GREAT review/commentary on Michael Moore's new lie-fest. Too bad most of the reviews of the film are positive- never pointing out the too-numerous-to-list-in-one-review lies the film contains. Again- we should challenge those who claim there is no liberal media bias. Read the raving reviews on this piece of complete propaganda disguised as a documentary, and you'll see- the much talked about liberal bias not only exists, it's working overtime.
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Fahrenheit 9/11
Featuring Michael Moore, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Osama bin Laden
Directed by Michael Moore
MPAA rating -- R
1¼ (Review by Chuck O'Leary)
It's impossible not to be political when writing about a film as purposely incendiary as Michael Moore's anti-Bush diatribe Fahrenheit 9/11. Leftists, a word that defines the vast majority of journalists and film critics, are bound to love every partisan, Bush-bashing minute of it -- which explains the number of positive reviews it will receive. Those of us on the right, however, will likely clench our teeth and feel like demanding equal time to rebut many of Mr. Moore's absurd assertions and half-baked conspiracy theories. In fact, Fahrenheit 9/11 is so far to the loony left that I'm surprised Moore didn't blame 2003's space shuttle disaster on George W. Bush. After all, it did explode and crash over Texas. I smell a rat. In this respect, Moore's film will already be preaching to the Bush-hating choir, most of whom are far beyond reason anyway.
Like his overpraised Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 drifts in many directions, all of which come around to demonizing conservatives, Republicans and white males. So please bear with me a bit, as this review will likely contain as many shifts in direction as one of Moore's films.
Another film critic once defended Michael Moore by saying, "He's a good filmmaker." I felt like saying, "Yeah, and so was Leni Riefenstahl, but I don't see you going out of your way to defend her work." But I like the guy and didn't want to give him a coronary, so I didn't say it.
While Moore may have started out as a documentary filmmaker, he has since become a partisan propaganda filmmaker of the far left. He now exists solely to advance a radical left-wing agenda. He's also become unbearably sanctimonious and full of himself. To call Fahrenheit 9/11 a documentary would be insulting to the form. It's paranoid left-wing propaganda from beginning to end.
Moore's first two films Roger & Me (1989) and The Big One (1998) were very good because they tackled issues most liberals and conservatives abhor -- corporate greed, corporate downsizing and sending jobs overseas for cheap labor. In those film I was with him about 90 percent of the time.
However, with his next two highly manipulative films, Moore shows his true pinko, blame-America-first colors. His vastly overrated examination of guns and the culture of violence in America, Bowling for Columbine, was full of half-truths and outright lies, and has the audacity to place more blame for the reckless killing of a little girl on then-NRA president Charlton Heston than it does the idiot uncle who left the gun laying around so his nephew could take it to school and shoot a fellow first grader. And Moore conveniently ignores the problems of black on black crime and the inner-city drug and gang-related activity that leads to a high percentage of America's gun deaths each year. But in Moore's warped mind I guess it's all whitey's fault anyway. Just checkout the website www.bowlingfortruth.com to see what I mean.
It's also evident from the highly offensive title of his book, Stupid White Men, that Moore is filled with self-loathing and liberal guilt and uses that guilt to always blame everything wrong in the world on white, Christian, heterosexual males, while minorites can do no wrong or always have an excuse. But that's one of the principal rules of the politically correct left's insane doctrine, and Moore has become one of their crown princes.
Can you imagine the outcry if some conservative wrote a book entitled Stupid Black Men, Stupid Gay Men, Stupid Muslim Men or Stupid Feminists? Something tells me it wouldn't be a featured selection on Oprah's book of the month club. But seriously, just replace the word "white" with any other group and see how quickly hypocritical liberals would be up in arms. Talk about your double standards.
Not surprisingly, Fahrenheit 9/11 begins and ends by showing supposedly oppressed minorities who allegedly are being victimized by the white establishment -- headed, of course, by none other than President George W. Bush. Bring out the violins. Of course, in Moore's mind, Bush didn't legitmately win the 2000 election because he narrowly lost the popular vote to Al Gore while winning the electoral vote. Moore goes into one of his typical bleeding-heart conspiracy theroies about some blacks being removed from the Florida voting rolls, however, never mentions that Gore lost votes because some Floridians were too stupid to mark a ballot correctly. Moore falsely asserts that this is the first time something such as this occurred in American history, and never bothers to mention that there was a similar, much-disputed election in 1876 when Rutherford B. Hayes won by one electoral vote after losing the popular vote to Samuel J. Tilden. Moore also conveniently never mentions how the Democrats stole the 1960 election from Richard Nixon by getting the Mafia to rig Illinois ballot boxes for John F. Kennedy. Isn't it ironic how liberals who question Bush's legitimacy always ignore the facts surrounding JFK's illegitimate win? Well, it temporarily kept that ever-hated, dastardly Republican Richard Nixon out of the White House, so I guess that makes it OK in the liberal book of thinking, right?
