary Worker newspaper noted the camaraderie of the fellow believers who packed theaters to witness 'this thing' that promised to change the country.

"'This thing'" is exposing the government -- and the Bush crew that runs it," the Revolutionary Worker review said. "Exposing the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, the stealing of the 2000 election, the worship of the rich, the corruption in high places, and the lies -- above all the LIES, that have now been used to conquer countries, send young men and women to kill and die, and cynically keep millions of people in a manipulated 'state of alert.'"

The review continues: "'Fahrenheit 9/11' is hilarious, and savage, and (despite the howls of rightwing attack dogs) overwhelmingly factual. People are sick -- to death! -- of being muzzled, stifled and gagged. And in this onscreen rush of images and sound, there is a feeling that the cork has been popped. It's like an opening shot to this heated, politicized, dangerous and oh-so-crucial summer."

"Michael Moore has found his own creative way to say "NO!" to this Bush agenda, to its juggernaut of war and repression," the Revolutionary Worker said. "He has said it with his satirical, impish and provocateurish riffs -- from his own, social democratic point of view."

from the Chicago Sun-Times, 2004-Jul-4, by Mark Steyn:

Connect the dots when you watch 'Fahrenheit'

Excited about "Fahrenheit 9/11?" It's the Palme d'Or-winning and doubtless soon to be Oscar-winning "documentary" from average blue-collar multimillionaire Michael Moore. I saw it last weekend with an audience composed wholly of informed, intelligent sophisticates.

I knew they were informed, intelligent sophisticates because they howled with laughter at every joke about what a bozo Bush is. They split their sides during the patriotic ballad -- eagles soaring, etc. -- composed and sung by John Ashcroft, the famously sinister attorney general. Moore reveals -- and if you feel that knowing the plot would spoil the movie, please skip to the next paragraph -- that Bush is a privileged simpleton under the control of war-crazed Big Oil interests who arranged to have the 2000 election stolen for him. I hadn't heard that before, had you?

Once Moore gets past his recounting of the Florida recount, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I agreed with in the movie. For example, he's very hard on the Saudis, and the unique access to the Bush family enjoyed by their oleaginous ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar. He's also very mocking of the absurdities of post-9/11 airport security, alighting on a poor mom forced to drink a beaker of her own breast milk in front of passengers before boarding in order to demonstrate the liquid wasn't anything incendiary.

As we left, the couple ahead of me said they thought Bush would have a hard job responding to these shocking revelations. I didn't like to point out they could have heard about all this stuff years ago just by reading yours truly. I mentioned the breast-milk incident in a column Aug. 10, 2002. I called for Prince Bandar to be booted back to Saudi Arabia in November 2002, and I've been urging the dismantling of the kingdom -- Washington's out-of-control Frankensaud monster -- for almost three years now, since within a month of 9/11.

So in theory I ought to welcome Michael Moore as a comrade in arms. But the trouble with "Fahrenheit 9/11" is that you don't come away mad at the Saudis or America's useless bureaucracy, you come away mad at Bush -- or, if not mad, feeling snobbishly superior to him. And, if feeling snobbishly superior to the president isn't your bag, what's left is an incoherent bore. Moore follows his GUT, by which I mean his Grand Universal Theory: Bush is to blame for everything. Because of Bush, the Saudis secretly run U.S. policy. Because of Bush, the Taliban were in bed with Texas energy executives. Because of Bush, the Taliban got toppled. . . .

Whoa, hold up a minute, I thought he was all pals with the Taliban. The Saudis certainly were, which is why they opposed the liberation of Afghanistan.

But by now Moore's moved on to pointing out that Bush's Afghan stooge Hamid Karzai used to work for the Texas energy company panting for that big Afghan gas pipeline.

But hang on, I thought the Texan energy guys already had the Taliban in their pockets and were funded by the Saudis . . . "Connecting the dots" is all very well, but not when you've got more dots in your picture than Seurat.

Bush has always been the issue for Moore. On Sept. 11 itself, his only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and D.C. instead of Texas or, indeed, my beloved New Hampshire: "They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, D.C. and the plane's destination of California -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"

The fellows at the controls of those planes were training for 9/11 when Clinton was president and Gore was ahead in the polls, and they'd have still been in the cockpit had Ralph Nader been elected. Though Mohammed Atta took flying lessons in Florida, he apparently wasn't as worked up about its notorious hanging chads as Michael Moore. Mr. Moore is guilty of what I believe psychologists call "projection."

The "Why didn't you terrorists kill the Bush voters?" line is not reprised in the movie, but the strange preoccupations it betrays drive the entire picture. Here's the way it works: If Bush is wearing the blue boxer shorts, they're a suspicious personal gift from Crown Prince Abdullah. If Bush is wearing the red boxer shorts, it's a conspiracy to distract public attention from the blue ones he was given by Crown Prince Abdullah. If he's wearing no boxer shorts, it's because he's so dumb he can't find his underwear in the morning.

So, shortly after 9/11, Moore wrote that footage of one of the World Trade Center planes showed that it was being trailed by an F-16 -- i.e., the government could have shot it down but chose not to, so it could hit all those Al Gore voters. Imagine if, on Sept. 11, the U.S. Air Force had blown four passenger jets to kingdom come. Moore's film would be filled with poignant home movies of final Christmases and birthday parties and exploitative footage of anguished parents going to Washington to demand the truth about what happened that day and an end to the lame Bush spin about vague "threats" to public buildings.

Midway through the picture, a "peace" activist provides a perfect distillation of its argument. He recalls a conversation with an acquaintance, who observed, "bin Laden's a real ass---- for killing all those people." "Yeah," says the "pacifist", "but he'll never be as big an ass---- as Bush." That's who Michael Moore makes films for: those sophisticates who know that, no matter how many people bin Laden kills, in the ass---- hit parade he'll always come a distant second to Bush. Why, even Saddam Hussein, at his arraignment on Thursday, sounded awfully like he'd just seen "Fahrenheit 9/11" at the Loews Baghdad Roxy: "This is all theater. . . . The real criminal is Bush."

I can understand the point of being Michael Moore: There's a lot of money in it. What's harder to figure out is the point of being a devoted follower of Michael Moore. Apparently, the sophisticated, cynical intellectual class is so naive it'll fall for any old hooey peddled by a preening opportunist burlesque act. If the Saudis were smart, they'd have bought him up years ago, established his anti-Saudi credentials, and then used him to promote the defeat of their nemesis Bush.

