“Now watch this drive.”
lol.
Moore advocates a 60-70% tax on your paycheck. What do T-maggers think of that? Seems like a lot less money left over for RED BANDS, ALPHA MALE and 4-AD-EC!
Boston Barrister
Was I really supposed to read all that drivel from Christopher Hitchens? He’s about as liberal as Fox News is “Fair and Balanced”.
Ptdr
You keep referring to Moore’s weight as evidence that he doesn’t bathe, has bad hygiene, etc. (“he should at least bath and look presentable.”)
That fat people don’t bathe is a stereotype about fat people, and stereotypes can be misleading. For example, it’s another well-known stereotype that a guy who enters “pose downs” against other guys wearing nothing but tiny bikini bottoms and covered in posing oil (sound familiar Ptrdr?) must be a flaming homosexual.
Maybe you should think twice about indulging in these kind of moldy stereotypes like “fat people don’t bathe”.
As far as Fahrenhite 9-11, it has set records for it’s early open in 2 theaters in New York City, and the nationwide opening this weekend should also be huge.
You guys keep referring to Moore in regards to this movie, but he is supposed to not be in the movie much, and most of it consists of people saying things on camera in their own words.
Why would Bushies have a problem seeing Bush saying things on camera in his own words…? Shit, if he said it, why can’t he stand behind his own words and statements? Are you ashamed of what Bush says and does? Why fight so hard against seeing Bush say it on the big screen?
Lumpy, what about 60-70% of your paycheck taxed? Are you in favor of this as Moore is?
[quote]Lumpy wrote:
Boston Barrister
Was I really supposed to read all that drivel from Christopher Hitchens? He’s about as liberal as Fox News is “Fair and Balanced”.
[/quote]
Lumpy:
I’m not surprised you didn’t read it – wouldn’t want you to challenge yourself or your hero Mr. Moore with those inconvenient little things called “fact” and “logic”…
Anyway though, Hitchens is a liberal - maybe not a Michael Moore though, for which you may wish to toss him out of the camp for not toeing the party line. Someone has to enforce the Party dogma, apparently…
Hitchens is a columnist for the Nation – not exactly a hotbed of conservative journalism. Here’s a link to his bio and the columns that are online from the Nation: http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/bio.mhtml?id=21
Here’s his personal website:
http://users.rcn.com/peterk.enteract/
Now, you probably don’t like him because he’s a liberal who supports the war, because he sees it as civilized society againts the tyranny of clerical barbarism, and he acknowledges we were attacked. Obviously you must toss him out of the movement.
At any rate, I think you fail to grasp what most people find objectionable about the movie. It’s not that it’s showing “Bush in his own words” – it’s that it takes things completely out of context, misrepresents what is there, embeds stupid, contradictory assumptions into its main points (to the extent it has points), while all the while purporting to be some sort of factual documentary. What utter horse crap.
Here’s another one you’ll enjoy Lumpy –
A long, un-cut post (I wouldn’t want to take anything out of context… that would be Moore-ish) by a liberal, anti-Bush war supporter talking about why Moore’s movie is such a piece of crap:
http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_06_24.html#007356
Watching Michael Moore
: As I walked out of the theater on the opening day of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, I thought (read: hoped) that even here, in the East Village of Manhattan, true Moore country, where the flick was already sold out all night, surely even here they wouldn’t fall for all his obvious, visual/rhetorical tricks, his propaganda too unsubtle for the cheapest tin-horn demagog.
Take this scene: Moore shows dead American soldiers in Iraq, many of them, the more blood the better. Then hed says we need to replace them and he asks where they’ll come from. He takes us to his favorite man-of-the-people populist playground, Flint, MI, and says that we’ll find soldiers “in the places that had been destroyed by the economy.” He focuses on poor black men as Bush’s next victims – not even acknowledging that virtually every soldier he has just shown – and ridiculed – in the film is white. It’s all so convenient: anti-war-pro-poor-multi-culti-heartland. The rhetoric is as obvious as the gut on the guy.
