At the current 5 pages, it’s understandable you didn’t read the whole thred. So I’ll repeat my previous comment on this.
YOU might have sat there freaked out for 7 mintues. That is why YOU are not president. We hire people to run the country who we expect will NOT be freaked out and paralyzed at crucial points.
“Mr. President, the Chinese have launched a nuclear strike at us. What should we do?” Sitting paralyzed for 7 minutes is not an acceptable answer.
A friend heard Moore state that Bush spent another half hour on the school grounds. Moore said something like, “If the nation is under attack, shouldn’t the president consider himself a target? Why was he hanging around an elementary school for another half hour?”
He should have at least gotten on the road and made himself a moving target.
Exactly. All plans by Bush-Cheney to promote George as a capable “war leader” are derailed–
TV commercial: “George W. Bush. A bold American leader in the face of terrorism.”
Viewer: “Yeah, right! I saw him, sitting like a stunned rabbit! Bold leader my ass!”
Except Fahrenheit 9/11 dismantled all of that, as well.
It doesn’t matter. The film was made by the defense department as part of the propoganda machinery. Your votes are NOT counted. Nobody in the the US who casts an election ballot is having their vote processed for election results.
The film only pacifies the population into thinking that transparency and activism are occurring. They pick up some gossip algorithms to get sex and move along.
Um. OK.
Michael Moore is coming on Charlie Rose’s show NOW. Charlie’s a great interviewer; should be great.
I think I’ll stay home if it’s all the same to you all.
Ted Koppel isn’t my most favorite newsguy, but he’s outdonehimself this time. Check out this review of MM’s film and see what you think…
Um…that “review” was done by someone named Dave Kopel, not Ted Koppel.
blush :o
no excuse…
And in a related vein, the mainstream media is apparently out to get Moore for making them look like a bunch of cowardly lapdogs:
Welp, just got my ticket online for a bargain matinee (7.50) at the Bronxville Cinema, a lovely little semi-indie house in bucolic and Westchester-liberal Bronxville, NY, for the 4:50 show.
Sorta dreading it and looking forward to it at the same time. I’ve watched enough interviews with Moore to understand what he’s getting at, I think. I like how he claims he is not out to be fair and has an agenda, and as a Dem I agree with it anyway; but my BS detector will be set on high and internally I’ll be yelling “CITE?!” every five minutes, I’ll bet.
But I don’t feel I can reasonably follow politics, here and elsewhere, without having seen this movie. And the man is entertaining at least.
Gulp. Report later.
I think Paul Krugman hits just the right note in his op-ed today about “Fahrenheit 9/11”:
http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20040702.html
Spinsanity does a fair vetting of the innuendo in the film, though I think they are mistaken about what Moore is implying in some cases, most of their criticisms are dead on.
And for all of you falling for a link with a pointed comment:
" One wild card is how much Mr. Moore himself will make via his own profit participation in the movie, which people close to the matter describe as generous. That amountwill be deducted from the take before the Weinsteins and the charities divvy up the rest. "
From that article - it looks like MM won’t be suffering at all.
However, who cares? This is America, and MM is a capitalist, and if he makes a movie that people pay to go see, he is entitled to profit!
If you don’t like that, well, become a liberal!
I just saw it. I promised my older daughter to wait to see it with her.
I don’t have much to add, except that I saw it 2:20 on a Friday afternoon, and the theater was 70% full. Not as many as were in the Spiderman show that got out at the same time - but probably more people of voting age.
My favorite part not mentioned before - how the Secret Service protected the Saudis from Michael.
Oh, and the missing seven minutes - Bush looked just like the kind of person who is stuck waiting at a doctor’s office without a book, and who seems to be staring into space with his mind in neutral. Moore didn’t assume he was thinking anything, he had some maybes as a rhetorical device. The waiting until someone told him what to do hypothesis seems most likely to me.
I’m baaaaack!
<pause for applause>
Well. I was both over-and-underwhelmed. The theater was about 2/3 full (not the biggest theater of the three there but pretty large, in a commuter suburb on a holiday weekend). Mostly retirees, some of whom were already discussing the merits of the film in the line. Pretty partisan Dem crowd, lots of uh-huhs and gasps and laughing and a little sobbing at the plight of Mrs. Liscomb. About ten people left during the movie, a couple of ancients during the dead children scenes, some younger types during the Marine scenes, a few more during the Mrs. Liscomb at the WH scenes. Big thoughtful applause at the end.