Hmm. Maybe they don't need to. Stick him in a head-dress and he looks like King Fahd's brother.

All I'm saying is connect the dots . . .

from Newsweek online, 2004-Jun-30, by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball:

More Distortions From Michael Moore
Some of the main points in ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ really aren’t very fair at all

In his new movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” film-maker Michael Moore makes the eye-popping claim that Saudi Arabian interests “have given” $1.4 billion to firms connected to the family and friends of President George W. Bush. This, Moore suggests, helps explain one of the principal themes of the film: that the Bush White House has shown remarkable solicitude to the Saudi royals, even to the point of compromising the war on terror. When you and your associates get money like that, Moore says at one point in the movie, “who you gonna like? Who’s your Daddy?”

But a cursory examination of the claim reveals some flaws in Moore’s arithmetic—not to mention his logic. Moore derives the $1.4 billion figure from journalist Craig Unger’s book, “House of Bush, House of Saud.” Nearly 90 percent of that amount, $1.18 billion, comes from just one source: contracts in the early to mid-1990’s that the Saudi Arabian government awarded to a U.S. defense contractor, BDM, for training the country’s military and National Guard. What’s the significance of BDM? The firm at the time was owned by the Carlyle Group, the powerhouse private-equity firm whose Asian-affiliate advisory board has included the president’s father, George H.W. Bush.

Leave aside the tenuous six-degrees-of-separation nature of this “connection.” The main problem with this figure, according to Carlyle spokesman Chris Ullman, is that former president Bush didn’t join the Carlyle advisory board until April, 1998—five months after Carlyle had already sold BDM to another defense firm. True enough, the former president was paid for one speech to Carlyle and then made an overseas trip on the firm’s behalf the previous fall, right around the time BDM was sold. But Ullman insists any link between the former president’s relations with Carlyle and the Saudi contracts to BDM that were awarded years earlier is entirely bogus. “The figure is inaccurate and misleading,” said Ullman. “The movie clearly implies that the Saudis gave $1.4 billion to the Bushes and their friends. But most of it went to a Carlyle Group company before Bush even joined the firm. Bush had nothing to do with BDM.”

In light of the extraordinary box office success of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” and its potential political impact, a rigorous analysis of the film’s assertions seems more than warranted. Indeed, Moore himself has invited the scrutiny. He has set up a Web site and “war-room” to defend the claims in the movie—and attack his critics. (The war-room’s overseers are two veteran spin-doctors from the Clinton White House: Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani.) Moore also this week contended that the media was pounding away at him “pretty hard” because “they’re embarrassed. They’ve been outed as people who did not do their job.” Among the media critiques prominently criticized was an article in Newsweek.

In response to inquiries from NEWSWEEK about the Carlyle issue, Lehane shot back this week with a volley of points:  There were multiple Bush “connections” to the Carlyle Group throughout the period of the Saudi contracts to BDM, Lehane noted in an e-mail, including the fact that the firm’s principals included James Baker (Secretary of State during the first Bush administration) and Richard Darman (the first Bush’s OMB chief). Moreover, George W. Bush himself had his own Carlyle Group link: between 1990 and 1994, he served on the board of another Carlyle-owned firm, Caterair, a now defunct airline catering firm.

But unmentioned in “Fahrenheit/911,” or in the Lehane responses, is a considerable body of evidence that cuts the other way. The idea that the Carlyle Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of some loosely defined “Bush Inc.” concern seems hard to defend. Like many similar entities, Carlyle boasts a roster of bipartisan Washington power figures. Its founding and still managing partner is David Rubenstein, a former top domestic policy advisor to Jimmy Carter. Among the firm’s senior advisors is Thomas “Mack” McLarty, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, and Arthur Levitt, Clinton’s former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of its other managing partners is William Kennard, Clinton’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Spokesman Ullman was the Clinton-era spokesman for the SEC.

As for the president’s own Carlyle link, his service on the Caterair board ended when he quit to run for Texas governor—a few months before the first of the Saudi contracts to the unrelated BDM firm was awarded. Moreover, says Ullman, Bush “didn’t invest in the [Caterair] deal and he didn’t profit from it.” (The firm was a big money loser and was even cited by the campaign of Ann Richards, Bush’s 1994 gubernatorial opponent, as evidence of what a lousy businessman he was.)

Most importantly, the movie fails to show any evidence that Bush White House actually has intervened in any way to promote the interests of the Carlyle Group. In fact, the one major Bush administration decision that most directly affected the company’s interest was the cancellation of a $11 billion program for the Crusader rocket artillery system that had been developed for the U.S. Army (during the Clinton administration)—a move that had been foreshadowed by Bush’s own statements during the 2000 campaign saying he wanted a lighter and more mobile military. The Crusader was manufactured by United Defense, which had been wholly owned by Carlyle until it spun the company off in a public offering in October, 2001 (and profited to the tune of $237 million). Carlyle still owned 47 percent of the shares in the defense company at the time that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—in the face of stiff congressional resistance—canceled the Crusader program the following year. These developments, like much else relevant to Carlyle, goes unmentioned in Moore’s movie.

None of this is to suggest that there aren’t legitimate questions that deserve to be asked about the influence that secretive firms like Carlyle have in Washington—not to mention the Saudis themselves (an issue that has been taken up repeatedly in our weekly Terror Watch columns.) Nor are we trying to say that “Fahrenheit 9/11” isn’t a powerful and effective movie that raises a host of legitimate issues about President Bush’s response to the September 11 attacks, the climate of fear engendered by the war on terror and, most importantly, about the wisdom and horrific human toll of the war in Iraq.

But for all the reasonable points he makes, on more than a few occasions in the movie Moore twists and bends the available facts and makes glaring omissions in ways that end up clouding the serious political debate he wants to provoke.

Consider Moore’s handling of another conspiratorial claim: the idea that oil-company interest in building a pipeline through Afghanistan influenced early Bush administration policy regarding the Taliban. Moore raises the issue by stringing together two unrelated events. The first is that a delegation of Taliban leaders flew to Houston, Texas, in 1997 (”while George W. Bush was governor of Texas,” the movie helpfully points out) to meet with executives of Unocal, an oil company that was indeed interested in building a pipeline to carry natural gas from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan.