But as I leave, I hear an older woman behind me, with a voice as loud at New York traffic, saying to someone who’s passing her on the escalator, obviously a stranger: “Don’t you sign up, now! Don’t you join!” I turn around. She’s saying this to a black man, just because he’s black: After all, Michael Moore said those people are all conservative cannon fodder, didn’t he? The man and the woman with him are polite enough to wait until they’re out the door before they laugh and then sadly shake their heads.
Hoo boy.
: One of the many things I’ve learned from blogging confrere Jay Rosen is that you have to stand back and investigate the assumptions that underly a media enterprise.
Moore’s assumption is venality. He assumes that President Bush and his confreres are venal, that their motives are black, that they are out to do no good, only bad, and that the only choices they make in life are between greed and power.
That’s inevitably a bad analysis. It’s the exact same analysis Bill Clinton’s enemies made of him. If they were wrong about Clinton, well then, Michael Moore is wrong about Bush. Life is never that simple, never that obvious, unless you’re a propagandist or one who believes propaganda. I especially can’t buy that analysis when we are a under attack as a nation, when we need to decide who the “us” and “them” are. The war on us as well as the dialogue among my confreres here online has made me question that assumption of venality in American politics.
Oh, you can argue Bush is incompetent; sometimes I do wonder. You can disagree with his policies; I disagree with many. You can question his intelligence; jury’s out still. I didn’t vote for Bush the last time and don’t plan to this time. But I don’t buy Moore’s Bush. To say that he’s the dark force of the universe only leads to simple-minded over-generalizations and bilious caricatures.
Like Fahrenheit 9/11.
: The real problem with the film, the really offensive thing about it, is that in Fahrenheit 9/11, we – Americans from the President on down – are portrayed at the bad guys. If there’s something wrong about bin Laden it’s that his estranged family has ties with – cue the uh-oh music – the Bush family. Saddam? Nothing wrong with him. No mention of torture and terror and tyranny. Moore shows scenes of Baghdad before the invasion (read: liberation) and in his weltanschauung, it’s a place filled with nothing but happy, smiling, giggly, overjoyed Baghdadis. No pain and suffering there. No rape, murder, gassing, imprisoning, silencing of the citizens in these scenes. When he exploits and lingers on the tears of a mother who lost her soldier-son in Iraq, and she wails, “Why did yo have to take him?” Moore does not cut to images of the murderers/terrorists (pardon me, “insurgents”) in Iraq or killed him – or even to God; he cuts to George Bush. When the soldier’s father says the young man died and “for what?”, Moore doesn’t show liberated Iraqis to reply, he cuts instead to an image of Halliburton.
He doesn’t try, not for one second, to have a discussion, to show the other side – and then cut that other side down to size with facts and figures and the slightest effort at argument. No, he just shows the one side. And that, really, is a tragedy. It would be good if we had a discussion. It would be good to have a movie that made us think and reconsider and talk.
But polemics don’t do that. They’re only made of two-by-fours.
: The cheap tricks keep on coming, mostly in what is not said. At the start of the movie, Moore fuzzes the video of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, et al to make it look as if it were recovered World War II film from Hitler’s Berchtesgaden: the bad guys in happier days. The trick is unintentionally appropriate: He’s trying to say that these guys are Nazis but he’s also using the Nazi propaganda motif to say it.
He asks the same questions, streteches out the same memes, we’ve seen on the Web regarding Bush and 9/11: Why did he sit there in that school another almost seven minutes after hearing that the second tower had been hit? The implication was that he could have done something. But how often do we hear anyone ask – certainly Moore does not – what he would have done? What if he had popped up in a panic and ran off? How would that have looked on TV to a nation and a world in such a moment of disorder? Is there some order he could have given in those minutes that the vast federal power structure could not – and, in fact, was not better equipped to handle than Bush? And if you think Bush is such a frigging idiot, isn’t it better that he sat there? The question keeps getting asked. The ellipsis carries the message. But that’s no answer.
