Do you think Farenheit 9/11 will actually affect November's election?

I don't have the foggiest idea what impact the movie will have on the election, but I know that some people are already worried.

The main impact it'll have will be on the undecideds out there, and I have no idea as to how much electorial sway they'll have.

Which is a great argument and all, but you might just want to wait until someone even insinuates this before going off.

But still, you made an argument against a strawman that no one had even tiptoed near. It's the knee-jerk reaction to criticizing limo lib'ruls - "well, it's OK for RUSH ISN'T IT!?!?" yawn, boring, next. At least wait until someone praises Rush or O'Reilly before beating people over the head with that line.

Is there a problem with actors sharing their political views?

I'm gonna have to say that Bono is in his own category w/ regard to celebrities on this topic though. We should leave him out so he doesn't wind up being the exception to every agreement we as a community of discussion come to.

I'd be really surprised if anyone thought F9/11 were going to help Bush.

As far as freefall goes, unfortunately, I think Bush's supporters may be a lot more stubborn than many of us wish.

Who on this thread said that they did?

I certainly liked Clinton more than I like Bush, but I don't see anyone anywhere in this discussion saying they like Clinton and not Bush.

What I really want to know is to whom you're responding, DAziz. Your question kinda came out of nowhere the way I read it.

kyle I don't the Bay Area's warped you too much. It's possible that I'm also overly concerned about Bush's followers cause I grew up in the South.

Bush big-upping Clinton resulted in the warmest feeling I've ever had for him (W). It has worn off.
-- Spencer Chow (spencercho...), June 16th, 2004.

maybe i took that wrong, if so, my mistake

He who controls the voting machines controls the, etc.

verrrrrrrry easily.

anyway, i have my doubts whether this will sway anyone on the fence re dubya. though it's provided yet more entertaining footage of mr. o'reilly acting like a wind-up douchebag (which MAY have a smidgen more impact than the film).

wouldn't mind seeing this, that said. i kinda like mr. moore.

If you mean that most of the people who see the movie will be voters who already have made up their minds, true enough. And/or that people who actually see the movie will be a small enough percentage of the potential electorate -- and a largely partisan percentage at that -- also true.

Whatever impact the movie has won't come from people actually seeing it, though -- it will come from the discussion of the film and its claims and ideas elsewhere. A lot more people will see Michael Moore on Good Morning America or wherever else he pops up than will see the movie, and some of those people may well be the great "undecideds". One interview with Michael Moore is not going to change anyone's mind, but if they're in the generally dissatified but uncertain group (a pretty large group, I think), it could help solidify some of their own concerns, give them a certain amount of reinforcement and ammunition the next time their Limbaugh-loving neighbor starts in on them. I don't know. I think keeping ideas and perspectives alive and vibrant in the media does have some potential effect, and that's the real agitprop value of the movie. (As opposed to whatever cinematic value you might get from actually watching the thing.)

What the film could do is sharpen the sense of urgency among anti-Bush voters and persuade a few more of them to turn activist - spending either their time or money to defeat Bush. Since activists are the real life blood of campaigns, a small increase in their numbers on the Kerry side of the equation will have an effect disproportiate to the numbers involved.

Which is one reason why I would urge any ILE'ers who feel strongly about this election to do a bit of volunteer work for their preferred candidates. Compared to merely voting, it's a whole 'nother level of effectiveness. Even 3-4 hours or $20 between now and November could be HUGE.

Visit Illinois and Wisconsin and get back to us on all the "Bush lovers" there (and no I don't mean the lesbos in Andersonville).

Maybe true.. But I saw an ad for the movie yesterday, and I thought at first it was a political ad. Then I thought it was for a TV documentary - like Frontline or something .. Then I realized it was Michael Moore's film .. but to people who don't even know the film exists, I think the tv advertisements alone are an anti-Bushco campaign.

My problem, Milo, isn't with rich people - it's with rich people who don't live the life they sing about in song, if you know what I mean. Vincent Gallo pointed out once that all of these idiot celebrities arriving at the awards shows in hybrid vehicles take private jets everywhere else. Just a for instance.

"Hey, I'm a dickface!"

"Yeah, thanks."

Uh, Michael Moore lives in an apartment on the Upper West Side if I'm not mistaken. A friend of mine used to live down the hall from him. I find it hard to believe that in the past 2 or 3 years he's graduated to roof-jacuzzi-frolicking.

