Fahrenheit 9/11 coming 6/25
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lukpac
- Top Dog and Sellout
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I was too tired Friday, busy Saturday, and now I'm in California. If I can find a theatre around here with it I'll go see it.
But no, not yet.
But no, not yet.
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD
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Rspaight
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'FAHRENHEIT' AD CENSORED
CENSORSHIP is alive and well and rearing its ugly head through the Motion Picture Association of America. Chicago Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper's comment on "Fahrenheit 9/11" — "Everyone should see this film" — has been banned from the movie's ads by the MPAA because it carries an R-rating. And the MPAA wouldn't back down, even after Lions Gate Films, Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, and Roeper appealed. "They don't trust their own rating system," an outraged Roeper told PAGE SIX's Lisa Marsh. "If their system worked, everyone under 17 would be stopped anyway." He added, "It's nice to know I have such power over 17-year-olds. For the record, everyone should see this film — I stand by my statement." Meanwhile, Michael Moore is not above manipulating information on behalf of his agit-prop "documentary," particularly when it comes to the supposed "newspaper of record." Moore bragged to the New York Times that "We sold out in Fayetteville, home of Fort Bragg." What he left out was that the picture played at Fayetteville's Cameo Art Theater, which has all of 125 seats.
CENSORSHIP is alive and well and rearing its ugly head through the Motion Picture Association of America. Chicago Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper's comment on "Fahrenheit 9/11" — "Everyone should see this film" — has been banned from the movie's ads by the MPAA because it carries an R-rating. And the MPAA wouldn't back down, even after Lions Gate Films, Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, and Roeper appealed. "They don't trust their own rating system," an outraged Roeper told PAGE SIX's Lisa Marsh. "If their system worked, everyone under 17 would be stopped anyway." He added, "It's nice to know I have such power over 17-year-olds. For the record, everyone should see this film — I stand by my statement." Meanwhile, Michael Moore is not above manipulating information on behalf of his agit-prop "documentary," particularly when it comes to the supposed "newspaper of record." Moore bragged to the New York Times that "We sold out in Fayetteville, home of Fort Bragg." What he left out was that the picture played at Fayetteville's Cameo Art Theater, which has all of 125 seats.
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney
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Bennett Cerf
- Posts: 739
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lukpac
- Top Dog and Sellout
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Something must be wrong...positive reviews in The Nation AND WND:
Moore 1, Media 0
[from the July 19, 2004 issue]
I had a swell time at Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's documentary about George Bush's dubious progress from Florida to Iraq. It's his best movie--funny, heartbreaking, outraged and outrageous--and deserves its huge success. When did you last see a muckraking exposé of events that are still unfolding? The film should make the media blush for its torpor and fake judiciousness and embedment with the Administration. Moore displays footage never before seen of events most Americans know nothing about, unless they read The Nation, because the media haven't told them. Did you know, for example, that the Congressional Black Caucus could not get a single Democratic senator to lend the required signature to its formal protest of the certification of Bush's victory in 2000? Did you know Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, dined with Bush on September 13, 2001, the day before flights began that would carry more than a hundred Saudis out of the country, including dozens of members of the extended bin Laden family? Have you seen wounded and dead Iraqis on TV, or interviews with mutilated soldiers, disillusioned soldiers--or with parents of dead GIs? If Joe Darby hadn't jump-started the Abu Ghraib scandal with those photos, you might well be seeing the brutalization of Iraqi prisoners for the first time in a brief scene in Fahrenheit 9/11.
Moore keeps his impish-blimpish on-screen presence down, but there are some hilarious bits--learning that Congress hadn't read the Patriot Act before passing it, he drives around the Capitol in an ice cream truck blasting it through the sound system. The best comedy, as always with Moore, is the found kind: He interviews Craig Unger (House of Bush, House of Saud) across the street from the Saudi Embassy and is immediately accosted by a Secret Service agent ("I'll take that as a yes," he replies genially when the agent won't comment when Moore asks if it's unusual for the Secret Service to guard foreign embassies). He tags along with two oleaginous Marine recruiters on the prowl in a down-market Flint, Michigan, shopping mall and films them as they swoop down on one young black man and practically offer him a recording contract on the spot when he mentions he's interested in music.
