Fahrenheit 9/11

[Professor S]

Ok, I will respond to this gibberish as it directly paints me as something I am not.

Originally Posted by Typhoid

Strangler, i think you should run for president. Seriously. The country would benefit from your one sided in your face attitude. Maybe when you become the president you can just sit there and do nothing, because you obviously see no fault in anything Bush is doing.

Typhoid, exactly when have I EVER said that I find no fault in anything Bush does? In fact, I remember specifically posting on more than one occasion my myriad complaints of the Bush administration, but I suppose you decided to use your selective memory, as usual.

You say Moore lies, and have cited sites that "debunk" Moores antics, but he did have researchers for F 9/11. Researchers that research things.

The same researchers that said Bush let the Saudi's leave without being screened? The fact is that all the Saudi's that were allowed to leave were screened and over 30 of them were interviewed. This is according to the 9/11 commision. I'm not saying that more shouldn't have been done, because more should have, but the truth is never damning enough for Moore.

The same reseachers that blamed Bush for letting the Saudi Royal family leave by plane while no flights were allowed in the air? The fact is commercial air traffic was cleared when the royals left and it was in fact Richard Clarke who personnally cleared them to leave. This once again according to the 9/11 commission and personally ratified by Richard Clarke himself during the hearings.

By the way, when George Stephanopolous confronted him on these lies, Moore's excuse was that they were "preliminary findings" from the 9/11 commission. Well considering that the commission hasn't completed the document yet and all there is are preliminary findings, thats a pretty useless excuse, even if he can use it as a legal defense for his outrageous claims.

And couldnt you say that a person that debunks things also manipulates people? I mean, they are manipulating you to believe the "manipulator" in question is wrong.

Of course that could be true, but when David Hardy actually interviews the people in Columbine, who by the way all HATE Michael Moore and the families of the victims actually sued him for slander and libel, and presents actual evidence that Moore himself has recognized and dismissed (read the sites and links that I posted earlier), as well as the fact that the NEWS sources such as ABC, CNN, The Wallstreet Journal, etc. are all of impecable quality, I think we can all use our brains to see who is the true manipulator here.

The fact is he is right on some things, and he is wrong on some things. So what, all in all he is a guy trying to make a living. He makes entertaing documentaries, and it makes him money.

Way to completely miss my point. I actually agree with Michael Moore on his stance on gun control that he brought up in Bowling for Columbine, but I DESPISE his tactics and "by any means necessary" ethic of yellow journalism. He paints himself as a truth teller who actually has directions on his website of how to use his films IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS but whenever anyone confronts him on the lies he exhorts, he claims he is nothing but a comedian. He can't play both sides and pick which one he wants whenever someone calls him on his bull****, especially when this bull**** might make into schools that my kids might attend. My country is polarized to the right and left too much already as it is, I don't need Michael Moore lying his ass off to make things even worse.

Meanwhile, he rakes in all the cash in the world by exploiting those with liberal sympathies, when he has done nothing but make himself into the very corporate fat cat that he claims to hate. Wake up and smell the hypocrisy.

Hey, maybe when you become the president, you can exile him to Cuba or Canada or something.

I wouldn't exile him anywhere as he is simply excercising his right to free speech, even if he toes the line of slander and libel ( actually think his "researchers" are lawyers whose job it is to keep him from getting sued). I'm using my right to try and give the other side, which explains what a disgusting social leech he is and how he is using you to line his pockets with gold and laughing all the way to the bank.

[Zaglar Ninja]

do you agree that bush is a moron? Micheal Moore thinks so, and he does a kickass job of showing it, I know he in the past has lied, but in F 9/11 I don't think there are any lies. Most of the movie isn't him talking anyways, like Dylflon says, he lets the facts show themselves.

ugh I dont even understand why you pick on Moore so much, hes just showing what a lying moron bush is. Maybe you should stop worrying about what "lying" film makers are saying and start worrying about what lying presidents are saying.

