Wow! Now we’ve almost filled up two pages on this thread! And the movie doesn’t even open until the day after tomorrow!
I love this election year! It’s so exciting! 2000 was so boring! Wasn’t 2000 boring? (Until they had to count the votes, that is.)
Take a moment to reread that. Moore lied. On this count, he admitted as much. What does this mean? He came clean about one lie, but he still lied about that. And there are other lies which he has not corrected detailed in the Spinsanity reports. Note, also, that this comes from an unbiased site, not one that even leans to the right ever so slightly. You’re showing your partisanship.
That’s a good question. How do I maintain my sanity with people like you defending favored pundits even after they’ve been shown to lie? It’s not easy. Yes, I hold BushCo to the same standards. Yes, they’ve lied. But, see, I realize that both sides are bullshitting and I don’t like it. You, however, seem to feel that if one side is really terrible it’s okay to lie about them, because you need recruits for yours. Finding good sources and keeping yourself objectively informed is difficult. The vitriol is great and it’s comforting to take shelter with people who agree with you. I don’t know everything–far from it–but I’m doing my best not to become a shill for a political party because I think it’s kind of degrading. Don’t you?
What mystifies me the most is that those who are so hasty to label Mr. Moore a liar are the same ones that idolize leaders and media personalities who exercise so little regard for fact in their fanatic pursuit of their agendas.
Compared to what is spouted by Rush, Coulter, Bush, and Chaney on a daily basis, the liberties Mr. Moore takes with facts are minor.
I personally think Moore does a disservice to the liberal cause by being so loose with his fact checking and research. Al Franken did a much, much better job with his book, but the right wing attack dogs in the media painted him as a clown… which stuck all too easily and diverted all attention away from the actual content of his book, some of which predated Clark’s book by nearly a year.
So if Moore can do what it takes to get these issues actually discussed, and not let the right wingers distract the media into focusing on personality, once again, then I can forgive whatever errors and exaggerations he makes. Those can get ironed out in the subsequent discussions.
Perhaps the errors are there precisely for this reason – to make people talk about the issues?
God knows the issues themselves haven’t been enough… despite their scandalous nature.
He admitted to making a factual mistake in the caption. Making a mistake isn’t lying. It does nothing to encourage people to correct their mistakes if they’re branded as liars anytime they do so.
*To which party?
One of my students, a Japanese housewife, brought up the subject of Farenheit 9/11 just yesterday. I swear this was with no prompting from me – I know nothing about this woman’s politics and the only thing I know about her movie preferences is that she really likes Johnny Depp, so I had no reason to think that she’d have any interest in Farenheit 9/11 at all. But she asked me if I was planning to see it, and said she was very curious about it.
She also said (I’m paraphrasing a bit, as her English is good but not great) “I think it’s very good that in America people can show so many different opinions. In Japan, we complain to each other, but the government doesn’t hear about it. Our opinions don’t have any effect on what they do.”
I said, “Maybe you need a Japanese director to make this kind of movie.”
She laughed very hard at this, then said “Maybe someday it will happen!” Based on my admittedly limited understanding of the Japanese, I think she actually meant something closer to “Yeah, that’ll happen…the day after hell freezes over!”
It sometimes makes me sad when my Japanese students say things to me that indicate that they hold an unrealistically sunny view of America – an America that I wish existed, but that I know does not. However, I think this particular student was right on. It is very good that in America people can hold many different opinions and share them not just in private discussion but in a public forum. In America, you can even make a major movie that’s openly critical of the current government, its policies, and the President himself! It may be controversial, it may be difficult to get it distributed, but Michael Moore has shown that it can be done. In America, they can’t shut you up because you don’t hold the “right” opinions. That strikes me as something bigger and more important than whether or not there may be lies (I doubt it), mistakes (possible), or spin (I’d be stunned if there wasn’t) in the film.