"<X> can't be the voice of the people, he's a rich dilettante."

"So how come <Y>, completely opposite politically, is the voice of the people instead when SHE'S a rich dilettante?"

"Er."

Repeat as needed.

Anyway, I'm writing in VengaDan for prez.

Martin - you are mistaken. Dude has a jacuzzi on the roof of his building. Ask around.

He's also one of the most notoriously megalomaniacal, smug and difficult jackasses in all the world. Ask anyone who's ever photographed him or worked for him.

Now is this O'Reilly or Franken or Moore or Cheney or Bush or all of them?

x-post

Haha. VengaDan OTM.

Visit any part of IL and WI that isn't within the Chicago/Milwaukee metro area and then get back to me.

And anyone who could give birth to such a beautiful young lady as Jenna Bush can't be ALL evil...

carry on.

He's DRUGGED, if anything. I wouldn't be surprised if Cheney regulates the dosage.

And anyone who could give birth to such a beautiful young lady as Jenna Bush can't be ALL evil...

So you're saying if Hitler had JUST thought to have a cute baby...

Dubya didn't give birth...

I'm enjoying this thread.

I fear somewhat for our society that hypocracy is seen as a greater evil than zealotry.

x-post: Now Dan sounds like Voltaire or something.

Monsieur Arouet,

Je vous felicite.

Isn't hypocrisy the basis of being polite, without which we'd just constantly be at each other's throats?

And anyone who could give birth to such a beautiful young lady as Jenna Bush can't be ALL evil...

This assumes several things I do not hold to be true.

wow, I'm so bemused at all you people in this country and why you rubes can't see that the wool is being pulled over your eyes

Given a choice, I will always choose humor over anger. It is less corrosive to the soul and it tends to beget more humor. Anger has a tendency to reproduce itself ad infinitim

now now

Aside from being a lame strawman ($50 says Gallo would mumble something about redheads smelling bad if anyone actually challenged his assertion here), that ventures far too close to the "leftists must spend their life in sackcloth and ashes" school of debate.

Leftist/liberal/environmentalist != flagellant. (though you never know when the Granola Mafia is going to strike)

Basically he's saying that anyone who champions a cause - environmentalism - must forfeit their right to travel like other people (of their economic class here).

I'm saying that too. Put your fucking values where your mouth is.

But the point of Gallo's rhetoric - and yours, apparently - is to shut them damned hippie liberals up, not maintain any semblance of logic. Boring.

Show by example. Is that so hard to understand? is that really "bullshit?" Expecting people to practice what they preach?

Why doesn't Susan Sarandon just quit making millions of dollars and barking demands from her trailer and just join the Peace Corps already?

jean-luc godard thinks it will. he also thinks the bush administration invaded iraq to acquire the prestige of the lost sumerian culture, so there you go.

This argument would have a deeper resonance with the people if the chickenhawks, the Cheneys, Wolwowitzes, Dubyas, Pearles et al. had bothered to go make war back in the day. Or if they'd volunteer now.

Look at the dichotomy you've created/supported - private jet v. hybrid pulling up to a premiere. Do those look equal, or even relevant to each other? Do people land private jets on the red carpet?

If you had a list of celebrities who demanded that the EPA ban SUVs while driving a fleet of Hummers, that would be an argument. But you don't.

Exactly.

-- scott seward (skotro...) (webmail), June 16th, 2004 4:28 PM. (scott seward) (later) (link)

zzzrrnnnnanngggggg pzzzyyyyyhtttttttt ooooooorrrrrrrtttthhhoooooooooonnnnnnggggg

Milo - You too - I'm not in cahoots with Vincent Gallo, I've never even met him (but I like his movies, music, and occasionally, his views). Stop projecting your hatred of the president and Vinny Gallo on me.

Now - we're not talking about people who wear Meat is Murder T shirts under wear leather jackets. We're talking about major, major double standards and hypocracy here - these people (who I'm assuming you're defending), these celebrities, they're all rich. Rich beyond your wildest dreams. And they flaunt it. So does the media. And that, in and of itself, is fine. Celebrities have always done that. It's terrible, but I've resigned myself to it over the years.