The second is that another Taliban emissary visited Washington in March, 2001 and got an audience at the State Department, leaving Moore to speculate that the Bush administration had gone soft on the protectors of Osama bin Laden because it was interested in promoting a pipeline deal. "Why on earth would the Bush administration allow a Taliban leader to visit the United States knowing that the Taliban were harboring the man who bombed the USS Cole and our African embassies?" Moore asks at one point.

This, as conspiracy theories go, is more than a stretch. Unocal’s interest in building the Afghan pipeline is well documented. Indeed, according to “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10., 2001,” the critically acclaimed book by Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll, Unocal executives met repeatedly with Clinton administration officials throughout the late 1990s in an effort to promote the project—in part by getting the U.S. government to take a more conciliatory approach to the Taliban. “It was an easy time for an American oil executive to find an audience in the Clinton White House,” Coll writes on page 307 of his book. “At the White House, [Unocal lobbyist Marty Miller] met regularly with Sheila Heslin, the director of energy issues at the National Security Council, whose suite next to the West Wing coursed with visitors from American oil firms. Miller found Heslin…very supportive of Unocal’s agenda in Afghanistan.”

Coll never suggests that the Clintonites’ interest in the Unocal project was because of the corrupting influence of big oil. Clinton National Security Council advisor “Berger, Heslin and their White House colleagues saw themselves engaged in a hardheaded synthesis of American commercial interests and national security goals,” he writes. “They wanted to use the profit-making motives of American oil companies to thwart one of the country’s most determined enemies, Iran, and to contain the longer-term ambitions of a restless Russia.”

Whatever the motive, the Unocal pipeline project was entirely a Clinton-era proposal: By 1998, as the Taliban hardened its positions, the U.S. oil company pulled out of the deal. By the time George W. Bush took office, it was a dead issue—and no longer the subject of any lobbying in Washington. (Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force report in May, 2001, makes no reference to it.) There is no evidence that the Taliban envoy who visited Washington in March, 2001—and met with State Department and National Security Council officials—ever brought up the pipeline. Nor is there any evidence anybody in the Bush administration raised it with him. The envoy brought a letter to Bush offering negotiations to resolve the issue of what should be done with bin Laden. (A few weeks earlier, Taliban leader Mullah Omar had floated the idea of convening a tribunal of Islamic religious scholars to review the evidence against the Al Qaeda leader.) The Taliban offer was promptly shot down. “We have not seen from the Taliban a proposal that would meet the requirements of the U.N. resolution to hand over Osama bin Laden to a country where he can be brought to justice,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said at the time.

The use of innuendo is rife through other critical passages of “Fahrenheit 9/11.” The movie makes much of the president’s relationship with James R. Bath, a former member of his Texas Air National Guard who, like Bush, was suspended from flying at one point for failure to take a physical. The movie suggests that the White House blacked out a reference to Bath’s missed physical from his National Guard records not because of legal concerns over the Privacy Act but because it was trying to conceal the Bath connection—a presumed embarrassment because the Houston businessman had once been the U.S. money manager for the bin Laden family. After being hired by the bin Ladens to manager their money in Texas, Bath “in turn,” the movie says, “invested in George W. Bush.”

The investment in question is real: In the late 1970’s, Bath put up $50,000 into Bush’s Arbusto Energy, (one of a string of failed oil ventures by the president), giving Bath a 5 percent interest in the company. The implication seems to be that, years later, because of this link, Bush was somehow not as zealous about his determination to get bin Laden.

Leaving aside the fact that the bin Laden family, which  runs one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest construction firms, has never been linked to terrorism, the movie—which relied heavily on Unger’s book—fails to note the author’s conclusion about what to make of the supposed Bin Laden-Bath-Bush nexus: that it may not mean anything. The “Bush-Bin Laden ‘relationships’ were indirect—two degrees of separation, perhaps—and at times have been overstated,” Unger writes in his book. While critics have charged that bin Laden money found its way into Arbusto through Bath, Unger notes that “no hard evidence has ever been found to back up that charge” and Bath himself has adamantly denied it. “One hundred percent of those funds (in Arbusto) were mine,” says Bath in a footnote on page 101 of Unger’s book. “It was a purely personal investment.”

The innuendo is greatest, of course, in Moore’s dealings with the matter of the departing Saudis flown out of the United States in the days after the September 11 terror attacks. Much has already been written about these flights, especially the film’s implication that figures with possible knowledge of the terrorist attacks were allowed to leave the country without adequate FBI screening—a notion that has been essentially rejected by the 9/11 commission. The 9/11 commission found that the FBI screened the Saudi passengers, ran their names through federal databases, interviewed 30 of them and asked many of them “detailed questions." “Nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the country,” the commission stated. New information about a flight from Tampa, Florida late on Sept. 13 seems mostly a red herring: The flight didn’t take any Saudis out of the United States. It was a domestic flight to Lexington, Kentucky that took place after the Tampa airport had already reopened.(You can read Unger’s letter to Newsweek on this point, as well as our reply, by clicking here.)

It is true that there are still some in the FBI who had questions about the flights-and wish more care had been taken to examine the passengers. But the film’s basic point—that the flights represented perhaps the supreme example of the Saudi government’s influence in the Bush White House-is almost impossible to defend. Why? Because while the film claims—correctly—that the “White House” approved the flights, it fails to note who exactly in the White House did so. It wasn’t the president, or the vice president or anybody else supposedly corrupted by Saudi oil money. It was Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism czar who was a holdover from the Clinton administration and who has since turned into a fierce Bush critic. Clarke has publicly testified that he gave the greenlight—conditioned on FBI clearance.

“I thought the flights were correct,” Clarke told ABC News last week. “The Saudis had reasonable fear that they might be the subject of vigilante attacks in the United States after 9/11. And there is no evidence even to this date that any of the people who left on those flights were people of interest to the FBI.” Like much else relevant to the issues Moore raises, Clarke’s reasons for approving the flights—and his thoughts on them today—won’t be found in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” nor in any of the ample material now being churned out by the film-maker’s “war room” to defend his provocative, if flawed, movie.

from NewsMax.com, 2004-Jun-30:

Richard Clarke: Big Part of Moore's Movie 'a Mistake'

Former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke, who served as a principal source for conspiracy filmmaker Michael Moore's movie "Fahrenheit 9/11," said this week that the central premise of the film is "a mistake."