Almost as if a Lib (or Con) would need to write anonymously for anyone to take them halfway seriously - and then they would just be written off as an anonymous coward.
Fine, except Moore himself refuses to ever discuss anything unless he’s completely in control of the situation.
And Moore’s personality is an issue, in that he’s a complete phoney. He is the Limousine Liberal poster child. He schlubs around in his trademark jeans, t-shirt & cap like he’s a working class slob, when in fact he’s a mansion owning, personal assistant & bodyguard employing, first-class flying millionaire.
A year or so ago during his little outburst in London his disdain for so-called ‘working class’ people boiled over to the surface when he ranted on about how little he was being paid.
Not to mention his absolutely deplorable and opportunistic comments about the “wimpy, white” hijacked passengers (opportunistic in that he was plugging his “Stupid White Men” book via their deaths).
What was that? Proving his point that all you do is snipe his personality?
So what? No one made him a love object of liberals. We didn’t elect him President or anything. Do you want me to go start a thread on that marital-trouble having pill popping hypocritical arrogant slob whose leg the Right has been humping and proudly proclaiming themselves mental slave dittoheads to for decades?
Except it wasn’t a mistake. He replaced the caption “Willie Horton released. Then rapes a woman.” with “Willie Horton released by Dukakis and kills again.” It doesn’t seem like a typo to me. Not only is it difficult to see how the two could be confused, it clearly helps him with his agenda:
More importantly, however, you have ignored all the other points in the columns. Please address them.
Well, since Moore is ostensibly a liberal, it would be a liberal bias. Given the disingenuousness with which some posters appear to have approached this issue, I’m inclined to point to such a bias as the cause. The only other reason I can see for your not having addressed the other instances of Moore’s dishonesty would be some sort of personal devotion to him, something that’s too absurd to merit any contemplation.
Because his personality gets at the issue of his credibility.
As an example, Limbaugh has lost a lot of credibility, but not so much because of his becoming addicted to (originally) prescribed pain killers. But more so (to me anyway) for his less than forthcoming addmission & explaination.
Moore’s first film, Roger & Me, was basically a testament to class hatred. That GM executives fired people so that they could water ski behind bigger yatchs. That capitalism is evil and socialism is good. This makes his personallity & behavior on the matter of lifestyle very relavent.
And with F9/11 he is presenting himself as a selfless, objective, defender of freedom and the victims of Sept 11th. When in fact he is just using manipulative images to paint GWB in the worst possible light. In fact, he’s exploiting the victims of 9/11 both for political & financial gain (last I heard he wasn’t giving 100% of the film’s profits to charity). Which is the very thing he is accusing & condemning GWB for in the film!
Well, then he’s a hypocrite. shrugs I don’t like him anyway. But even a hypocrite can be right sometimes. 
And which, as you point out, he was condemning GM executives for in his first film.
Really? Somebody better tell Moore, then:
In any event, so what if Moore is not scraping by on a working-class income? Saying that he has to be working-class himself to address working-class issues is as meaningless as saying a physician must be sick before he can treat sick people. :rolleyes:
Really? That’s the first time I’ve heard this interpretation of the movie; it’s certainly not a point raised in any of the reviews, or by Moore himself.
Political gain? Moore’s running for office? Or are you pulling accusations out of thin air again?
Is it mathematically possible for this film to break $40M in one week? While I’ve seen several different figures for how many screens it is opening on, none of them have been over 850.
You could probably count on something like 3-4 showings a day but I don’t know what the calculated ticket price is or how many seats an average auditorium has.
*And with F9/11 he is presenting himself as a selfless, objective, defender of freedom and the victims of Sept 11th. *
Well gee, I’m looking at an ad for it on imdb right now:
**
Your Country
Your Future
Your Movie
**
Sounds like he is to me…
Do you have some proof that Moore knowingly and deliberately attributed the wrong crime to Horton? The man’s not omniscient, isn’t it possible that he was just wrong, or that someone in the computer room screwed things up somehow? Sure, that’s the sort of thing it would be best to catch before releasing the film, but he’s corrected it for the DVD/video release and admitted that the original caption was wrong.