[Bond]

I have found a very nice article from Slate.com, a liberal website, that calls Fahrenheit 9/11 counterpropaganda. If you don't believe me they're liberal, the writer of the article calls himself liberal, and the article that appears before this one reads: "Bush plays the Nazi card." Here is the article:

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is unfair and outrageous. You got a problem with that?

Back in the '80s—the era of Reagan and Bush 41, when milquetoasts Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis were the ineffectual Democratic candidates and Jimmy Carter was off building houses for poor people, when Anthony Lewis was writing oh-so-temperately in the New York Times, which was then leaning neoconward under the stewardship of Abe Rosenthal, when there was an explosion of dirty Republican tricksters like Lee Atwater and trash-talking right-wingers, from Morton Downey Jr. to the fledgling Rush Limbaugh—I found myself wishing, wishing fervidly, for a blowhard whom the left could call its own. Someone who wouldn't shrink before the right's bellicosity. Someone who would bellow back, mock unashamedly, and maybe even recapture the prankster spirit of counterculture figures like Abbie Hoffman.

Yeah, I know: Be careful what you wish for.

In 20 years of writing about film, no movie has ever tied me up in knots the way Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (Lions Gate) has. It delighted me; it disgusted me. I celebrate it; I lament it. I'm sure of only one thing: that I don't trust anyone—pro or con—who doesn't feel a twinge of doubt about his or her responses. What follows might be broadly labeled as "waffling," but I hope, at least, that it is bold and decisive waffling.
Needless to say, Fahrenheit 9/11 never waffles. The liberals' The Passion of the Christ, it ascribes only the most venal motives to the other side. There is no sign in the filmmaker of an openness to other interpretations (or worldviews). This is not quite a documentary—which I define, very loosely, as a work in which the director begins by turning on the camera and allowing the reality to speak for itself, aware of its complexities, contradictions, and multitudes. You are with Moore, or you are a war criminal. The film is part prosecutorial brief and part (as A.O. Scott has noted) rabid editorial cartoon: a blend of insight, outrage, and sniggering innuendo, the whole package threaded (and tied in a bow) with cheap shots, some of them voiced by Moore, some created in the editing room by intercutting stilted images from old movies. Moore is largely off-screen (no pun intended), but as narrator he's always there, sneering and tsk-tsking.

Here are the salient points: that Bush stole the presidency from Al Gore (who, in one of the film's best scenes, must certify his opponent's election and quell a movement to stall that certification); that Bush and his family had been in bed with the Saudis, which made him less responsive to the danger of al-Qaida terrorism; that a pipeline in Afghanistan promised billions if the Taliban was on board, which was one reason that the threat of Osama Bin Laden (black sheep of a family with whom daddy did business) was swept under the rug. Better to concentrate on Iraq, the administration felt—it had unfinished Saddam business, it was rich in oil, and it was a potential goldmine for U.S. corporations.

Moore ranges far and wide: He apes Apocalypse Now (1979) with footage of bucolic Baghdad before the bombings, then cuts to soldiers explaining the way they hook their iPods to the tank speakers: "You have a good song playing in the background, it gets you really fired up." (I'm surprised he didn't go ahead and play "Ride of the Valkyries.") Then there's graphic footage of dead Iraqi women and small children killed in what the Pentagon said were surgically precise bombings. A grieving old woman shrieks curses at the United States, while U.S. soldiers with missing limbs rail at the administration. On the home front, Moore suggests that the Patriot Act was unread by the legislators who passed it and harps on its absurd applications, like the agent who infiltrated a septuagenarian cookie-baking peace collective in Fresno, Calif. Then he chases hawkish congressmen outside the Capitol. Would they send their own sons and daughters to fight in Iraq? he asks—often to their backs, as they flee.

As I watched California Congressman John T. Doolittle take off from Moore's camera, arms and legs bobbing spastically, I was troubled by the cheapness of Moore's interviewing techniques. But I laughed my ass off anyway. And I felt better about laughing when I checked the warlike congressman's Web site, which mentions his graduation from high school in 1968 but, predictably, no Vietnam service.