In an interview with the Associated Press, Clarke took issue with Moore's criticism that President Bush allowed prominent Saudis, including members of Osama bin Laden's family, to fly out of the U.S. in the days after the 9/11 attacks.

Saying Moore's version of the episode has provoked "a tempest in a tea pot," Clarke called his decision to make the bin Laden family flyout a big part of the film's indictment against Bush "a mistake."

"After 9/11, I think the Saudis were perfectly justified ... in fearing the possibility of vigilantism against Saudis in this country. When they asked to evacuate their citizens ... I thought it was a perfectly normal request," he explained.

In May, Clarke confessed that he and he alone made the decision to approve the flyouts.

"It didn't get any higher than me," he told The Hill newspaper. "On 9/11, 9/12 and 9/13, many things didn't get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI."

Clarke told the 9/11 Commission the same thing in March, after first detailing the episode for Vanity Fair magazine last August - leaving plenty of time for Moore to adjust his film to the facts as recounted by his primary source.

from Slate, 2004-Jun-21, by Christopher Hitchens:

fighting words
Unfairenheit 9/11
The lies of Michael Moore.

One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. 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? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.

Nonetheless, it seems that an answer to this long-felt need is finally beginning to emerge. I exempt Al Franken's unintentionally funny Air America network, to which I gave a couple of interviews in its early days. There, one could hear the reassuring noise of collapsing scenery and tripped-over wires and be reminded once again that correct politics and smooth media presentation are not even distant cousins. With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note has been struck. Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified. Something—I cannot guess what, since we knew as much then as we do now—has since apparently persuaded Moore that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama is suddenly so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a dangerous "distraction" from the fight against him. I believe that I understand the convenience of this late conversion.

Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about Afghanistan, and makes them in this order:

1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group.

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

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

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.

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

6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar" film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.)

It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point. Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all—the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002—or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending. 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.

He prefers leaden sarcasm to irony and, indeed, may not appreciate the distinction. 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. I banged on about this myself at the time and wrote a Nation column drawing attention to the groveling Larry King interview with the insufferable Prince Bandar, which Moore excerpts. However, recent developments have not been kind to our Mike. 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, Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that—as you might expect—Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment. And it does not seem very likely that, in his open admission about the Bin Laden family evacuation, Clarke is taking a fall, or a spear in the chest, for the Bush administration. So, that's another bust for this windy and bloated cinematic "key to all mythologies."

A film that bases itself on a big lie and a big misrepresentation can only sustain itself by a dizzying succession of smaller falsehoods, beefed up by wilder and (if possible) yet more-contradictory claims. President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is that about, by the way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars?) But the shot of him "relaxing at Camp David" shows him side by side with Tony Blair. I say "shows," even though this photograph is on-screen so briefly that if you sneeze or blink, you won't recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or at least with this prime minister, is not a goof-off.

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. Well, that's what you get if you catch the president on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm. 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 (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse. The other half would be saying what they already say—that he knew the attack was coming, was using it to cement himself in power, and couldn't wait to get on with his coup. This is the line taken by Gore Vidal and by a scandalous recent book that also revives the charge of FDR's collusion over Pearl Harbor. At least Moore's film should put the shameful purveyors of that last theory back in their paranoid box.

But it won't because it encourages their half-baked fantasies in so many other ways. We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation." (In fact, Iraq's "sovereignty" was heavily qualified by international sanctions, however questionable, which reflected its noncompliance with important U.N. resolutions.) In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003. I remember asking Moore at Telluride if he was or was not a pacifist. He would not give a straight answer then, and he doesn't now, either. 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.)

That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible. Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way: He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist "security" headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as "threatening," even if one was narrow enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.)

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. Now look again at the facts I have cited above. If these things had been allowed to happen under any other administration, you can be sure that Moore and others would now glibly be accusing the president of ignoring, or of having ignored, some fairly unmistakable "warnings."

The same "let's have it both ways" opportunism infects his treatment of another very serious subject, namely domestic counterterrorist policy. From being accused of overlooking too many warnings—not exactly an original point—the administration is now lavishly taunted for issuing too many. (Would there not have been "fear" if the harbingers of 9/11 had been taken seriously?) We are shown some American civilians who have had absurd encounters with idiotic "security" staff. (Have you ever met anyone who can't tell such a story?) Then we are immediately 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. (Cue mood music for sinister influence of Big Tobacco.) So—he wants even more pocket-rummaging by airport officials? Uh, no, not exactly. But by this stage, who's counting? Moore is having it three ways and asserting everything and nothing. Again—simply not serious.

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? If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other's pockets, as is alleged in a sort of vulgar sub-Brechtian scene with Arab headdresses replacing top hats, then how come the most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in Baghdad? The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq's recuperated oil industry might challenge their near-monopoly. They fear the liberation of the Shiite Muslims they so despise. To make these elementary points is to collapse the whole pathetic edifice of the film's "theory." Perhaps Moore prefers the pro-Saudi Kissinger/Scowcroft plan for the Middle East, where stability trumps every other consideration and where one dare not upset the local house of cards, or killing-field of Kurds? This would be a strange position for a purported radical. Then again, perhaps he does not take this conservative line because his real pitch is not to any audience member with a serious interest in foreign policy. It is to the provincial isolationist.

I have already said that Moore's film has the staunch courage to mock Bush for his verbal infelicity. Yet it's much, much braver than that. From Fahrenheit 9/11 you can glean even more astounding and hidden disclosures, such as the capitalist nature of American society, the existence of Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," and the use of "spin" in the presentation of our politicians. It's high time someone had the nerve to point this out. 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. I won't dwell on the fact that black Americans have fought for almost a century and a half, from insisting on their right to join the U.S. Army and fight in the Civil War to the right to have a desegregated Army that set the pace for post-1945 civil rights. I'll merely ask this: 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.) Well, where does he think those needful heroes and heroines would have come from? Does he favor a draft—the most statist and oppressive solution? Does he think that only hapless and gullible proles sign up for the Marines? Does he think—as he seems to suggest—that parents can "send" their children, as he stupidly asks elected members of Congress to do? Would he have abandoned Gettysburg because the Union allowed civilians to pay proxies to serve in their place? Would he have supported the antidraft (and very antiblack) riots against Lincoln in New York? After a point, one realizes that it's a waste of time asking him questions of this sort. It would be too much like taking him seriously. He'll just try anything once and see if it floats or flies or gets a cheer.