*You have the order of the captions reversed. He replaced the incorrect “Willie Horton released by Dukakis and kills again” with the correct “Willie Horton released. Then rapes a woman.” If he’d done it the other way around as you described, he’d have been replacing the truth with an error or lie. I don’t see how you could confuse the two this way, but it was probably a mistake and not an intentional deception…even though it does help support your agenda.
Anyway, while I agree that Moore’s description of the incorrect caption as a “typo” doesn’t seem accurate (although I suppose some sort of cut-and-paste accident could have taken place), that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a mistake. If he didn’t intend to say something that wasn’t correct, it was a mistake.
Why would he “explain” that if it’s not true? Perhaps it is true, I don’t know, but unless there’s some proof of Moore’s intent it seems strange to ask why he didn’t explain that he held particular motives when it’s possible that wasn’t the reason why he added the caption at all.
Even if that was his reason, I don’t see why he should be expected to explain it. Does he need to explain why he made every decision that went into the film? Could anyone watching the film be unaware of Moore’s political biases? It’s not a lie to simply fail to say “That’s why I did it.” Now, if that was really his reason, it would be a lie for him to say “No, it wasn’t!” But I don’t see that this has happened.
*I’ll address whatever I like, and what I’m interested in addressing is the specific phrase “Moore admits to altering Bowling for Columbine DVD”. This phrase is not literally false. I could rewrite it using Webster’s definitions for two key words and have a truthful, if awkward, sentence: “Moore concedes as true that he made different the Bowling for Columbine DVD”. But “admits to altering” has a different ring than the equally true “announces he corrected”, doesn’t it?
Er…what? I have them in the right order because I was referring to the original alteration, what you think is a mistake and what I think is deliberate.
Probably because he was caught in a lie. Hey, I’m not saying that his changing to the correct sentence isn’t a good thing–at least he’s not denying it–but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a lie in the first place.
If you were reading a book by Bill O’Reilly and found some “mistakes” would you think it’s okay that he lied because people are aware of his bias? I don’t and I think it’s ridiculous to defend a pundit’s lying by simply positing artistic license.
Yes, it does and if you think that it was an honest mistake that’s a correction you’d want to make. But, as I explained, it’s difficult to see it as a mere typo and he certainly had a motive for doing it. I don’t know about you, but I think giving pundits this much credence is hardly sensible.
So would you accept the validity of the criticisms, seeing as how the larger issue is Moore’s integrity?
Isn’t part of the charge against Moore that the original ad had no caption referring to Horton? The “original alteration” would have been adding the caption in the first place, not replacing one caption with another.
*But if it was a mistake of some sort, it would mean that it wasn’t a lie in the first place.
*That would depend on what the “lies” were and whether they were actual lies, honest mistakes, or slanted/exaggerated representations of the facts. But I certainly wouldn’t expect O’Reilly to say “Now boys and girls, keep in mind, I have my biases and I’ll be doing my best to present my point of view and convince you that it’s correct!” I know that already. I’d be a fool if I didn’t.
*Look buddy, I’m posting in my free time here. And I do mean free – unlike many other Dopers, I don’t have Internet access at work. I already spend a truly ridiculous portion of my non-work hours here. I used up my lunch break writing my last reply to you. If you think I’ve got time to read through every link you throw out, research the claims contained therein and see if they’re supported by outside evidence, and then determine the validity of the criticisms, you can think again. I chose the one point I wanted to respond to and that I felt I had time to do justice to. You’ll just have to live without hearing my opinions on the rest of them.
It is reckless for conservatives to go inserting fat jokes into this kind of debate, gato. At least, until Rush Limbaugh retires.
Fat jokes are the best they can do.
(someone has to make a post 99)