What makes me have to choke back vomit when I see some of them not-so-anonymously giving to charity (usually a piddling drop in the bucket) and forcing their fucked up, spoiled, cocoon opinions on the rest of the world.

Moore is most definitely smug and arguably an asshole, but he is not "rich beyond your wildest dreams."

Yawn.

How does "not-so-anonymously" giving [any amount, piddling or otherwise] to a charity necessarily force any opinion on the rest of the world?

FFS stop reading the entertainment section if you don't want to have their opinions forced on you.

Maybe it's too bad that the rich and famous have more attention paid to their opinions than someone who might have a better idea or a more well-rounded opinion. But duh, they're famous. Rather than just mindlessly bashing them for offering their views, maybe the focus should be on shaping those views into something more respectable.

And the flipside of your view is that people with opinions should just shut up. Don't say anything, just go along with it. We need to encourage opinions and views and debate and opposition, even when it isn't brilliant or agreeable to you.

Also - people in doing good deeds to be recognized SHOCKAH!

Well that was BushCo, right? "Hey, we're getting rid of Saddam! Yay!"

As for what I said above, it wasn't directed at you Roger. I largely agree that the celebrity left is hypocritical. Iwas just pointing out that the Neo-Cons are too. The truth is that they're all human, just like you an I and are thus just as likely, be they liberal or conservative, to be full of it as any other person chosen at random.

I assume she thinks she'll have a greater impact by remaining int the public eye than if she joined the Corps. The logic being that she can influence 100K people to join the Corp whereas if she were in the Corp she could only influence, like, 1 person to join it, dig?

Essentially I agree. The resentment people feel at celebrity activists tends to stem more from the free exposure they get, compared to most of us, than from disagreements with their specific positions per se.

i think this dovetails with the question of "should artists be considered role-models" that has been going on in another thread. as was mentioned there, the celebrity ==> role model teleology is very real, whatever position you take on how appropriate that it is.

so why shouldn't they consciously use their renown as something they see as socially responsible? the 'artist as de facto outcast / insane / fucked up' arument can only go so far, and seems increasingly to me like a big old cop-out.

On a side note, can anyone explain why Scott Baio was at Reagan's funeral?

If you had a million dollars what would you honestly do with it?

Elvis - I'll spare you a sarcastic ILXOR-style quip and tell you the truth: I'd buy a nice, big house in California, on the beach, and own it outright. I'd get some nice furniture, put some money aside for my children, and then live for as long as I could without working a straight job. I also know a coupla distros who'd be able to put their kids through college if I had that kind of money.

I know that sounds boring, but that's what I'd do. Besides, a million dollars really doesn't buy what it used to. It's really not a LOT of money these days. Though it would be to me. And presumably, to you.

They do nothing productive anymore, as the focus has shifted from gun safety and training onto full-time lobbying for gun manufacturers and threatening politicians.

Presumably, you then know what my next question is: why are you criticizing Michael Moore's jacuzzi?

Like, presumably.

Unless the person living it up is simultaneously calling for a mass execution of the decadent bourgeoisie, I see no contradiction.

I R mushy moderate!!

Perhaps roger dislikes rich liberals because he wants to believe that only greedy people are rich.

or that they're hypocrites.

This is perhaps the biggest load of horseshit I've ever read on ILXOR. You can't POSSIBLY believe that.

Milo - the rights of gun owneres are being threatened every day. I'm not going to preach or start hitting you with propaganda here, but why don't you just try, as a citizen of this country, to shoot off a few rounds at a rifle range in New York without being a cop or an ex-cop. You CAN do it - but the hoops you'll have to jump through, designed to discourage you - do just that.

But don't listen to me - I'm a "from my cold dead hands" type of guy.

I'm probably going to sell some things and get a Bushmaster AR-15 soon. When the Revolucion comes, I want to be ready.

I'll go with the former, as I like rich people that believe they should be paying far more taxes. Less taxes for me, y'know?

And yes - that's why such a right must be preserved. And that's why, arguably, it's under a lot more fire than any other.

Bush isn't too bright - but is it possible that - just MAYBE - he has a problem with public speaking?

Aimerche - please don't take offense to this - but are you a boy or a girl? For my own edification

Eisbar - I couldn't agree with you more

I would agree with you, but if you compare Bush's speaking skills now with when he was governor, I seriously wonder if he's been hitting the cocaine lately. His early press conferences and impromptu speaking skills back in the Texas days were actually pretty good, but lately he's been the Manchurian President.

