Less for your enlightenment than mine, I spent a little time last night reading websites that purport to cite errors in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. I found some that struck me as splitting hairs and others where I thought the critic had turned backflips to try and interpret Moore in a manner that could be disputed. But I also found several instances of the kind of thing I had in mind when I wrote (back here) that "…you have a real smart man who's good at entertaining, good at socking home his points…but he won't stop where the supportable facts leave off…"
The troubling points fall roughly into two categories for me. One is when Moore insinuates something without carrying it to the point of making an actual charge which could be confirmed or disproven. He is probably right that the Bush family and their circle of friends have had a lot of contact with Saudis of dubious motives…but there's something unseemly about guilt-by-association and indictment by innuendo. The appearance of impropriety is not the same thing as impropriety and the two should not be confused. So on the one hand, I'm about 85% annoyed at Moore for that kind of excess. It would be total but I've also read and cannot completely discount two arguments in his favor…
One is that, as others have noted, the past business dealings of the Bush family and their associates with certain Saudi businessmen have been woefully under-reported and under-investigated by the press. It shouldn't take Michael Moore and his sloppily-made charges to bring this to public attention and to maybe, just maybe, get the press to stop interviewing Gennifer Flowers again and shine some light in that direction. Maybe they'll find everything is legit but we have a right to know if there's any "there" there, and from a better source than Moore. If his vague accusations prompt some more responsible coverage, they may not be worthless. His over-the-top statements that Bush was a "deserter" in the National Guard did lead to some reporters doing more legitimate inquiry.
And the other point, made by others, is that this kind of circumstantial accusation is practiced everywhere these days, including by people who are now denouncing Michael Moore for it. I mentioned the attempts to link John Kerry and Jane Fonda and to get people to infer something negative about Kerry from their proximity. It also extends to things like the much-discussed question of whether Americans were duped into thinking we had to invade Iraq because Saddam and/or others there had a hand in the 9/11 attacks on us. The Bush Administration says they never claimed such a thing. I think that's disingenuous. I think there are a number of instances of them doing so, including Bush's letter to Congress and his speech on the aircraft carrier. At the very least, the strategy seems to have been to mention Saddam and 9/11 so often in the same context that people might assume a connection…and that's really the same stunt Moore is pulling. He shows every possible shot he can find of a guy named Bush embracing a guy dressed in a Saudi thawb and invites you to speculate on their relationship. It's a seedy tactic but it's not like he's the only one doing this.
Then there's the second kind of inaccuracy that Moore appears to have committed, which is the category of Judicious Editing. In the film, for instance, he shows Condoleezza Rice saying, "Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11." The full quote which he trimmed, is reportedly: "Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11. It's not that Saddam Hussein was somehow himself and his regime involved in 9/11, but, if you think about what caused 9/11, it is the rise of ideologies of hatred that lead people to drive airplanes into buildings in New York." The truncated version is not a fair representation of what she said in that particular instance.
Again, Moore is hardly the only person doing this. The Republican spin machine (and at least one of Bush's own campaign ads) claims that John Kerry has referred to Yasser Arafat as a "statesman" and "role model." A look at those words in context shows that the strip-quote is just as dishonest as what Moore did to Rice.
All of this brings me back to one of the first things I wrote just after viewing the film: "A polemic such as this movie forces me to confront a question for which I have no easy answer. To what extent should we tolerate fighting dirty against opponents who are not only fighting dirty but winning?" I am not comfortable with Moore doing any of this but I am also not comfortable with him being condemned and dismissed in toto for tactics that are s.o.p. throughout talk radio and the general political circus these days…and even practiced to some extent by the guy in the Oval Office. It all comes down to another of those reasons why I can never get too enthused about anyone who stands for election in this country or most of those who report and comment on them. I think Moore is fighting dirty but what I resent more is that it seems to be the way the game is now played.