He goes after Bush ties to the Saudis again and again but never enumerates the Saudi sins. They’re there. It wouldn’t be hard. It would be helpful. Why not? Just laziness? Or is it easier to end with another ellipsis? Conspiracies are spiced with silence.
We know that Moore opposed even the war in Afghanistan but here he doesn’t say that. Here he says we didn’t bring enough force to Afghanistan and thereby gave bin Laden “a two-month headstart.” Moore doesn’t say that Bush, with his family ties to bin Laden’s family, wanted that to happen. But the ellipsis whispers it.
He ridicules the terror threats and alerts, showing goofy stories about poison pens and model airplanes and goofier guys from the canned-bean crowd showing off their terror shelters. He gets a congressman, Rep. Jim McDermott, to downright say that the alerts are all engineered to keep us on edge. The implication is – the sllipsis says – that we’re not in danger. I watch this scant blocks from where almost 3,000 Americans were killed that day. Oh, yes, Moore, we are in danger.
But Moore wants to pooh-pooh the danger and make it into a conspiracy: “Was this really about our safety or…” [pregnant ellipsis] “…something else?” He adds (and I can’t read one word of my scribbled transcription): “The terrorism threat wasn’t waht this was all about. They just wanted us to be fearful enough to get behind their plan.”
Of course, it was all about Iraq… Wasn’t it?..
: If you don’t believe that, well, says Moore, you’re an idiot. You’re Britney Spears, shown in all her ditziness saying, “Honestly, I think we should just trust our President.” There’s your spokesman for the other side: Britney.
Or you’re a bloodthirsty American goon, which is how Moore portrays soldiers who rush into battle hopped up on rock ‘n’ roll. He spares us the obvious napalm, morning, smell thing.
In Moore’s view, you’re either with him or against him. Hmmm, who else looks at the world that way?
Yup, Moore is just he mirror image of what he despises. He is the O’Reilly… the Bush of the left.
: After leaving the theater and walking by the black man now shaking his head at what Moore had wrought and the people with bring-down-Bush clipboards, I made my way back to New Jersey through the PATH train at the World Trade Center where, most of you know, I was on 9/11. And now I was shaking my head. Michael Moore did not present bin Laden and the terrorists and religious fanatics (from other lands) as the enemy who did this. No, to him, our enemy is within. To him, our enemy is us. And that’s worse than stupid and sad and it’s most certainly not entertaining. It’s disgusting.
: Later, I read Christopher Hitchens’ wonderful fisking of the film.
And then I read A.O. Scott’s mealy-mouthed review in The Times. He points out that the movie is full of crap in many ways: “…blithely trampling the boundary between documentary and demagoguery…” Hey, blurb that!
[Fahrenheit 9/11] is many things: a partisan rallying cry, an angry polemic, a muckraking inquisition into the use and abuse of power. But one thing it is not is a fair and nuanced picture of the president and his policies. What did you expect? Mr. Moore is often impolite, rarely subtle and occasionally unwise. He can be obnoxious, tendentious and maddeningly self-contradictory. He can drive even his most ardent admirers crazy.
But then Scott lets Moore off the hook – and himself off the hook with that audience that applauded the flick in the East Village, which is Times Country, too – with this: “He is a credit to the republic.”
I guess he’d say the same thing of Rush Limbaugh, then.
Scott keeps going. On the one hand:
After you leave the theater, some questions are likely to linger about Mr. Moore’s views on the war in Afghanistan, about whether he thinks the homeland security program has been too intrusive or not intrusive enough, and about how he thinks the government should have responded to the murderous jihadists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11.
Right. But on the other hand:
At the same time, though, it may be that the confusions trailing Mr. Moore’s narrative are what make “Fahrenheit 9/11” an authentic and indispensable document of its time. The film can be seen as an effort to wrest clarity from shock, anger and dismay, and if parts of it seem rash, overstated or muddled, well, so has the national mood.