FWIW, I believe that good public speaking skills should be a requirement for a President. Period.

the primary difference is that the Constitution guarantees me my right to own guns. It doesn't guarantee you the right to determine what is and isn't a life.

Just playing devil's advocate. You realize of course, that all fetuses start out FEMALE. Well, there ya go, there's your whole argument right there. What about THAT lil' woman's right to choose? Why is it denied?

Again, just playing devil's advocate

And I didn't call you stupid - I was calling your opinion stupid. And I wouldn't bother if I didn't think, as a reasonable person, you cared whether you were stupid or not.

-- oops (don'temailmenicelad...), June 16th, 2004.

Ever been to Madison? Champaign-Urbana? East St. Fucking Louis?

Reasonable people can disagree about the humanity, or potential humanity of a fetus. Oversimplifying doesn't promote any meaningful discussion.

and re the liberal midwestern city/conservative countryside: (a) visit any part of NY state outside the NYC metro area; (b) "in b/w philadelphia and pittsburgh, it's alabama" (you could say the same about the southernmost parts of NJ, too).

Roger - I doubt you could find a nice, big, beachfront house in California for $1 mil or less. Try again.

Maybe he shouldn't be a leader then.

btw Eisbar the county that Selma, Alabama's in gave Gore nearly 82% of the vote. Red/Blue states are a myth perpetuated by the winner-take-all electoral college.

"Maybe he shouldn't be a leader then" -- otm.

bush is mildly dyslexic and hates to read. at least reagan could turn a fucking phrase once in a while.

aimurchie: "What is written in the constitution are ideas about freedom and privacy."

privacy is not an explicit constitutional right; rather a right generated by the overlap (jargon: 'penumbra') of other rights (1st amendment right to free expression, assiciation, 4th amendment right from illegal search & seizure).

not arguing a point, but clarifying.

Also, I'd like to see some of our strict constructionalists (not just ILXors, either - I"M LOOKING AT YOU BORK!) defend the Constitution's 3/5ths rule.

aimurchie: "What is written in the constitution are ideas about freedom and privacy."
IDEAS. Not facts. it's all open to interpretation. Abortion and gun ownership get argued in the court of public opinion all the time - everyone attaches morality to these issues. But there should not be a particular sense of morality in the interpretation of law.
promoting real change often means waiting around while the lawyers figure it out. I don't have to believe in this system, but it's the only system I have. And i stand by my statements re:freedom and privacy, because that is now an international question.

aimurchie: understood. sorry if my previous post came off as hostile; such was not intended. & i agree with you that, yes, one ought to be able to discern matters of personal ethics from matters of politics.

I think the idea is, as long as the aren't going to nuke everything, the military couldn't take out the millions of people that are armed even if they had superior waepons. (oh and remember to buy your guns used from a private party so you don't have to register them)

The problem is that "liberalism" per se has been so starved for vocal defenders in this country that it's been redefined and grossly distorted -- convicted in absentia, basically -- so that it mostly exists as a cartoon strawman to be kicked and smeared with shit and burned in effigy (while the Democratic Party stands around nervously shuffling its feet and hoping no one has any pictures of it smoking a joint in college).

Rich liberals aren't hypocrites. They're just rich. And liberal.

Yeah, but that idea is bullshit fed by mistaking Red Dawn for a documentary. I refuse to believe that anyone actually buys into the concept, it's just too far-fetched. The military's got tanks and planes and big guns that go boom. An unorganized, untrained mob wielding consumer weaponry is useless.

I stand corrected. Though I lived in Champaign-Urbana for four years and, yes, the students (almost all of whom don't maintain residency there, ie it's not their voting district) and the faculty are generally prett liberal, most of the homeowners are not.
My point was that almost every rural/semi-rural (Danville, Rockford, etc) is conservative. Out of all the 20, 000 or so municipalities in IL or WI left, can you name any with a predominantly liberal populace?

xpost milo I don't think it matters that it's far-fetched. people are obsessed with the idea of taking on the whole gubberment single-handedly in the OK Corral.

why don't gun owners support the Iraqi insurgency?
-- hstencil (hstenci...), June 17th, 2004.