The odd thing is, I found the movie immensely cheering and energizing, even though I don't agree with its main thesis, drawn from Unger, that Bush's oil-business interests, particularly his close financial and personal connections with the Saudis, drove his post-9/11 decisions to go easy on Saudi Arabia and invade Afghanistan and Iraq. I think President Gore might well have invaded Afghanistan too--although, who knows, maybe the Republicans would have thwarted him out of spite. I also think that key promoters of the war in Iraq--Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld--were motivated by a sincere, if deranged, belief that overthrowing Saddam would usher in US- and Israel-friendly capitalist democracies all over the Middle East. They had, after all, been pushing for regime change for years. Like all Moore's movies, Fahrenheit 9/11 is somewhat muddled and self-contradictory. Just as Bowling for Columbine excoriated the NRA while arguing that guns don't kill people, Americans kill people, Fahrenheit 9/11 simultaneously argues that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are wrong and unnecessary and that we need to send more troops; that the Bush Administration does too much and too little to protect the country from another terrorist attack; that Bush is an idiot and a lightweight and that he is a master of calculation. Actually, come to think of it, that's not such a contradiction--but I wish Moore had acknowledged Bush's obvious political skills. It's not easy to fool 40 percent of the people 100 percent of the time.
Well, OK, so Moore isn't Mark Twain, he's a propagandist who can be funny and angry at the same time. He takes a lot of cheap shots--Paul Wolfowitz slicking back his hair with saliva, John Ashcroft crooning a patriotic anthem of his own composition, Bush smirking and looking shifty while waiting to go on air and announce the invasion of Iraq--but the point of these vignettes is not just to make us laugh and feel superior, it's to undo the aura of assurance and invincibility with which this Administration cloaks itself while it spreads fear across the land. Watching Bush sit in that elementary classroom pretending to read My Pet Goat for seven long minutes after being notified of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center, you see a man who is paralyzed and stunned, who hasn't a clue, because there's no one there to tell him what to do, no stage set, like the flight deck of USS Abraham Lincoln, and no audience before which to look manly and resolute.
Moore's critics are going over the movie frame by frame, but he's phrased his most controversial contentions, about the Saudi flights, carefully. He doesn't actually say they took off while the airports were closed, and he doesn't say the bin Ladens weren't interviewed, although a viewer could get that impression. Other complaints seem trivial. Does it really matter if Moore says only one child of a congressperson or senator is serving in Iraq, and doesn't mention that a few others are in the armed forces, just not there? Of course, the scene in which Moore tries to hand out recruitment literature to politicos is unfair: It's not as if parents can enlist their kids. The scene works, though, because Moore's basic point is right: Politicians whose own kids are safely ensconced in the Ivies send off to die in Iraq the children of women like Lila Lipscomb, the vibrant working-class Flint woman Moore follows in the second half of the movie, who puts out the flag every morning and who has always encouraged her kids to join the military as a path to a better life. Her grief and rage when her son is killed in Iraq are unbearable to watch. Surrounded by her large, interracial family, she reads her son's last letter home: "He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I'm so furious right now, Mama." There are plenty of mothers and fathers like her--but you don't see Katie Couric ("Navy SEALs rock!" ) interviewing them.
Take your friends, your relatives, your book club, your drinking buddies, take teenagers (it's R-rated), take that nice Republican in the office, take David Brooks and the staff of The Weekly Standard, and the Council of Economic Advisers! And then send your ticket stub to George W. Bush, so he'll know you're watching.
---
Michael Moore's daring film
Posted: July 2, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Bill Press
© 2004 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
If you haven't yet seen it, what are you waiting for? Check your local listings, round up the family and head out to the movies. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a must-see film for all Americans: Kerry supporters, undecided voters and even devoted Bushies – so they can see just how inept a president their man really is.