The most interesting part of Fahrenheit 9/11 deals with Saudi Arabia and how much the Bush family and America itself has benefited from Saudi investments. Of course, Osama bin Laden himself is a Saudi, and 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers on September 11, 2001 were Saudi nationals. So how come in the days immediately following 9/11 did the U.S. let 142 high-profile Saudis, including some members of the bin Laden family, leave the United States? Good question. I have to agree with the FBI agent Moore interviews who says "They should have at least been interviewed before being allowed to leave." With so-called friends like Saudi Arabia, who needs enemies. Moore scores the most points with this intriguing segment.
Between musical montages which exist solely to elicit easy laughs at Mr. Bush's expense, Moore shows footage of political partisans such as Richard Clarke, who blushed with embarrassment when caught contradicting himself during testimony before the 9/11 commission, and interviews far-left Democratic congressman "Baghdad" Jim McDermott, who visited Iraq in 2002 and reported back what a nice guy Saddam Hussein was. We never get any articulate defenses of the invasion of Iraq from such middle-of-the-roaders as Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, instead Moore heaps on the footage of Bush's many lapses in articulation -- the same stuff you see every night on Letterman and Leno. One minute Moore wants Bush to come across as some calculating, evil genius, the next minute he's a puppet, and the next he's supposed to be a stumbling, clueless dolt.
I knew it was only a matter of time before Moore got into criticizing the U.S. Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement expanded powers to surveillance terrorists. To be truly safe, our borders should be protected by the military and we should have much stricter immigration laws (absolute necessities that both political parties don't have the guts to do anything about), but I feel a lot safer with Attorney General John Ashcroft keeping close tabs on terror suspects than what his predecessor Janet Reno did. Or I should say didn't do. Typical of the PC obsessed Clinton administration, Reno was too afraid to investigate Arab Muslims for fear of being called racist -- the biggest fear of any liberal. In this day and age, crying racism is the last refuge of scoundrels. And, of course, Moore never shows us all the terrorists Ashcroft's FBI has caught in the last three years and all the terror plots thwarted. If we leave it to the civil liberties and civil rights wackos and Communistic groups like the ACLU, a lot more innocent Americans are going to end up dead. Mark my words.
Moore even has the gall to show happy Iraqi children playing in the streets as if we were about to invade some peace-loving utopia like Canada -- well at least Moore thinks Canada is a utopia according to Bowling for Columbine. And hey, it took a Canadian company to produce Bowling for Columbine and a Canadian company to distribute Fahrenheit 9/11. So why doesn't he move there? Something tells me the taxes are too high even for a wealthy liberal like Moore. Furthermore, the smarmy fat slob conveniently never documents the brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime and tells of Hussein's torture chambers and mass graves. But he's more than eager to show the collateral damage caused by American bombings, and gladly makes American soldiers look bad, while lamenting enemy casulties. Moore says Saddam's weapons of mass destruction didn't exist, but conveniently never mentions how the Clinton administration was convinced WMDs existed, and how WMDs might have been smuggled across the border to Syria or Iran in all the months of haggling with the United Nations before the invasion. And what about all those UN resolutions Hussein so brazenly defied since the 1991 Gulf War? Moore just can't seem to find the time to mention this either.
Then Moore spews the left's continuing lie of no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al- Qaida. Not to say that other Middle Eastern nations aren't equally complicit, but how about al-Qaida terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who was given refuge by Hussein and continues to carry out attacks from the enemy stronghold of Fallujah? What about 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta's reported meeting with an Iraqi security agent in early 2001? Furthermore, what about Hussein sending money to the families of Palestinian homicide bombers? And how about Hussein's longtime mistress, who alleged during an interview on American television that the former Iraqi dictator gave money to Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s? Moore never touches on these points because they'll interfere with his agenda.