That's a great question. i expect an answer.

(a) b/c the people, through their elected representatives, properly enact legislation setting the rates of taxation. if anyone -- liberal, conservative, whatever -- doesn't like the rates of taxation, they can vote for or otherwise petition the elected representatives to change the rates to their liking. same as any other laws enacted by congress or administrative agencies.

(b) "no-one is required to pay more tax than what they owe" (justice learned hand, paraphrased).

tax law is boring, let's talk about gun nuts - Iraqis and Americans.

XPOST

If a tyrannical govt. ever took power, a resistance movement would exist, I'm sure. But it would be receiving outside support most likely, and the legality of weapon ownership wouldn't make much difference to them.

And I know why people want to believe it (hey, sometimes I'm all for the power of voting from the rooftops), I just can't believe none of them notice the giant, honking flaws in their beliefs. Or maybe they don't care.

(x-post)
Because that's not how taxes work. These aren't just voluntary payments - no one wants to pay taxes. We all do it because we're required, and because it's part of the cost of living in civil society. You won't receive a good answer, because it's not a good question. You sound like you're starting from the assumption that taxes are illegitimate and arbitrary.

if you (or anyone else) wants to read some tax law that ISN'T boring (or, if it IS boring it's still pretty funny), you should some of the "arguments" made by "tax protestors."

probably because they are very busy controlling the liberal media while deflecting criticism about the media being so liberal. And fielding offers from Al-Jazeera to become a network.

You sound like you're starting from the assumption that taxes are illegitimate and arbitrary.

Well I suppose I do think that, but I dont think I was .starting off from that assumption'.

and re "liberal media": a fun game is to replace the word "liberal" w/ the words "jewish" or "jew." it will be enlightening and may help some connect some dots.

Then explain to me how the Iraqi insurgency is not doing damage with AKs. And then how the legality of weapon ownership doesn't make much difference, even though the Coalition Provisional Authority has consistently called for voluntary disarmament of all Iraqi citizens.

And then read this:

If you do not defend your beloved country it will not be saved.

We call upon the people of Fallujah to support the legitimate Iraqi authorities in bringing this crisis to an end. We hope that they join in ridding the city of heavy military weapons. Those who turn in weapons voluntarily will not be arrested for weapons violations.

The current ceasefire is a good start, but without exception, armed bands in the city must submit to national authority. If these bands do not surrender their military weapons and instead continue to use them against Iraqi and Coalition Security forces, major hostilities could resume on short notice.

Militias also threaten security. Ultimately, Iraq cannot be secure, free and united if people can set up armed militias and define the law of the land to suit their own ambitions. That is why all armed elements in Iraq must be controlled by the central government, not just now, but during the next government and the next and the next.

This applies equally to those armed groups who fought valiantly against Saddam’s tyranny. For some time we have been engaged in talks with these groups over how their members can be integrated into Iraq’s armed forces or move into civilian life. I urge our partners in these talks to move quickly to comply with the Transitional Administrative Law, including those provisions which prohibit militias and other armed groups.

Militias present a particular problem in Najaf and Karbala. We in the Coalition recognize the holy nature of these cities. I add my voice to those of the religious authorities who have called for disarmament in these holy cities. We are prepared to work with these authorities to achieve disarmament. Armed militias should not be allowed to exploit holy shrines to advance personal political interests.

- Paul Bremer, April 23, 2004-06-17

According to media reports, Iraq is one of the most heavily armed countries in the world. It is believed that there are enough guns in Iraq for at last every person in Iraq to possess one, a level similar to gun ownership in clans in Yemen and Somalia, as well as in the United States. With a population of approximately 24 million, that means there could be millions of small arms in the hands of civilians. The gun culture is pervasive in Iraq. There is even an Iraqi saying, "Give everything to your friend, except your car, your wife, and your gun."

The majority of military-style weapons in the hands of civilians in Iraq come from three sources, according to media reports. First, civilians possess weapons from government arsenals that were looted in 1991. Second, weapons have been provided from Iran, which has provided support for the main Shia rebel group. Third, the Iraqi government has provided AK-47s to leaders of Sunni and Shi'ite tribal leaders for dispersal.