Is it perfect? No. Sometimes, Michael Moore goes over the top. He can't resist the occasional cheap shot, or forcing himself front and center – as in the scene where he tries to convince members of Congress to sign up their own kids for the war in Iraq. Funny stuff, but Moore's sidewalk shenanigans get in the way of making a serious point.
Do I believe every accusation he makes against Bush? No. Even though a natural gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea across Afghanistan has long been talked about, I don't buy Moore's theory that it was the reason we went to war in Afghanistan. That war, which I supported, was motivated by the Taliban's refusal to turn over Osama bin Laden.
Predictably, Bush apologists are trying to silence or smear Michael Moore. Disney refused to distribute the film. White House spokesperson Dan Bartlett said the movie was "so outrageously false it's not even worth comment." A group called Citizens United is now suing to block TV commercials for the movie. And stiff shirt Bill O'Reilly compares Moore to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Nonsense.
Moore's no propagandist; he's a protagonist. He doesn't mask his strong differences with President Bush, especially over his ties to Saudi Arabia and his pursuit of the war in Iraq. Moore has a clear message, which he pounds home with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Yet, despite its flaws, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a searing, blockbuster documentary that will make you laugh, cry, shake your head in disbelief – and then run out to try and save your country.
What makes "Fahrenheit 9/11" so effective is that Moore dares to go where the networks fear to tread. He brings to the big screen footage we've never before seen on the little screen. In gruesome detail, for example, he shows video of Iraqi civilians who are victims of U.S. bombs, including one little boy with a badly mutilated arm. He records the agony of families whose homes were destroyed. Their grief belies the phony assurances of Donald Rumsfeld that our precision-driven weapons, aimed with "humanity," never miss their target.
Moore also shows President Bush at a Florida elementary school on the morning of September 11. On his way into the school, he's informed that a plane has struck the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, while Bush is sitting in front of school children, Chief of Staff Andy Card tells him the second tower has been struck. Yet Bush continues to sit there for seven long minutes, reading "My Pet Goat" – while America, in Card's chilling words, is "under attack." What was Bush thinking? What was he waiting for? Did he need Dick Cheney to tell him what to do? And why haven't we seen this video before?
Finally, in the film's most poignant moments, Moore introduces us to a woman from Flint, Mich., whose son was killed in Iraq. Lila Lipscomb is part of an extended, patriotic American family. Her grandfather, father, uncles, brothers and daughter all served in the military – and she's proud of them. But she believes her son died fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq.
Speaking from the heart, in words more powerful than any political candidate or anti-war activist could ever invent, Lipscomb regrets our involvement in a war against a country that had never attacked America, and had never threatened to attack America. And she lays the blame squarely at the feet of George W. Bush.
Question: In all the interviews of families of American troops we've seen on national television, why haven't we met one family member critical of the war in Iraq? Is Michael Moore the only one in the whole media world who could discover Lila Lipscomb or others like her? Or are networks afraid of White House retaliation?
Michael Moore has done this nation a great service. He has already produced the most successful documentary ever at the box office. If crowds continue to pour in, he may also have produced the first documentary ever to decide an election.
Special Offer!
Bill Press' book "Spin This!" exposes how the truth is manipulated in the White House, in the courtrooms, in headlines and in advertising slogans. Autographed copies are now available in ShopNetDaily!
Bill Press is a political analyst for MSNBC, a syndicated columnist, and the author of "Spin This!"
Moore 1, Media 0
[from the July 19, 2004 issue]
I had a swell time at Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's documentary about George Bush's dubious progress from Florida to Iraq. It's his best movie--funny, heartbreaking, outraged and outrageous--and deserves its huge success. When did you last see a muckraking exposé of events that are still unfolding? The film should make the media blush for its torpor and fake judiciousness and embedment with the Administration. Moore displays footage never before seen of events most Americans know nothing about, unless they read The Nation, because the media haven't told them. Did you know, for example, that the Congressional Black Caucus could not get a single Democratic senator to lend the required signature to its formal protest of the certification of Bush's victory in 2000? Did you know Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, dined with Bush on September 13, 2001, the day before flights began that would carry more than a hundred Saudis out of the country, including dozens of members of the extended bin Laden family? Have you seen wounded and dead Iraqis on TV, or interviews with mutilated soldiers, disillusioned soldiers--or with parents of dead GIs? If Joe Darby hadn't jump-started the Abu Ghraib scandal with those photos, you might well be seeing the brutalization of Iraqi prisoners for the first time in a brief scene in Fahrenheit 9/11.