Crap. It is not creditworthy only to attack and call that discussion and democracy; to insult our intelligence with half, quarter, and untruths; to stifle debate with polemic rather than provoke debate with facts; to mock the people he exploits on film; to gloss over his own outrageous opinions for the sake of convenience; to turn his guns on his own people, letting those who attacked us off as free as birds.
No, this is no more good democracy than it is good filmmaking.
: EPILOGUE: The movie was Topic A in Howard Stern’s opening this morning and the discussion there demonstrates exactly what is wrong with Fahrenheit 9/11: Moore provided no facts for an honest discussion. He provided only fuel for the fire, bullets for bombast.
Granted, this ain’t exactly the Algonquin Round Table; it doesn’t pretend to be. Stern switched sides so completely that he tries not to acknowledge his former support for the war and for Bush as command-in-chief against the terrorists. Stern wasn’t fooled about WMD as he tries to argue now; he was – like me – a Tom Friedman war supporter who believed that we had to do this somewhere, we had to bring democracy to somewhere in the Middle East and Iraq was a good place to do it because Saddam was a tyrant and his continued rule was, in good measure, our fault. It’s possible to be against Bush in this election and still be for the war and at the same time think that we’ve messed up the aftermath; it’s still possible to support Bush as the sitting president while wanting to unseat him. As Bill Clinton said on Today today when asked whether the release of his book would distract voters: “The American people can walk and chew gum at the same time.” Nonetheless, I grant that Stern is hardly trying for a nuanced argument. And the only person to argue against him is his TV director, a graduate of Glassboro State, which ain’t exactly Yale.
Still, the argument that raged for 20 loud minutes on Stern this morning will be replayed by water coolers all across America. And you could say that is good for Democracy. You could say that if the people arguing were armed by the film that causes the arguments with facts and intelligent views of the issues. But, instead, they’re armed only with one side, half-facts, and bile. That doesn’t make for good dialogue or democracy.
: BY THE WAY: The commercials for the film are still saying it’s not rated. It has been rated R because of the copious gore and the appeal of that rating lost, even with Mario Cuomo arguing the case. So the commercial isn’t quite, well, telling the truth.
: LINKS: Fred Wilson reacts to this post and asks whether I react similarly to Rush Limbaugh; in his comments, I list many posts where I do. He also says it’s time for the left to play hardball. Hardball yes, Dodgeball, no. Hardball with real facts and reasoned arguments and intelligence. Mimicking the worst of the right is not what the left should do – the Rush of the left in Randi Rhodes on Air America or Bizarro Rush in Michael Moore on film. We’re smarter than that, aren’t we?
Fred says I’m angry. Yes. I’m angry this movie isn’t better made.
And here are MooreLies, the Jobless Lawyer, Nick Troester, Sisu, more later.
Says Jason Kottke:
The film, while entertaining – very funny in parts and at times powerfully moving – was ultimately disappointing for me…
Fahrenheit 9/11 is so much about Michael Moore’s opinion that it’s difficult to go through that process of finding the truth. The frustrating thing is that Moore has a point, but he’s unable to get himself out of the way enough to tell us the story so we can make up our own minds about it…
Samizdata says:
One last thought: Fahrenheit 9/11 is many things, but for pity’s sake let’s not call it a documentary.
- Ty Burr, Boston Globe
Boston Barrister
I didn’t know that Hitchens writes for the Nation. But so what? Just because a Liberal says something, that means I am compelled to agree with it? That is absurd. Don’t confuse the Right Wing’s approach (falling in lockstep under party lines, no matter what) with my beliefs.
As far as your long ‘review’ post, it is too long to address every point (a woman’s dumb comments when walking out of the theater, etc).
But this review, like much of the criticism I see of Mooree here, is based on some basic fallacies: That a documentary film is obliged to give all sides of an issue equal time, to not have any biases or opinions of it’s own, that opposing points of view must be given equal time, and other nonsense.
If you think that is what documentary films are supposed to do, it shows that you don’t really know anything about documentary films.
Glen Beck is going to start taking pre-orders for his t-shirts tomorrow.