Indeed, Moore's affected and ostentatious concern for black America is one of the most suspect ingredients of his pitch package. In a recent interview, he yelled that if the hijacked civilians of 9/11 had been black, they would have fought back, unlike the stupid and presumably cowardly white men and women (and children). Never mind for now how many black passengers were on those planes—we happen to know what Moore does not care to mention: that Todd Beamer and a few of his co-passengers, shouting "Let's roll," rammed the hijackers with a trolley, fought them tooth and nail, and helped bring down a United Airlines plane, in Pennsylvania, that was speeding toward either the White House or the Capitol. There are no words for real, impromptu bravery like that, which helped save our republic from worse than actually befell. The Pennsylvania drama also reminds one of the self-evident fact that this war is not fought only "overseas" or in uniform, but is being brought to our cities. Yet Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is everything.

Moore has announced that he won't even appear on TV shows where he might face hostile questioning. I notice from the New York Times of June 20 that he has pompously established a rapid response team, and a fact-checking staff, and some tough lawyers, to bulwark himself against attack. He'll sue, Moore says, if anyone insults him or his pet. Some right-wing hack groups, I gather, are planning to bring pressure on their local movie theaters to drop the film. How dumb or thuggish do you have to be in order to counter one form of stupidity and cowardice with another? By all means go and see this terrible film, and take your friends, and if the fools in the audience strike up one cry, in favor of surrender or defeat, feel free to join in the conversation.

However, I think we can agree that the film is so flat-out phony that "fact-checking" is beside the point. And as for the scary lawyers—get a life, or maybe see me in court. But I offer this, to Moore and to his rapid response rabble. Any time, Michael my boy. Let's redo Telluride. Any show. Any place. Any platform. Let's see what you're made of.

Some people soothingly say that one should relax about all this. It's only a movie. No biggie. It's no worse than the tomfoolery of Oliver Stone. It's kick-ass entertainment. It might even help get out "the youth vote." Yeah, well, I have myself written and presented about a dozen low-budget made-for-TV documentaries, on subjects as various as Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton and the Cyprus crisis, and I also helped produce a slightly more polished one on Henry Kissinger that was shown in movie theaters. So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them. By the same token, if I write an article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (…), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised. At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage.

Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …

And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

Correction, June 22, 2004: This piece originally referred to terrorist attacks by Abu Nidal's group on the Munich and Rome airports. The 1985 attacks occurred at the Rome and Vienna airports. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest book, Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, is out in paperback.

from NewsMax.com, 2004-Jul-5, by Christopher Ruddy:

Michael Moore's Hate Soup

I just drank a cup of Democratic Hate Soup cooked up by its new propaganda chef, Michael Moore.

After watching his “Fahrenheit 9/11,” one has to have a certain admiration for Michael Moore.

It takes a definite genius to be able to manipulate well-educated people.

Of course, I was shocked by Moore’s film and his blatant disregard for truth.

But even more startling was the reaction I have heard this week from other people who saw the “documentary” and who are Republicans, conservatives or political moderates – but all well-educated.

All of them were overwhelmed by Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and said they already have decided to vote against Bush and for John Kerry. I count now about a dozen people that I would not have believed could be so affected, including one of my doctors.

Clearly, the Republicans and supporters of George Bush must take this movie with the utmost seriousness.

NewsMax predicted that this movie would be part of the media offensive against Bush.

In NewsMax Magazine’s June cover story, “The Media War On Bush,” we detailed the $2 billion – our estimate – that will be spent with “in kind” media coverage to defeat Bush this November.

This in-kind donation comes in the form of slanted nightly news coverage, the print media, books and even Hollywood’s efforts.

We noted that Michael Moore’s film would be a major contribution for Kerry, as it was being shown in theatres nationwide. Of the $2 billion media war against Bush – which we believe to be a conservative estimate – we calculated that Michael Moore’s “documentary” would be an in-kind contribution of approximately $20 million for the Kerry campaign.

As it turned out, that figure was way too conservative.

The Moore film raked in over $20 million on its opening day.

It is now evident that the Moore film will have a value of at least $250 million for the Kerry effort to win the White House.

Moore’s concoction of Hate Soup is being completely swallowed. This November it will sway independent voters, completely energize the Democratic base – and lead to increased donations to the Kerry coffers.

Moore’s Hate Soup can be countered, but only if we can regurgitate chunk by chunk the propaganda that has been so willingly swallowed.

'The Real Intent'

Moore claims that this is a movie about Bush’s failure to handle the events that led up to 9/11.

But the opening of the documentary reveals that his real intent was to inflict as much political damage on Bush as possible.

He does so by having viewers relive his version of the 2000 election crisis in an effort to show that George Bush a) is an illegitimate president and b) stole the election from Al Gore.

I’m not sure what the election controversy has to do with Sept. 11.

But in discussing this event, Moore uses the same old arguments that somehow Bush stole the election and squeaked through in Florida.

In a sequence of footage he shows news clips of the 2000 Election Night where the major news anchors flip-flopped their prediction that Al Gore had won Florida.

But he could just as easily have shown clips of the networks declaring Gore the winner of Florida – an hour before all the polls in the state had closed.

As Republicans have pointed out, this had the effect of lowering Republican turnout by as many as 50,000 votes in Florida’s Panhandle.

As it turned out, Bush won Florida by a squeaker – but there is little dispute that had the media not acted deviously in calling the election early in Florida, Bush would have won quite handily.

I might add that Moore could have noted that the major networks had been asked not to call Florida before the polls closed – as they customarily do for every other state – because it could skew the results.

But Moore did not even mention that issue. His intent is not to get to the truth behind Sept. 11. It is instead to remind people that Bush is an illegitimate president and to stir up Democratic ranks to come out on Election Day.

’The Saudi Stuff’

My doctor pointed out to me that he was so bothered by “the Saudi stuff” – meaning the Bush family connections with the Saudi Arabians revealed by Moore – he will not vote for Bush.

Moore claims that Bush never really held the Saudis accountable for their ties to al-Qaida because of these “family connections.”

As I asked my doctor, “Why, then, are the Saudis trying to defeat Bush this election year?”