Moore keeps his impish-blimpish on-screen presence down, but there are some hilarious bits--learning that Congress hadn't read the Patriot Act before passing it, he drives around the Capitol in an ice cream truck blasting it through the sound system. The best comedy, as always with Moore, is the found kind: He interviews Craig Unger (House of Bush, House of Saud) across the street from the Saudi Embassy and is immediately accosted by a Secret Service agent ("I'll take that as a yes," he replies genially when the agent won't comment when Moore asks if it's unusual for the Secret Service to guard foreign embassies). He tags along with two oleaginous Marine recruiters on the prowl in a down-market Flint, Michigan, shopping mall and films them as they swoop down on one young black man and practically offer him a recording contract on the spot when he mentions he's interested in music.
The odd thing is, I found the movie immensely cheering and energizing, even though I don't agree with its main thesis, drawn from Unger, that Bush's oil-business interests, particularly his close financial and personal connections with the Saudis, drove his post-9/11 decisions to go easy on Saudi Arabia and invade Afghanistan and Iraq. I think President Gore might well have invaded Afghanistan too--although, who knows, maybe the Republicans would have thwarted him out of spite. I also think that key promoters of the war in Iraq--Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld--were motivated by a sincere, if deranged, belief that overthrowing Saddam would usher in US- and Israel-friendly capitalist democracies all over the Middle East. They had, after all, been pushing for regime change for years. Like all Moore's movies, Fahrenheit 9/11 is somewhat muddled and self-contradictory. Just as Bowling for Columbine excoriated the NRA while arguing that guns don't kill people, Americans kill people, Fahrenheit 9/11 simultaneously argues that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are wrong and unnecessary and that we need to send more troops; that the Bush Administration does too much and too little to protect the country from another terrorist attack; that Bush is an idiot and a lightweight and that he is a master of calculation. Actually, come to think of it, that's not such a contradiction--but I wish Moore had acknowledged Bush's obvious political skills. It's not easy to fool 40 percent of the people 100 percent of the time.
Well, OK, so Moore isn't Mark Twain, he's a propagandist who can be funny and angry at the same time. He takes a lot of cheap shots--Paul Wolfowitz slicking back his hair with saliva, John Ashcroft crooning a patriotic anthem of his own composition, Bush smirking and looking shifty while waiting to go on air and announce the invasion of Iraq--but the point of these vignettes is not just to make us laugh and feel superior, it's to undo the aura of assurance and invincibility with which this Administration cloaks itself while it spreads fear across the land. Watching Bush sit in that elementary classroom pretending to read My Pet Goat for seven long minutes after being notified of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center, you see a man who is paralyzed and stunned, who hasn't a clue, because there's no one there to tell him what to do, no stage set, like the flight deck of USS Abraham Lincoln, and no audience before which to look manly and resolute.
Moore's critics are going over the movie frame by frame, but he's phrased his most controversial contentions, about the Saudi flights, carefully. He doesn't actually say they took off while the airports were closed, and he doesn't say the bin Ladens weren't interviewed, although a viewer could get that impression. Other complaints seem trivial. Does it really matter if Moore says only one child of a congressperson or senator is serving in Iraq, and doesn't mention that a few others are in the armed forces, just not there? Of course, the scene in which Moore tries to hand out recruitment literature to politicos is unfair: It's not as if parents can enlist their kids. The scene works, though, because Moore's basic point is right: Politicians whose own kids are safely ensconced in the Ivies send off to die in Iraq the children of women like Lila Lipscomb, the vibrant working-class Flint woman Moore follows in the second half of the movie, who puts out the flag every morning and who has always encouraged her kids to join the military as a path to a better life. Her grief and rage when her son is killed in Iraq are unbearable to watch. Surrounded by her large, interracial family, she reads her son's last letter home: "He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I'm so furious right now, Mama." There are plenty of mothers and fathers like her--but you don't see Katie Couric ("Navy SEALs rock!" ) interviewing them.