I’m glad I was spoiled for some of the dead children and soldier scenes, and the death of Michael Lipscomb, because they were really disturbing, and the more egregious errors had already been pointed out so I didn’t yell Cite?! once. Although I did mutter a few "Come ON!!"s.
I liked the passion. I liked the candid footage of officials before and after interviews, although probably everybody goofs a little self-consciously during the boring light n’ makeup stuff. I was amazed at some the links he found between the various companies in Bush’s career and the forces in Middle East, although I’m not quite sure most of them MEAN something. I esp. liked the interviews with the soldiers; hope they don’t get into too much trouble, although I think they were breaking a few regs with their candor. Might have been nice of Moore to at least blur their faces. I also wished he hadn’t lingered for so long on the face of Liscomb and her family, but it made the point. She is a brave woman and sums up the conflict the country has in her tortured love of both country and son.
The 9/11 scenes were well-done. I could feel everybody’s minds around me filling in the awful video to go with the audio (esp. since we’re in the NYC area; I had passed Bronxville’s own 9/11 plaque with their dead’s names on it on the way to the theater from the train station). The editing was sometimes silly (the whole Iraq! Al-Qaeda! random quote thing, film-student 101 stuff) but usually excellent.
Things that made me go hmmmm:
Doesn’t the miltary always send a special detail of military chaplins to announce a death to the family? I don’t want to doubt a grieving mother, but why did she just get a phone call? If it was a screw-up, I hope heads rolled.
The prisoner who was abused by–uh–having his delicates touched for a sec had been caught looting; the soldiers were calling him ‘Ali Baba’, which is what the angry Iraqis themselves called these jerks. Wish Moore had mentioned the looting and how it complicates the reconstruction efforts; the portrayal of happy bucolic Iraq pre-war also bugged me, but he’s explained on talk shows that he assumes everybody knows about the dark side of Iraq so it didn’t bother me TOO much.
As for the business connections: the Canadians, I believe, are the folks who “own the most of America” in the aggregate; granted, their government is a little less despotic. 
As for the rest, well, $1.3 billion made for “the Bush family and companies they were associated with” over thirty years does not strike me as really excessive. The James Bath connection is interesting but all it proves to me is that the Bush family does business with people it knows, as do most businesses. As for the cousin working for Fox News and Kathleen Harris being the FL Secretary of State, well, they’d been elected or appointed presumably by people who had no idea of their connection to the Bush family. It would be some plot to put them in place years before the election randomly hinged on Florida.
As for Prince Bandar, Moore practically was playing the Darth Vader theme every time he appeared. I have no love for the Saudis in general but Bandar is an civilized and complex man trying to straddle two cultures; IMO he deserved better treatment. Great article on Bandar from The New Yorker here (warning: PDF, but worth it).
This ties into the thing that bothered me the most: guilt-by-association. Fact: Bin Ladins (sic) were flown out of America (and I did know that the FBI cleared them thanks to this board, but that wasn’t Moore’s point I guess). Fact: Some bin Ladins attended Osama’s sons wedding. Uhm…were they the SAME bin Ladens as the ones (mostly students) that were in America? Isn’t that kind of important? Do they all think alike, or are there fractures like my (considerably smaller) family? Their real estate firm is the second-largest in the world, so how many businesses that interact with the ME have NOT worked with them? Salem binLadin is Osama’s half brother–well, he has about 35 others, I believe; if I was shunned in business because of the actions of an estranged half-brother, I’d think it pretty unfair. And the constant shots of Bush Sr. and Jr. meeting and shaking hands with various Saudis in their national costume in ornate settings started to feel to me like Moore was trying to awake any xenophobia the audience might have at their ‘exoticism’.
I have a few other quibbles, but overall, though, I’m very glad I saw it. I’m glad I saw for myself what all the fuss was about. And although I didn’t learn much I didn’t already know, I could tell by the gasps and the “Nooo!”'s and the “Wow!”'s all around me that people who do not frequent the Dope were learning things they hadn’t known. In that case, Moore was very successful.
To be strictly accurate, Moore doesn’t draw any conclusions about this either – he just tosses out the data and leaves it to each individual to be as suspicious as they want to be. In part, I think it’s because he doesn’t genuinely know how close Osama is with the rest of the family, or how much influence the Carlyle/Saudi ties had on Bush’s policies. But as you mentioned, a lot of people didn’t even know these data points at all until they saw the movie, so just having more people aware of the situation and raising questions is a good thing.
In a related vein, this page seems at first blush to be a comprehensive primer on the ties between the Bush family and the Saudis. I’ll leave it to someone with more financial expertise than myself to poke it further and see if it stands up.