He looked shocked. If the Saudis really wanted Bush re-elected this year, gas would be selling for $1.25 a gallon today. Gasoline is still closer to $2 a gallon – and even if the price drops, it will only marginally help Bush. Clearly the Saudis could have made a major contribution to Bush by revving the U.S. economy this year with low oil prices.

The Saudi Arabians may like the Bush family on a personal level. But they are clearly afraid of him and his national security team, which has held Saudi Arabia accountable as never before.

Gone are the Clinton-Gore days when the Saudis could walk all over the United States, pay lip service to us and give huge amounts of money to al-Qaida front groups and other terrorists around the world.

Remember the Khobar Towers bombing? During the Clinton years, the Saudis would not even cooperate with the FBI’s investigation.

The Saudis did not want Bush to be so vigorous in his war on terror. That is clear.

But by showing a montage of pictures of George Bush and his father shaking hands and smiling with Saudi princes, Moore tries to “prove” that somehow the relationship was improper.

The Moore “evidence” sounded like something out of a Lyndon Larouche propaganda flyer: a photograph of the queen of England smiling with the president of the United States. Aha! This proves Larouche’s contention that the British monarchy secretly controls the White House.

So much for conspiracy theories created out of “guilt by association” techniques. Saudi Arabia is a major country in the Middle East and one of the most vitally important for the United States. It is smart and good politics for the Bush family and other American leaders to have close and developing ties with the Saudis.

Nor did I buy the claim that Michael Moore uncovered some huge smoking gun, as he suggests in his film.

As it turned out, one of the men who served with George Bush in the National Guard during the 1970s was James R. Bath.

Bath has gone on to have ties with the Saudi Arabians. So what? Moore also implies that Bath funded George Bush’s business enterprises with Saudi money, a claim already categorically denied.

’9/11: Bush Did Nothing to Stop It’

It’s interesting that Michael Moore never focuses on the Clinton administration’s culpability in Sept. 11.

The Sept. 11 Commission and other intelligence reports say that the plot to bomb the World Trade Center began in the mid 1990s – as early as 1996.

During the same time, numerous U.S. targets were hit, with very little retaliation from the U.S.

For five years the terrorists plotted, with many entering and training in the U.S. during the period Bill Clinton was president.

Yet there is almost no discussion of this in Michael Moore’s film. Why?

On Sept. 11, 2001, Bush had been in office for less than eight months.

Anyone who knows how the federal government functions would know that the president, in such a short time, would have limited influence over the government and its policies.

For instance, only three political appointments had been made to the Pentagon by Sept. 11; one of those was Donald Rumsfeld.

At the time of 9/11, most of the government was still staffed by the appointments Bill Clinton had made – including at the CIA and FBI and almost every other federal agency. Certainly President Bush has some culpability in the events of Sept. 11, but reasonable people should wonder why he receives all the blame while his predecessors receive none.

’But Bush Knew They Were Going to Hijack Planes’

As the 9/11 Commission report has revealed, Bush was informed in a memo in August 2001 that al-Qaida was intent on hitting targets within the U.S. and was even considering hijacking planes.

Moore uses this information again as a smoking gun that Bush should have done more and that somehow he should have taken steps to stop the hijackers.

Perhaps.

But I also have a feeling that the president gets warnings of this type – some real, some not so real – every day.

Recently, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that a day did not go by that his police commissioner or some other agency chief called him about a potential threat to the city.

Obviously, almost all such threats never materialize. What was Bush supposed to have done had he known there were potential hijackings under way?

He could have notified the public about that threat and every other threat the U.S. gets.

Criticism of the administration since Sept. 11 has led the administration to regularly reveal “chatter” that suggests threats.

Moore, of course, doesn’t applaud the administration for doing so. He suggests in his film that the terror warnings are just an effort to scare and manipulate the public.

In the Moorewellian world we live in, Bush is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.

And the CIA intelligence report warning of hijackings never informed the president that that terrorists were planning to use commercial jets as flying bombs.

This was a significant failure of our intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and FBI, which failed to take into account available intelligence that hijackers were preparing to attack the U.S. – and not alerting the president to previous intelligence showing that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups had plotted to use jets as human flying bombs.

Had that possibility been mentioned in that August memo, I would agree that Bush would be more culpable for not having been more proactive. But that possibility was never mentioned, and I don’t believe it was Bush’s role dream up what the hijackers might do.

’Weapons of Mass Destruction’

The pretext of the war was that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the U.S. primarily because he was developing weapons of mass destruction.

The U.S. cited some evidence that appears now to have been faulty. But what is clear is that Saddam Hussein refused to abide by numerous U.N. resolutions and treaty obligations he had signed that required full inspections.

Is it our fault that we held this rogue leader accountable to international law?

Weapons of mass destruction include biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. We now know that Saddam had a biological and chemical program and was trying to develop nuclear programs.

Can we fault the president for acting on the best of intentions? What would have happened if Bush had not acted and five years later Saddam had killed 250,000 Americans with an anthrax attack?

Also missing from Moore’s film are the serious statements that Clinton and many of his top officials made about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

In one warning, Clinton said that Saddam Hussein was developing such weapons and that he could use them if he was not stopped.

Had Moore, in fairness, showed just one of these Clinton clips, the claims of his “documentary” would have been eviscerated.

No, in Moore’s Hate Soup, Bill Clinton is not an ingredient.

’Blacks and the War’

Michael Moore is very clever.

He is working on behalf of the Democratic Party for this year’s election.

He offers some passing criticism of the Democrats, but he is still rooting for them.

In his film, a maimed soldier from Iraq says that he’s voting Democrat this year and doing everything he can to help the Democrats. (Funny, that’s what Michael Moore’s also doing!)

Moore knows that the African-American constituency is a key component of the Democratic Party. The Democrats need the African-American vote to win.

Typically, they’ve been getting 90 percent of the vote. But in a close election, every percent counts. They can’t have blacks go off the reservation, so to speak – not this year.

So Moore cleverly begins his film with the Congressional Black Caucus’ efforts to stop the Electoral College procedures. (I am baffled as to what this has to do with Sept. 11.)

And again, Moore implies throughout his film that somehow young black men are being used as cannon fodder for Bush’s war on terror. It is they, not white young people, being sent to Iraq to die.