Take your friends, your relatives, your book club, your drinking buddies, take teenagers (it's R-rated), take that nice Republican in the office, take David Brooks and the staff of The Weekly Standard, and the Council of Economic Advisers! And then send your ticket stub to George W. Bush, so he'll know you're watching.
---
Michael Moore's daring film
Posted: July 2, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Bill Press
© 2004 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
If you haven't yet seen it, what are you waiting for? Check your local listings, round up the family and head out to the movies. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a must-see film for all Americans: Kerry supporters, undecided voters and even devoted Bushies – so they can see just how inept a president their man really is.
Is it perfect? No. Sometimes, Michael Moore goes over the top. He can't resist the occasional cheap shot, or forcing himself front and center – as in the scene where he tries to convince members of Congress to sign up their own kids for the war in Iraq. Funny stuff, but Moore's sidewalk shenanigans get in the way of making a serious point.
Do I believe every accusation he makes against Bush? No. Even though a natural gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea across Afghanistan has long been talked about, I don't buy Moore's theory that it was the reason we went to war in Afghanistan. That war, which I supported, was motivated by the Taliban's refusal to turn over Osama bin Laden.
Predictably, Bush apologists are trying to silence or smear Michael Moore. Disney refused to distribute the film. White House spokesperson Dan Bartlett said the movie was "so outrageously false it's not even worth comment." A group called Citizens United is now suing to block TV commercials for the movie. And stiff shirt Bill O'Reilly compares Moore to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Nonsense.
Moore's no propagandist; he's a protagonist. He doesn't mask his strong differences with President Bush, especially over his ties to Saudi Arabia and his pursuit of the war in Iraq. Moore has a clear message, which he pounds home with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Yet, despite its flaws, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a searing, blockbuster documentary that will make you laugh, cry, shake your head in disbelief – and then run out to try and save your country.
What makes "Fahrenheit 9/11" so effective is that Moore dares to go where the networks fear to tread. He brings to the big screen footage we've never before seen on the little screen. In gruesome detail, for example, he shows video of Iraqi civilians who are victims of U.S. bombs, including one little boy with a badly mutilated arm. He records the agony of families whose homes were destroyed. Their grief belies the phony assurances of Donald Rumsfeld that our precision-driven weapons, aimed with "humanity," never miss their target.
Moore also shows President Bush at a Florida elementary school on the morning of September 11. On his way into the school, he's informed that a plane has struck the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, while Bush is sitting in front of school children, Chief of Staff Andy Card tells him the second tower has been struck. Yet Bush continues to sit there for seven long minutes, reading "My Pet Goat" – while America, in Card's chilling words, is "under attack." What was Bush thinking? What was he waiting for? Did he need Dick Cheney to tell him what to do? And why haven't we seen this video before?
Finally, in the film's most poignant moments, Moore introduces us to a woman from Flint, Mich., whose son was killed in Iraq. Lila Lipscomb is part of an extended, patriotic American family. Her grandfather, father, uncles, brothers and daughter all served in the military – and she's proud of them. But she believes her son died fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq.
Speaking from the heart, in words more powerful than any political candidate or anti-war activist could ever invent, Lipscomb regrets our involvement in a war against a country that had never attacked America, and had never threatened to attack America. And she lays the blame squarely at the feet of George W. Bush.
Question: In all the interviews of families of American troops we've seen on national television, why haven't we met one family member critical of the war in Iraq? Is Michael Moore the only one in the whole media world who could discover Lila Lipscomb or others like her? Or are networks afraid of White House retaliation?
Michael Moore has done this nation a great service. He has already produced the most successful documentary ever at the box office. If crowds continue to pour in, he may also have produced the first documentary ever to decide an election.