Moreover, it is widely believed that Saddam's government has trained civilians, including units of children, in small arms usage and combat techniques and tactics. These trainees were given firearms, including military assault rifles to keep in their home in the event of an attack. Indeed, in February, 2003, Saddam's governments held a parade of thousands of small arms-bearing civilians to march down the streets of Mosul to demonstrate the capacity of ordinary Iraqis to wage war. This is not a new tactic. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi government provided AK-47s to decommission soldiers Ba'ath party members, and tribal leaders.

In the months preceding the war with Iraq, small arms in Iraq fluctuated in price. A shotgun was selling for $100, Iraqi-made "Tariq" 7.65 mm pistols for $200; AK-47 assault rifles were selling for between $120 and $250, Israeli Uzis and German MP5 submachine guns for $400, a 9mm Beretta for $850. Each bullet was selling for approximately 25 cents. In the months prior to the start of the war, arms bazaar leaders had bemoaned the slow business of selling arms. There were so many arms in circulation, that when the Iraqi government gave away weapons, citizens were selling them to buy food. Indeed, some merchants were buying the weapons in Iraq and then smuggling them into the Kurdish areas to make a small profit. In the Kurdish areas, AK-47s were being sold as low as $70. RPGs were going for as little as $30 to$40. Hand grenades were selling between $3 and $10. Higher prices were for those weapons made in the West versus those from Russia, China, Iran or Egypt. However, in the days immediately before the U.S. invasion, the small arms trade exploded, as civilians became fearful of their safety, not necessarily from invading U.S. forces, but from Kurdish groups and their well-armed neighbors. In fact, AK-47s went from $20 in some areas to $500 in others.

It is not just civilians that possess weapons in Iraq, however. U.S. and coalition forces will have to deal with armed opposition groups as well. According to some media reports, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) are also well armed. However, unlike the government forces, these groups have tried to remove the large number of small arms from circulation. For example, in 1997, the KDP opened an arms market and determined that only KDP soldiers or those with KDP-issued permits could purchase weapons from the market. They even recorded the buyers name and the serial numbers of each purchase. Although these groups may be concerned with civilian ownership of these military-style weapons, they themselves, in some cases are well armed. The KDP, for example is believed to have small arms, Iranian light artillery, rocket launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. The PUK is believed to have T-54 and T-55 tanks, as well as mortars, anti-aircraft guns, and surface-to-air missiles.

- Rachel Stohl, Center for Defense Information Senior Analyst, March 24, 2003

And one more answer... because that's basically a conservative approach, at least as "conservatism" is defined these days (i.e. unbridled individualism). The notion that you don't need to "force" or "coerce" anyone to do anything, you just let everyone support the things they think need to be supported -- it's why conservatives love to talk about "charity" programs instead of "government" programs. Liberals who voluntarily gave more to support government programs (if it were possible to do so) would be in some ways undermining the fundamental value of mutual obligation and shared responsibility for social and civic needs, because they would be acknowledging other people's right to just opt out of that mutual obligation.

er, no. Read the second to last paragraph of what I posted.

A mob of untrained Americans fighting against a tyrannical government would "do damage." They'd kill some soldiers. And they would be slaughtered. A US government gone over the edge wouldn't show the modicum of restraint that the US is forced to in Iraq.

"Doing damage" != "doing useful damage" or "winning."

And then how the legality of weapon ownership doesn't make much difference, even though the Coalition Provisional Authority has consistently called for voluntary disarmament of all Iraqi citizens.
And those calls have made a big difference to Sadr, haven't they? When he heard Bremer's call, he sent all his guys rushing over to turn in their weapons, right?

That's why legality of weapon ownership is irrelevant when it comes to a never-gonna-happen situation like the evil govt.. When your cause is to fight back against the government or the invaders or whomever - their laws don't mean shit to you.

Also, look at that list - RPGs, hand grenades, mortars, AA, fucking missiles. What was your point with all that? That guns kill people? I'm shocked.

***

Ok, I get the ranting about taxes, but the above statement...how can it not be relevant to gun control?
Because gun control doesn't cover hand-grenades and rocket-propelled grenades. It doesn't cover bombs, it doesn't cover missiles and exploding cars and everything else.

This is all dealing with the mystical "tyrannical government" that so many wingnuts buy guns to protect themselves from. So they can fight back when the day comes. My point is that when the day comes, if you're fighting back, you aren't going to be using Pappy's hunting rifle or that pistol you bought for home-defense. And if you are, you're going to lose and not really do much to change things.