All right, you can make anyone into a goofball with a selection of unflattering shots and out-of-context quotations, but it is so very easy to make George W. Bush—with his near-demonic blend of smugness and vacuity—look bad. Or is this in eye of the beholder? Perhaps when Bush speaks of hunting down terrorists, then gets down to the real, golfing business—"Stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive"—you see an honest, plainspoken leader unfairly ridiculed. But what can even Bush partisans make of those seven minutes in the elementary school classroom after he received the news that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center and the nation was under attack? In one of the few lapses in an otherwise virtuoso rant, Christopher Hitchens argues that Moore would have made sport of a martial, Russell Crowe-like response. Nice try, but that blow wouldn't have landed, and this one does, spectacularly. It is downright spooky to watch the nominal commander in chief and "leader of the free world" behave, in a moment of crisis, like a superfluous man.

Moore is best when he doesn't stage dumb pranks (like broadcasting the Patriot Act in D.C. out of an ice-cream truck) but provokes with his mere presence. When he interviews the author of House of Bush, House of Saud in front of the Saudi embassy and the Secret Service shows up to ask what he's doing, it's a gotcha moment: What's the Secret Service doing protecting non-U.S. government officials? He has a light touch there that's missing from the rest of the Fahrenheit 9/11. In one scene, his camera homes in on a Flint, Mich., woman weeping over a son killed in Iraq, and the effect is vampirish. After the screening, a friend railed that Moore was exploiting a mother's grief. When I suggested that the scene made moral sense in the context of the director's universe, that the exploitation is justified if it saves the lives of other mothers' sons, my friend said, "When did you become a relativist?"

I'm troubled by that charge—and by the fact that we nearly came to blows by the end of the conversation. But when it comes to politics in a time of war, I think that relativism is, well, relative. Fahrenheit 9/11 must be viewed in the context of the Iraq occupation and the torrent of misleading claims that got us there. It must be viewed in the context of Rush Limbaugh repeating the charge that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster murdered in Fort Marcy Park, or laughing off the exposure of Valerie Plame when, had this been a Democratic administration, he'd be calling every day for the traitor's head. It must be viewed in the context of Ann Coulter calling for the execution of people who disagree with her. It must be viewed in the context of another new documentary, the superb The Hunting of the President, that documents—irrefutably—the lengths to which the right went to destroy Bill Clinton. Moore might be a demagogue, but never—not even during Watergate—has a U.S. administration left itself so open to this kind of savaging.

Along with many other polite liberals, I cringed last year when Moore launched into his charmless, pugilistic acceptance speech at the Academy Awards. Oh, how vulgar, I thought—couldn't he at least have been funny? A year later, I think I might have been too hard on the fat prick. Six months before her death in 1965, the great novelist Dawn Powell wrestled in her diary with the unseemliness of political speech during an "artistic" event: "Lewis Mumford gave jolt to the occasion and I realized I had gotten as chicken as the rest of America because what he said—we had no more right in Vietnam than Russia had in Cuba—was true but I did not think he should use his position to declaim this. Later I saw the only way to accomplish anything is by 'abusing' your power." Exactly. Fahrenheit 9/11 is not a documentary for the ages, it is an act of counterpropaganda that has a boorish, bullying force. It is, all in all, a legitimate abuse of power.

Source

Of course I don't expect anyone to read that whole article, because it's much easier to watch a movie than read an article, and that's the kind of society we are.

I still haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11, but I plan to sometime. I've seen Bowling for Columbine and really enjoyed it and agreed with most of his points.

[Jonbo298]

I think most of the time, when Michael Moore is wrong on things, it happens. If he wanted something to be a lie, then thats his fault. But movies like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 mainly just open people's eyes and get them thinking.

[Null]

Originally Posted by Jonbo298

movies like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 mainly just open people's eyes and get them thinking.

^^

[Dylflon]

Thanks for the article Bond. Nice read.