Special Offer!
Bill Press' book "Spin This!" exposes how the truth is manipulated in the White House, in the courtrooms, in headlines and in advertising slogans. Autographed copies are now available in ShopNetDaily!
Bill Press is a political analyst for MSNBC, a syndicated columnist, and the author of "Spin This!"
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD
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Bennett Cerf
- Posts: 739
- Joined: Sat Oct 25, 2003 7:54 pm
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Matt
- Posts: 539
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- What color are leaves?: Green
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The Left Doesn't Need a Limbaugh
The Left Doesn't Need a Limbaugh
By Ellen Goodman
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A27
BOSTON -- Maybe it was because the man on my left was doing a play-by-play when any member of the Bush team came on the screen. Maybe it was because the movie theater was within pitching range of Fenway Park.
But halfway through "Fahrenheit 9/11," I realized this wasn't an audience, it was a fan club. They weren't watching the movie, they were rooting for it.
I saw this movie in a sold-out theater on a Monday night surrounded by people in their twenties. You go, Michael. If "Fahrenheit 9/11" preaches to the choir, you could find me in the alto section.
More to the point -- or Moore to the point -- I agreed with the filmmaker that Bush didn't exactly win the 2000 election, that we were misled into Iraq and that the White House has used the terrorism alerts as a political toy. So add my review to the marquee: I laughed! I cried!
But at some point, I also began to feel just a touch out of harmony. Not even this alto believes that the Iraq war was brought to us courtesy of the Bush-Saudi oil-money connection. Not even the rosiest pair of my retro-spectacles sees prewar Iraq as a happy valley where little children flew kites.
There were a few too many cheap shots among the direct hits, conspiracy theories among the solid facts, and tidbits of propaganda in the documentary. Going for the jugular, he sometimes went over the top.
The simple fact that George Bush the First called Moore a "slimeball" makes me itch to call him a "genius." But that's the problem. If the right is after him, does the choir have to sing the filmmaker's praises as our own cuddly and amusing pit bull?
Michael Moore has been called the left-wing answer to Rush Limbaugh. Rush without the OxyContin. But is it heresy to ask whether the left actually wants its own Rush?
More than a decade ago, talk radio became talk right. Then Fox News took out a trademark on "fair and balanced." The right wing tried to take possession of "patriotism" the way they took over "family."
After years as a punching bag, is it any wonder that the left wants its own punching machines? But the result is that we've hardened further into "us and them."
Politics isn't polarized between ideas as much as it is divided between teams in an endless color war. The famous geopolitical map of 2000 painted the states red and blue. Now we have added red and blue talkmeisters, red and blue books, red and blue movies.
If the reds have Bill O'Reilly, the blues now have Al Franken. If red people read "Treason," blue people read "Thieves in High Places." Log on to Amazon.com and a few clicks take you to the literary red team, a few more to the blue team.
There was even an unseemly competition when political sportscasters pitted the TV ratings for the funeral of Ronald (the Red) Reagan against the literary resurrection of Bill (the Blue) Clinton.
Now we are getting our own space in the cineplex. When "Fahrenheit 9/11" hit $23.9 million the first weekend, box office receipts were read like political tea leaves. Moore was also cast as the left's Mel Gibson. Whose "passion" was more powerful?
One letter writer in the New York Times described the "fun" of watching "conservatives throw up their hands in horror and dismay as the one-man liberal attack machine scores points against them." He called it a "taste of their own medicine."
Well, I am happy to write prescriptions for this medicine. After all, those who attack Moore's ad hominem attacks on the president do so with ad hominem attacks on Michael Moore. But it's getting awfully rare to see anyone trying to write or speak across the political color line.
Moore described his movie as an "op-ed piece," not a documentary. Well, I know something about op-ed pieces. Over the long run, you don't get anywhere just whacking your audience upside the head; you try to change the mind within it. You don't just go for the gut. You try, gulp, reason.