(if it's not clear, my statement isn't in opposition to gun control, it's in opposition to morons who think owning a gun is going to save them from the Commies/A-rabs/Lib'ruls/etc.)

-- hstencil (hstenci...), June 17th, 2004.

okeedoke. So China and Russia are also to blame.But between the lot we pretty much armed Iraq. i just think it is very funny, in a sad way, that the US searched for WMD's and ends up being killed by its own weaponry.

For example, in 1997, the KDP opened an arms market and determined that only KDP soldiers or those with KDP-issued permits could purchase weapons from the market. They even recorded the buyers name and the serial numbers of each purchase. Although these groups may be concerned with civilian ownership of these military-style weapons, they themselves, in some cases are well armed. The KDP, for example is believed to have small arms, Iranian light artillery, rocket launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. The PUK is believed to have T-54 and T-55 tanks, as well as mortars, anti-aircraft guns, and surface-to-air missiles.

sounds like Rosie O'Donnell was running the show! FYI - KDP and PUK are Kurdish quasi-governmental groups that controlled autonomous zones in Northern Iraq aka Kurdistan post-1991 thanks to the no-fly zone. Also, Kurdistan has more than likely suffered far less insurgency activity than in the Baathist-dominated Sunni Triangle or the predominantly Shiite south. I can think of only one or two incidents up there off-hand (and in the border city of Kirkuk, which Saddam was repopulating with Arabs), whereas Sunni Triangle shit blows up daily.

And I get yours, even though I think the coercion argument (which I've heard a lot) represents a kind of juvenile conception of liberty -- that is, if anyone has any claim over me for anything, then I'm not truly free. The reality is that living in a society has costs and benefits. It always has (and even if you choose not to live in a society, you're still going to be somehow affecting the world around you, which amounts to the same thing). We've been slowly and painfully developing less exploitative, more thoughtful ways of distributing both the costs and benefits, and it's hard to do because everybody wants to minimize their costs and maximize their benefits and blah blah blah. I'm not saying there aren't better ways of doing things than we do them now, but the idea that there's some state of perfect freedom where nobody can "make" you do anything you don't "choose" to do is idle utopianism. It's why so many American libertarians sound like 12-year-olds to me -- "You can't make me!"

Yeah, well, as long as you're living under this roof...

"Later Wednesday, an ammunition dump on a U.S. air base near the northern oil city of Kirkuk caught fire after an unknown device exploded near it, a U.S. military official said. No injuries were reported."

Libertarian states are a fairy tale. It's not feasible in this Age.

If I did, for the same reason I have other guns - primarily that they're fun to shoot. I also enter local tournaments every once in a while.

Why do gun nuts constantly propose their "rights" are protected by the 2nd amendment when you admit that militias wouldn't stand a chance in said evil gov't doomsday scenario?
I don't know, stence. That's what I've been saying this entire thread, from "I hate the NRA" on down. Did you miss those posts where I challenged Roger's gun-nuttery?

Why do so many Iraqis own weapons even though they were living through an evil gov't doomsday scenario? What did Saddam Hussein have to say about the legality of weapon ownership under his regime?
I think it's safe to assume that Saddam wasn't favorable toward private gun ownership. Which goes, again, to show what I was saying:
one, owning a weapon isn't going to save you from the doomsday govt.
two, if worst comes to worst and the doomsday govt. comes to town, the previous legality of weaponry is irrelevant. Your little band of Minutemen will find weapons somehow.

I don't get your point about the list and weapons attained. OK, so the Kurds had US-esque gun control. Does it matter? Did it stop any group that felt threatened from acquiring, you know, RPGs? No. Revolutionary/insurrectionary/doomsday scenarios render previous gun control of any type irrelevant.

re-read with salient points bolded:

The majority of military-style weapons in the hands of civilians in Iraq come from three sources, according to media reports. First, civilians possess weapons from government arsenals that were looted in 1991. Second, weapons have been provided from Iran, which has provided support for the main Shia rebel group. Third, the Iraqi government has provided AK-47s to leaders of Sunni and Shi'ite tribal leaders for dispersal.