What’s on the shirt? - A picture of Michael Moore. The caption? Moore’s FAT.
Why? According to Beck, there is absolutely no arguing with anyone so far left as Moore and his out of touch minions.
I thought it was a hilarious ad - I may buy 1, or a dozen.
This thread certainly sets new records for acidic sniping and name-calling. I don’t think I’ve seen a single post from someone outside the US/Canada so far. So, yay for precendence.
Several points spring immediately to mind.
- F.9/11 is coming soon to a cinema near you in Australia. Most everyone I know will go to see it. These are the same people who think Moore is a populist, a progagandist, and general all-around media clown, with all the contradictions and disrespect for objectivity involved in being as such.
…and everyone is going to see it anyway.
- At Mardi Gras last year, our Prime Minister was portrayed as a 20 foot papier-mache terrier with his tounge firmly implanted in the arsehole of your dear befuddled President. A relationship of pure cornholing.
One of the few things that actually unites people in this country is their disgust at the perpetual fawning of our political figures at the seat of power. Which is you guys.
Moore is an antidote to the way this country and the rest of the world sees America, as an overblown thick-browed imperial bully. He is far and away the most famous figurehead for attacking American ideals. Sadly, this puts him squarely on the ‘approved’ everywhere except where he lives.
- Christopher Hitchens likening of Moore to Leni Riefenstahl is entirely appropriate (and makes me wish I’d thought of it first). Goddamn it, I wish I could write like that…
I saw Bowling for Columbine, like the rest of this country, and to someone with a major in the philosophy of logic, it was a calculated insult to journalism and level-headedness. It was an exercise in inference, heart-string-tugging and very carefully manipulated images. The scene with the little girl’s picture at the end was pure unadulterated shit-stained hubris. In other words, I felt like I’d paid $10.50 to see a commercial news broadcast.
Anyone I’ve repeated this opinion to inevitably says “Sure. But he made a good point. America has an unhealthy obsession with guns, and is full of mad lethally armed douchebags with moral blindspots.”
-
Expect sales records to be challenged, if not broken, by this movie. Like everything else Moore has done.
-
Everyone likes Americans in the flesh, unless they’re French. You’re a mightily pleasant bunch of people, and they occasional wart on your national psyche would be completely forgivable. Hell, Australia likes everyone up close. I think it has something to do with the beer.
However, the people who run your country are universally despised, and your self-obsession reaches poisonous and unhealthy levels. Books excoriating your way of life, your President and his cabal of pinstriped pindicks and the way your wipe your arse on the rest of the world ride the non-fiction best seller lists. Politicians make hay out of indiscriminately bashing Uncle Sam.
Long and short - you gots yourself some serious problems and Moore, Bush and Kerry are not the solution. The gentleman from NY before who called for all these people to be ground into bloody meatpaste and shipped to East Africa has hit upon a good start.
zarathrustra:
Isn’t it ironically amusing that people who view Americans with contempt for being fat, lazy, obnoxious, unnuanced louts have fixated on Michael Moore as the savior for America?
Lumpy:
Why do you continually miss the point? The point wasn’t that you had to agree with Hitchens because he is a liberal. You were obviously going to disagree – without actually reading the article, I will add, once again, to emphasize that you do not want facts or logic to interfere with your little world view.
The point was that even those with a liberal bias generally can see through Moore’s infantile crap. Only those who either have let hatred of Bush produce myopia, or who really are too stupid to see the difference between what Moore puts forth and an actual argument, would take this movie as a serious entry in the debate.
[Sigh]
Lumpy:
Of course documentaries are supposed to have a point of view. However, it is possible to have a point of view while at the same time painting a picture that is not blatantly distorted. Generally, this helps to prove your point, because it shows the strength of your position.
In addition, documentaries are supposed to have a point of view while at the same time “documenting” the events as they occur. They are supposed to be factual representations, not an embodiment of one myopic viewpoint. Under your definition, Nazi propaganda films qualify as documentaries, because they had facts and they advanced a viewpoint.