I actually agree with P.J. O'Rourke, a conservative who writes in the Atlantic that he tunes out Rush because there's no room for measured debate: "Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives." But now liberals are trudging purposefully down the same low road.
In the election between Bush and Anybody But Bush, reason and civility are now designated for wimps. But what happens to the country when the left only meets the right at the American jugular?
The name of Moore's production company, you may recall, is Dog Eat Dog.
By Ellen Goodman
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A27
BOSTON -- Maybe it was because the man on my left was doing a play-by-play when any member of the Bush team came on the screen. Maybe it was because the movie theater was within pitching range of Fenway Park.
But halfway through "Fahrenheit 9/11," I realized this wasn't an audience, it was a fan club. They weren't watching the movie, they were rooting for it.
I saw this movie in a sold-out theater on a Monday night surrounded by people in their twenties. You go, Michael. If "Fahrenheit 9/11" preaches to the choir, you could find me in the alto section.
More to the point -- or Moore to the point -- I agreed with the filmmaker that Bush didn't exactly win the 2000 election, that we were misled into Iraq and that the White House has used the terrorism alerts as a political toy. So add my review to the marquee: I laughed! I cried!
But at some point, I also began to feel just a touch out of harmony. Not even this alto believes that the Iraq war was brought to us courtesy of the Bush-Saudi oil-money connection. Not even the rosiest pair of my retro-spectacles sees prewar Iraq as a happy valley where little children flew kites.
There were a few too many cheap shots among the direct hits, conspiracy theories among the solid facts, and tidbits of propaganda in the documentary. Going for the jugular, he sometimes went over the top.
The simple fact that George Bush the First called Moore a "slimeball" makes me itch to call him a "genius." But that's the problem. If the right is after him, does the choir have to sing the filmmaker's praises as our own cuddly and amusing pit bull?
Michael Moore has been called the left-wing answer to Rush Limbaugh. Rush without the OxyContin. But is it heresy to ask whether the left actually wants its own Rush?
More than a decade ago, talk radio became talk right. Then Fox News took out a trademark on "fair and balanced." The right wing tried to take possession of "patriotism" the way they took over "family."
After years as a punching bag, is it any wonder that the left wants its own punching machines? But the result is that we've hardened further into "us and them."
Politics isn't polarized between ideas as much as it is divided between teams in an endless color war. The famous geopolitical map of 2000 painted the states red and blue. Now we have added red and blue talkmeisters, red and blue books, red and blue movies.
If the reds have Bill O'Reilly, the blues now have Al Franken. If red people read "Treason," blue people read "Thieves in High Places." Log on to Amazon.com and a few clicks take you to the literary red team, a few more to the blue team.
There was even an unseemly competition when political sportscasters pitted the TV ratings for the funeral of Ronald (the Red) Reagan against the literary resurrection of Bill (the Blue) Clinton.
Now we are getting our own space in the cineplex. When "Fahrenheit 9/11" hit $23.9 million the first weekend, box office receipts were read like political tea leaves. Moore was also cast as the left's Mel Gibson. Whose "passion" was more powerful?
One letter writer in the New York Times described the "fun" of watching "conservatives throw up their hands in horror and dismay as the one-man liberal attack machine scores points against them." He called it a "taste of their own medicine."
Well, I am happy to write prescriptions for this medicine. After all, those who attack Moore's ad hominem attacks on the president do so with ad hominem attacks on Michael Moore. But it's getting awfully rare to see anyone trying to write or speak across the political color line.
Moore described his movie as an "op-ed piece," not a documentary. Well, I know something about op-ed pieces. Over the long run, you don't get anywhere just whacking your audience upside the head; you try to change the mind within it. You don't just go for the gut. You try, gulp, reason.
I actually agree with P.J. O'Rourke, a conservative who writes in the Atlantic that he tunes out Rush because there's no room for measured debate: "Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives." But now liberals are trudging purposefully down the same low road.
In the election between Bush and Anybody But Bush, reason and civility are now designated for wimps. But what happens to the country when the left only meets the right at the American jugular?
The name of Moore's production company, you may recall, is Dog Eat Dog.