The big problem with people who argue about Michael Moore is, while Moore does lie to make points they'll take the fact that he lied about some things to discredit everything else that's true about his movies.

Strangler, Let's say he did lie about the Saudis not being screened and about the thing with the Saudi royal family being the only plane in the air.

So, you've got two lies. Put those in your back pocket and perhaps you can bring them out and throw them at us again later.

Anyways, Taek a look at everything Moore says in the movie that isn't a lie. I'm not telling you to like Moore or even respect him. But just take a look at everything in the movie that isn't a lie. There's a lot of good stuff in there.

[Crash]

This is a movie, this is not a documentary. It is meant to be entertaining. But the problem is, too many people take everything in there to be real facts. Some is, some isn't (sounds like a New York Times article)

Of course there are faults in the presidency. There always has been from the first.

If there was one thing people would do, it should be this:

never take all your facts from one source. moore isn't all correct, strangler isnt all correct (but seems to know more than I) Rush isn't, Shawn Hannity isnt, and MSNBC isn't.

Just makes you wonder what the documentary would look like that is directed by Rush Limbough. (if he knew anything about directing)

point is, just take this movie for what it is: A MOVIE - nothing else.

[Professor S]

Originally Posted by Dylflon

Thanks for the article Bond. Nice read.

The big problem with people who argue about Michael Moore is, while Moore does lie to make points they'll take the fact that he lied about some things to discredit everything else that's true about his movies.

Strangler, Let's say he did lie about the Saudis not being screened and about the thing with the Saudi royal family being the only plane in the air.

So, you've got two lies. Put those in your back pocket and perhaps you can bring them out and throw them at us again later.

Anyways, Taek a look at everything Moore says in the movie that isn't a lie. I'm not telling you to like Moore or even respect him. But just take a look at everything in the movie that isn't a lie. There's a lot of good stuff in there.

You're missing my point too. How can you distinguish what is fact and what is fiction if you know he blatantly lies? Why do I have to go out and do fact checking on a documentarian when he should be responsible for his own rediculous movies?

You even helped prove my point. When you saw the movie, could you distinguish the reality from fantasy, or are you willing to believe it all until someone showed you what was wrong? Don't you think there's a problem with that? Don't you think there is a problem with an Acadamy Award winning documentarian lying and manipulating and yet still being seen as some great truth telling muck raker?

If one thing is a lie, and another, then another... how can you trust ANY of it?

Oh, and here's another little fact I can put in my back pocket. One of the congressmen that Moore interviewed about having relatives in the military actually answered that he had a nephew in the military and another that was going to ship overseas. Moore excluded this response from the movie, and then denied it ever happened in the interview with Stephanopolous. Well thank god George has researchers becuase they actually found the raw footage and in fact the congressman does say he has family overseas in the military. Once again, the truth hurts Michael Moore.

Zaglar Ninja, do yourself a favor a leave this thread. You're only hurting yourself.

[Bond]

Originally Posted by The Strangler

Zaglar Ninja, do yourself a favor a leave this thread. You're only hurting yourself.

I don't know, right now he's making Typhoid look pretty good.

[Crash]

Originally Posted by The Strangler

Oh, and here's another little fact I can put in my back pocket. One of the congressmen that Moore interviewed about having relatives in the military actually answered that he had a nephew in the military and another that was going to ship overseas. Moore excluded this response from the movie, and then denied it ever happened in the interview with Stephanopolous. Well thank god George has researchers becuase they actually found the raw footage and in fact the congressman does say he has family overseas in the military. Once again, the truth hurts Michael Moore.

Zaglar Ninja, do yourself a favor a leave this thread. You're only hurting yourself.

ah, strangler is the man.... good ammunition for my girlfriend (who hates bush)

what did bush do to any of you guys, he's a lot smarter than anyone on these boards so just let him do his job.... if kerry gets elected, let him do his job... just let the president work for the love of pete!

[Null]

They meantioned 1 congressman had family in the military a number of times.
kept saying, all but 1 had no children in the army.


or are we talking about a different one?