As predictable as he is partisan, Moore rips Bush for spending 42 percent of his time at his Crawford, Texas ranch in his first eight months in office, even though Bush explains how it's just as easy to conduct business from Texas as it is from Washington D.C. In all his unending criticisms of George W. Bush's performance during his first months in office, Moore gives the Clinton-Gore administration a pass for letting terrorism grow and flourish in their eight full years in office. Moore never addresses how the CIA and military were virtually emasculated by appeasing wimps likes of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and how Clinton did nothing to confront al-Qaida after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993; how Clinton never even visited the site of the first World Trade Center bombing; how Clinton pulled out of Somalia to let al-Qaida flourish there; how Clinton did nothing after the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000; how Clinton could have had bin Laden three different times, but let him go because of insufficient evidence; and how Clinton's missile strikes against al-Qaida in 1998 were the equivalent of putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. Yes, the Bush administration could have done more to combat terrorism in the eight months prior to 9/11, but Clinton-Gore deserve a lot more of the blame for doing virtually nothing in eight years.
One of the few things Moore does get right is the Bush administration's bad decision to end major combat in Iraq too soon and its overzealous declaration of victory, not foreseeing all the forthcoming problems during occupation. But while it's too early to call the invasion of Iraq a total victory, it's also premature to label it the complete failure Moore would have his audience believe. When you get right down to it, it will take at least a few more years to fully analyze the pros and cons of invading Iraq. One line of thinking is as follows: The U.S. government knows it's going to continue to have problems with these Islamic maniacs for years to come. Therefore, we overthrew Saddam Hussein to install a quasi-democracy friendly to the U.S. smack in the middle of the hornets' nest. But do you think we get an articulate defense of this theory in Moore's hatchet job? Keep dreaming.
Another important matter Moore obviously doesn't examine is how leftists like himself and the leftist majority of the "mainstream" media have tied Bush's or any future U.S. president's hands in going full throttle with the war on terror. With all of America's high-tech weaponry, we should be able to level the entire Middle East without one of our soldiers getting hurt, but the bleeding-heart internationalists in the press will never allow it to happen, making a major issue over every foreign civilian who gets killed in the crossfire. What leftists like Moore can't or won't understand is that we're fighting a nihilistic enemy that only understands and respects force. It's also an enemy that will hide behind women and children and in mosques for propaganda purposes. Besides, did those Arab Muslims who perpetrated 9/11 care about our civilians on that horrific day? Had Moore and today's overwhelmingly liberal media existed in the 1940s, I'm afraid we never would have won World War II. Back then you had a better generation of Americans who knew the only way to win was to stay united and totally annihilate the enemy. Now we have a left-wing, bordering on seditious, media that's giving the same solace to our enemy as they did in Vietnam, a war we would have won had it not been for Marxist anti-war protesters, an enemy sympathizing media and spineless politicians. Can't these stubborn pinheads understand that it's not possible to fight a politically correct war and win?
Instead of showing us an interview with one American soldier who believes in his mission in Iraq, Moore loads his film with disillusioned soldiers, providing no balance whatsoever. And in the biggest outright lie I found, Moore scoffs at the coalition of nations currently in Iraq, naming only the smallest, most obscure countries without militaries while never mentioning that Britain, Italy, Poland, Australia, Japan and South Korea are part of the coalition. See how Moore lies by what he doesn't tell you?
But when you get right down to it, what can you expect. Moore is your typical peacenik who has delusions about everybody around the world one day holding hands and singing We Are the World. And overall, Fahrenheit 9/11 plays like an agonizing two-hour negative campaign ad for John Kerry. It's really sad that in the early stages of our battle for survival against the most vicious savages imaginable, a film has been made that demonizes George W. Bush more than the real demons who want to decapitate all us infidels -- liberal or conservative. What a shame the treacherous lengths some weasels will go to just so the Democrats can regain the White House.
Just imagine someone as far to the right as Moore is to the left, such as Ann Coulter, making a film as slanderous of Bill Clinton as Fahrenheit 9/11 is about George W. Bush? Do you think it would receive a single kind word in the "mainstream" press? Or even get distributed at all?
Michael Moore should be proud of himself. He's made a movie America-haters everywhere will love. If every dog has its day, Mr. Moore will one day get his.
The title of another Moore book asks the question, Dude, Where's My Country? Well, Mike, you go down to Key West, Florida, jump in the ocean and swim for about 90 miles to the south and you'll run right into it. It's called Cuba, and you'll love it.
Posted by Josh at June 25, 2004 05:20 PM | TrackBack