-Matt
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Mike Hunte
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Re: The Left Doesn't Need a Limbaugh
This notion that somehow it's the responsiblity of the left to suddenly take the information high road is noble, yet absurd. Of course reasoning and intelligent debate are always preferable to going for the jugular. Yet, over the course of the last 25 years, I've watched the systematic demonization and distortion of liberal ideology by the conservative propaganda machine in a way that was nothing BUT outright bludgeoning. Few seemed to think it was necessary to stand up and defend the concept of warm and gushy discourse while AM radio became the wall-to-wall toilet bowl of misinformation and cheap-thrills pandering that it became. The fact that the left finally has 15 minutes of "op-ed" time to throw forth propaganda on a national stage, frankly, makes me howl with delight.
If the American public responds to Moore's flick...the right-wing loudmouth machine has only itself to blame. They blurred the lines of propaganda, entertainment, and facts with their hit-and-run tactics long before anyone ever heard of Michael Moore.
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Matt
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Of course reasoning and intelligent debate are always preferable to going for the jugular.
Agreed.
Yet, over the course of the last 25 years, I've watched the systematic demonization and distortion of liberal ideology by the conservative propaganda machine in a way that was nothing BUT outright bludgeoning. Few seemed to think it was necessary to stand up and defend the concept of warm and gushy discourse while AM radio became the wall-to-wall toilet bowl of misinformation and cheap-thrills pandering that it became. The fact that the left finally has 15 minutes of "op-ed" time to throw forth propaganda on a national stage, frankly, makes me howl with delight.
Propaganda and bias are not exclusive to conservatives. Yes, the conservatives dominate AM talk radio. As far as newspapers go, the liberals win.
If the American public responds to Moore's flick...the right-wing loudmouth machine has only itself to blame. They blurred the lines of propaganda, entertainment, and facts with their hit-and-run tactics long before anyone ever heard of Michael Moore.
Again, it goes both ways. Both sides have been taking cheap shots at one another for years and years.
-Matt
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Rspaight
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Propaganda and bias are not exclusive to conservatives. Yes, the conservatives dominate AM talk radio. As far as newspapers go, the liberals win.
You mean all those newspapers that breathlessly went along with rush to war? The ones that report only grudgingly on things like the Plame case, but ran huge photo spreads of Bush in his flight suit? The endless fawning coverage of Reagan a couple of weeks ago? The ones that refuse to cover things like universal health care as anything other than a wacko socialist plot? The ones that gave exponentially more coverage to Clinton's blowjob than Bush's war lies? They're to the left of AM talk radio, to be sure, but calling them "liberal" is a stretch.
More to the point, though, I think Mr. Hunte's contention was that right-wing propaganda over the last 25 years has been far more distorted, unfair and sensationalistic than whatever left-wing propaganda made it to the mainstream. I think he's right. If over-the-top left-wing material like F9/11 is par for the course, then why the huge fuss over it? If right-wing propaganda is so rare, why did a piece of hagiography like this generate nary a peep in comparison?
Ryan
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney
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Mike Hunte
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Furthermore, I have to chuckle as everyone's favorite neo-con, P.J. O' Rourke, chimes in with:
This is like saying: "o.k., the conservative machine got their chance to drive the car of the "virtual slime game" for a quarter of a century, all the while managing to run the left over and over until they were politically flattened. Yet, now that the liberal machine has gotten up and taken the wheel...it's no longer fun for the Cons to play. In fact, the mean and nasty libs should be scolded for driving the very same course."
Afterall, it's no longer "fashionable".
How noble...
"Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives." But now liberals are trudging purposefully down the same low road."
This is like saying: "o.k., the conservative machine got their chance to drive the car of the "virtual slime game" for a quarter of a century, all the while managing to run the left over and over until they were politically flattened. Yet, now that the liberal machine has gotten up and taken the wheel...it's no longer fun for the Cons to play. In fact, the mean and nasty libs should be scolded for driving the very same course."
Afterall, it's no longer "fashionable".
How noble...