Moore never makes this claim outright because he knows that statistical evidence shows blacks are not dying in Iraq in any disproportionate number to their percentage of the U.S. population. (A similar myth was created by the media during the Vietnam War. The statistics show that blacks died in Vietnam at about the same percentage as their population.)

The clear impression from Moore is that Bush is an elitist white racist, along with many congressmen who don’t have their sons or daughters in the U.S. military.

Moore conveniently fails to note that a very large number of congressmen and senators have served in the military and risked their lives for their country.

He also fails to inform his audience that there is probably a very small number of congressmen and senators with children of recruiting age.

On so many points and in so many ways, Michael Moore is extremely manipulative.

I was shocked at the end of the film when people clapped thunderously. It looked like an audience that was sophisticated and educated.

But they apparently don’t even know the basic facts of what’s happening in the world today.

I do believe that the Bush administration made mistakes in the Iraq war. Mistakes are made in all wars.

But I do not believe that Bush was wrong in going after Saddam Hussein or had a malevolent intention – as Moore suggests.

The Real Michael Moore

I remember when I first watched Moore’s first blockbuster documentary, “Roger and Me.”

I knew it had a liberal bias but I sort of liked Michael Moore.

How can you not like an average guy going against a corporate giant such as GM’s chairman, Roger Smith?

It is human nature to like to see David take on Goliath.

So it is easy to understand the cheers as Moore takes on the president, vice president and leadership of the country – and shows apparent hypocrisy.

I understand the positive reaction Moore’s film has received by many.

But who is Michael Moore?

When Michael Moore’s TV series (which turned out to be a very big flop) came out in the 1980s, I tuned in.

I thought it would be as interesting as his “Roger and Me” documentary.

But instead of taking on the rich and powerful, the typical show demonstrated time and time again Moore’s belief that the average American is stupid, ignorant, dumb.

It’s no contradiction that Moore went to Europe recently and said that Americans were “stupid.”

In “Fahrenheit 9/11,” he hits a nerve again, because he takes on what appear to be the rich and the powerful and the elite. But what he doesn’t reveal is that he hates the rest of us too.

Take, for example, the grieving mother in the film who lost her son in Iraq.

She talks of her love for Jesus and how she has relied on Him during this period.

It was a touching moment, especially for anyone who is a Christian. But one wonders why Moore would use that footage, because he is like a lot of other liberal elitists who don’t exactly have a history of attending Billy Graham crusades.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if his next documentary is about “Jesus Freaks.”

So that’s the bottom line: Michael Moore is not interested in truth, he’s interested in political action, achieving goals and manipulating people. He can do “whatever it takes” to achieve the objectives.

It’s a dangerous pot of soup Michael Moore has concocted, and it is sad that so many people haven’t discovered that it is a deceptive potion.

from Knight Ridder Newspapers via the Seattle Times, 2004-Jul-5, by Sumana Chatterjee and David Goldstein:

Analyzing "Fahrenheit 9/11": It's accurate — to a degree

WASHINGTON — Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11" has been called many things: incendiary, thought-provoking, satirical, propaganda.

But is it true?

That's a question millions of viewers are asking as the film enters its second week of distribution. This weekend, the number of screens showing the film doubled, from 868 to 1,725. More than 6 million people had seen the film by Wednesday, and millions more will watch it in the next few days.

Political commentators have weighed in. Detractors of President Bush have praised the film for its scathing view of the way he has handled the war on terrorism. Supporters of the president say Moore has used the facts selectively to distort the record.

A close viewing of the film and a review of the record provide a more nuanced picture. Many of the details Moore uses to slam Bush are true. Others are partially true and open to interpretation. Some are clearly false.

This is a guide to some of the film's key points.

Bush's leadership on Sept. 11

President's actions, timing still a matter of controversy

In one of the film's most controversial sequences, Moore shows the president at an elementary school in Florida on Sept. 11. Two planes have crashed into the World Trade Center towers, and Bush is sitting in front of second-grade students reading "My Pet Goat." His chief of staff, Andrew Card, comes in about 9:05 a.m. and whispers in his ear. Card was telling Bush, we later learned, "America is under attack."

The president appears frozen. The movie slows the frames, which exaggerates each movement. Bush remains in the classroom for seven minutes before leaving to talk to his staff about the attacks.

Moore suggests the president's possible thoughts during those minutes: Should I have vacationed less and worked more? Should I have listened to anti-terrorism experts warning of an al-Qaida attack?

The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks and the government's response interviewed Bush. The commission staff said in an interim report that the president "felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."

The report says nothing about what Bush's staff did while he was in the classroom but notes that "as far as we know no one was in contact with the Pentagon." The president's motorcade left the school at 9:35 a.m., and Bush talked with Vice President Dick Cheney for the first time at 9:45 a.m.

According to the interim report, the government's response to what had happened at the World Trade Center and to two other hijackings was in disarray during the period that Bush was at the school. Two F-15 fighter planes had taken off at 8:53 a.m., but their pilots didn't have clear orders on what to do or where to go and were in a holding pattern off Long Island, N.Y.

Sometime between 9:21 and 9:25 a.m., the Federal Aviation Administration realized that a third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, had been hijacked. That plane would strike the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., the commission reported.

A few minutes later, air-traffic controllers heard screaming aboard United Airlines 93 and determined that it also had been hijacked. It was headed to Washington and gaining speed.

What happened next is contested. The Sept. 11 panel reviewed tapes and flight and radar data, and conducted hundreds of interviews.

It found that while Bush read the children's book, air-traffic controllers wondered if the military had been asked to intercept the plane and who had the authority to shoot down planes. By the time the plane crashed into a Pennsylvania field at 10:03 a.m., no one at the FAA had asked the military's help to stop the aircraft, according to the panel.

Though the president told the commission that he authorized the military to shoot down the hijacked planes, there's no record of that conversation. Cheney said the president authorized the shoot orders in a brief conversation shortly after 10 a.m., not in time to intercept the planes headed to Washington.

The commission's interim report reaches no conclusion about the president's actions.

Saudi flights after attacks

There's a question about who gave go-ahead

Moore says the administration allowed 142 Saudi Arabian nationals, including about two dozen relatives of Osama bin Laden, to leave the United States after Sept. 11 without proper questioning by law-enforcement agencies. In the film, Craig Unger, author of the book "House of Bush, House of Saud," tells Moore that none of the Saudis underwent serious scrutiny.