Aside from all that, Moore’s position is obviously weak. You see, people who have a strong argument generally aren’t afraid to show the other side. They believe their argument is strong, and can account for all the facts – or in the case of a movie, a “nuanced” presentation of the facts.
In fact, in writing, students are taught that a truly effective argument addresses the strong points of the opposition’s argument. When you ignore the other side’s points, you are implicitly admitting that you cannot deal with them (unless they are so ridiculous as to not merit comment – obviously not the case in an issue as contentious as this one).
This film is claptrap.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
zarathrustra:
Isn’t it ironically amusing that people who view Americans with contempt for being fat, lazy, obnoxious, unnuanced louts have fixated on Michael Moore as the savior for America? [/quote]
Irony writ large 
An ideologue will forgive a man who murders his family with a blunt table knife if he’s waving the right flag when he does it.
Why is it seemingly so hard to get an answer from the Moore supporters on a 60-70% income tax on your paychecks? as Moore believes is fair and just?
[quote]PtrDR wrote:
Lumpy, what about 60-70% of your paycheck taxed? Are you in favor of this as Moore is?[/quote]
PtrDr - you must have seen Bill O’ Dickhead re-air his interview with Moore when he mentioned this. He was saying that he (Moore) and O’Reilly - since they’re wealthy - ought to be taxed that much (he was also hesitent to name a percentage). It was NOT 70% across the board, as you seem to have misunderstood or contorted.
Rightsideup…you didn’t answer the question: should people be taxed 60-70%??
Note: I NEVER said 70% across the board…
RSU -
I didn’t see you disagree with a 70% tax rate - you just said that it wasn’t an across the board tax rate.
So you think it’s acceptable to rob a person who has a good year of up to 70% of his income?
It’s OK to soak the rich - they can afford it, right?
Besides - they’re probably evil corporate types anyhow.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
RSU -
I didn’t see you disagree with a 70% tax rate - you just said that it wasn’t an across the board tax rate.
So you think it’s acceptable to rob a person who has a good year of up to 70% of his income?
It’s OK to soak the rich - they can afford it, right?
Besides - they’re probably evil corporate types anyhow.
[/quote]
LOL - you guys are a real laugh! Did my post say anything about my opinions on taxation? No it didn’t, so settle down there rainjack.
I responded to PtrDr’s post which put forth a statement about Moore’s beliefs, and I corrected him on his inaccurate portrayal of that opinion. That is all.
PtrDr - no, I didn’t reply to the question that was in your post, which was directed at Lumpy, btw. No, you didn’t say across the board, but it is what you implied, no? You stated that t-maggers wouldn’t be able to purchase supplements any longer. This implies that such high taxation would leave little disposable income that could be used on supplements. My guess is that T-maggers do not represent one segment of economic class.
Moore was on The Daily Show tonight and was surprisingly candid and humble. He said that his movie is not pure fact, but it does contain much of his opinion, much of his view. I think this is a proper look at it. He has his ideas, did some degree of HW and is putting them forth in a manner that is obviously going to be supportive of his views.
That it should be viewed with this grain of salt is clear, but how on earth can you argue with video footage that shows Bush briefly addressing his view on terror and message to terrorists, then saying “Now watch this drive.” Ugh, don’t you find that a sort of cavalier attitude if not fully arrogant? The arrogance – that’s what so many can’t stand. His arrogance has gotten the US in some deep shit, too.
Hundreds dead today in Iraq…I guess we’re really cramming this whole “rooting out terrorism” thing into this week, huh?
I saw the segment where O’Reilly interviews Moore. Moore’s point was that the ultra-rich like himself and O’Reilly can afford to pay more in taxes, and had a moral obligation to pay a fair share.
My take was that the numbers “60 to 70 percent” were made up on the spot, and were not a serious statement about tax rates. There was a general air of goofing around during the interview, from Moore.
O’Reilly said “I already pay about 50% of my income in taxes, isn’t that too much?” and Moore said “No! You should pay more” (paraphrasing) and it continued from there.