"So a little interview, check the passport, what else?" Moore asks.

"Nothing," Unger replies.

The Sept. 11 commission's interim report said law enforcement interviewed 30 of the 142 Saudis, including 22 of the 26 people on the flight that took most of the bin Laden relatives out of the country. The report said none was of interest to the investigation.

It says Saudi Arabia asked for help to get its nationals out of the United States. Because 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, the Saudi government was worried about reprisals.

The commission says it doesn't know whom in the administration the Saudi government contacted, but that the request eventually reached Richard Clarke, who was the White House counterterrorism chief at the time.

Clarke told the commission he refused to approve the request, suggesting that it be sent to the FBI so the agency could vet the Saudis for terrorism connections. He said the FBI approved the flights.

However, an FBI spokeswoman denied to The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress, that it had "anything to do with arranging and clearing the flights." She said the bureau interviewed some passengers but that none was "of investigative interest."

Despite some media reports, the movie doesn't allege that the Saudis were allowed to leave while U.S. airspace was still closed.

Bush, bin Laden connections

Head of watchdog group says it couldn't establish key link

The movie paints a sinister connection between Bush and the bin Laden family. It implies that James Bath, a friend from the president's days in the Texas Air National Guard, might have funneled bin Laden money to an unsuccessful Bush oil-drilling firm called Arbusto Energy.

The accusation is a stretch, said Bill Allison, the managing editor for the Center for Public Integrity, an independent watchdog group based in Washington, D.C.

"We looked into bin Laden money going into Arbusto, and we never found anything to back that up," Allison said.

The center's investigations into Bush's years in Texas found that Bath managed the assets in Houston of Salem bin Laden, Osama's oldest brother. Bath also invested $50,000 in Arbusto in 1977 and 1978. There's no evidence that the money came from the Saudis, Allison said.

Moore further hints that a relationship between the Bush and bin Laden families was forged through their common involvement in the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based private equity firm heavily invested in the defense industry.

President Bush's father, the first President Bush, served as a senior adviser and board member to the Carlyle Group. James Baker, secretary of state in the first Bush administration, has been a partner. The current President Bush was a board member of a Carlyle subsidiary in the 1990s but withdrew in 1994 when he became governor of Texas.

The bin Laden family, whose wealth comes primarily from its Middle East construction company, invested in the Carlyle Group in 1994, then withdrew in late October 2001, after the terrorist attacks.

The bin Laden family's investment in Carlyle has been reported as $2 million, a small fraction of the billions that the group manages.

Most bin Laden family members reportedly severed ties to Osama years ago.

The war on terrorism

Commission expected to sharply criticize Ashcroft's early effort

Moore says the administration used the threat of terrorism to make Americans willing to give up some civil liberties, but that Attorney General John Ashcroft "turned a blind eye and deaf ear" to fighting terrorism before Sept. 11.

While the administration disagrees with that assessment, former FBI Director Louis Freeh told the Sept. 11 commission that fighting terrorism "was not a national priority." From 2000 to 2002, "we asked for 1,895 people — more agents, linguists and analysts. We got a total of 76" during that time, Freeh said.

The commission is expected to issue harsh criticisms of Ashcroft's anti-terrorism efforts before the attacks.

Moore criticizes Congress for quickly passing a sweeping anti-terrorism bill known as the USA Patriot Act, without reading it. The law gave broad powers to federal law enforcement to eavesdrop on individuals, detain and deport immigrants, and coordinate with intelligence agencies.

While it's impossible to know whether legislators read the bill, it's true that Congress short-circuited the usual legislative process and passed it in less than a week.

Bush and veterans

Administration proposed both increases and cut.

Moore charges that the Bush administration has cut veterans benefits. In 2003, the administration proposed to increase health-care spending for the Veterans Affairs Department over the previous year. Veterans' groups argued that it wasn't enough, particularly at a time when soldiers were in combat and would need health care when they were discharged. Congress wanted to add more money to the budget, but the administration opposed a higher increase.

The administration did cut services to higher-income veterans whose disabilities weren't connected to military service. It also proposed charging veterans higher copayments for prescription drugs.

Bush's vacations

President was often away from Washington; critics say work was done during those times

Citing The Washington Post, Moore says Bush spent 42 percent of his first eight months as president on vacation. The Post calculated the numbers in early August 2001 as Bush embarked on a monthlong "working vacation" at his Texas ranch, according to administration officials at the time.

The president's supporters say Moore failed to note that Bush met with advisers and other officials and was briefed on issues.

Mark Knoller, a veteran CBS Radio White House correspondent and unofficial chronicler of presidential trips, said his own numbers from the first eight months of 2001 show that Bush spent all or part of 50 days at his Texas ranch; all or part of 40 days at Camp David, the presidential retreat in rural Maryland; and all or part of four days at his family's vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

That works out to nearly 39 percent of his first eight months in the White House.

Afghan president's oil link

Unocal says Karzai had no link to company

Moore suggests that one of the first official acts of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who took office after the United States toppled the hard-line Islamic Taliban regime following the Sept. 11 attacks because it was sheltering bin Laden, was to help seal a deal for the California-based oil conglomerate Unocal to build an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. It alleges that Karzai had been a Unocal consultant.

A Unocal spokesman denies it. "Karzai was never, in any capacity, an employee, consultant or a consultant of a consultant," Barry Lane said. He said Unocal also never had a plan to build a Caspian Sea pipeline.

What's true in the movie is that Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, was a Unocal consultant in the mid-1990s, Lane said.

from the Irish Independent, 2004-Jul-14:

Film-maker Moore a bully, says rock star

WHO guitarist Pete Townshend has claimed the documentary-maker Michael Moore is as bad a "bully" as the man he vilifies in his hit movie 'Fahrenheit 9/11', George W. Bush.

Moore had wanted to use Townshend's song, 'Won't Get Fooled Again', on the soundtrack to his film which opened in Ireland last weekend. When Townshend refused, Moore accused him of being in favour of the war.

Townshend responds: "I greatly resent being bullied and slurred by him because he didn't get what he wanted from me. It seems that this aspect of his nature is not unlike that of the wilful man at the centre of his documentary."

"He'll have to work very, very hard to convince me that a man with a camera is going to change the world more effectively than a man with a guitar."