Moreover, it is widely believed that Saddam's government has trained civilians, including units of children, in small arms usage and combat techniques and tactics. These trainees were given firearms, including military assault rifles to keep in their home in the event of an attack. Indeed, in February, 2003, Saddam's governments held a parade of thousands of small arms-bearing civilians to march down the streets of Mosul to demonstrate the capacity of ordinary Iraqis to wage war. This is not a new tactic. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi government provided AK-47s to decommission soldiers Ba'ath party members, and tribal leaders.

Saddam was giving out weapons to Shi'ite tribal leaders despite their suppressed uprising?

I don't get your point about the list and weapons attained. OK, so the Kurds had US-esque gun control. Does it matter? Did it stop any group that felt threatened from acquiring, you know, RPGs? No. Revolutionary/insurrectionary/doomsday scenarios render previous gun control of any type irrelevant.

I'm not talking about "just any group," I'm talking about the two main Kurdish political parties that split autonomy of the Kurdistan region after Saddam effectively lost control of it. Saddam didn't control the flow of arms into Kurdistan, the KDP and PUK did.

Again, what's your point? What does any of this prove or disprove, other than "Kurds be having weapons?" What's the argument? The stuff you're emphasizing and quoting doesn't even respond to anything I've said.

Also - "The majority of military-style weapons in the hands of civilians in Iraq come from three sources, according to media reports. First, civilians possess weapons from government arsenals that were looted in 1991. Second, weapons have been provided from Iran, which has provided support for the main Shia rebel group. Third, the Iraqi government has provided AK-47s to leaders of Sunni and Shi'ite tribal leaders for dispersal." - so the civilians of Iraq didn't obtain their "military-style weapons" shopping at K-Mart, they received them from a foreign government, their own dictator or jacked them during a war. Which of these is an issue that gun control deals with?

In summation: owning a gun today isn't going to be the last stand against the mythical doomsday government - gun nuts are crazy and rarely bound by logic. And gun control today isn't going to stop a group that desperately wants weapons or wants to fight back from doing so, as long as they have enough power, money or the right supporters.

Again, gun nuts believe that the 2nd Amendment exists so they can "liberate" America from tyranny if it ever appears (or is engendered) on our shores. I questioned why, then, gun nuts don't support the Iraqi insurgency. You said that small arms are ineffective against a larger army. I brought up examples of how that's false in Iraq. You say "gun control is irrelevant" there, then I bring up examples of how 1) in the Kurdish region, gun control as exercised by the PUK and KDP is very relevant to the relative stability and 2) Saddam's version of "gun control" (ie. give everybody weapons - which is even better than having to buy them at K-Mart) basically is the main factor behind the insurgency. Then you come to the same conclusions I've been pushing all along, except that you like to try and derail in classic Milo fashion.

I questioned why, then, gun nuts don't support the Iraqi insurgency.
Which was obviously a ridiculous question.

You said that small arms are ineffective against a larger army. I brought up examples of how that's false in Iraq.
Not really. Sadr's militia isn't armed with a bunch of weapons you can buy at K-Mart.

And, last I've noticed, Sadr's militia was doing damage - as I agreed - but not exactly kicking the occupying forces out of Iraq. Which goes to what I said - "damage != 'useful damage' or 'winning.'"

You say "gun control is irrelevant" there, then I bring up examples of how 1) in the Kurdish region, gun control as exercised by the PUK and KDP is very relevant to the relative stability
Actually, the statement you cited never says that. What it says is that quasi-governmental authorities, armed with military weapons, have instituted gun control. Nothing more.

The relative stability could be because of the gun control, or the effectiveness of the gun control could be because of the stability and existence of armed groups supported by the local population.

2) Saddam's version of "gun control" (ie. give everybody weapons - which is even better than having to buy them at K-Mart) basically is the main factor behind the insurgency.
First, "give everybody weapons" isn't what anything you've cited says. It says Saddam trained the populace with small arms. Trained. You can train with a weapon handed to you and then taken back. Nor has anything you've referred to cited Saddam's actions as the "main factor" - in fact, Saddam's giveaways are the third factor cited, behind looting and the intervention of a foreign power. Which of those is covered by 'gun control'? Would big signs that say "Hey, if you've received a weapon from a hostile foreign power, plz sign up here" do the job?

Then you come to the same conclusions I've been pushing all along, except that you like to try and derail in classic Milo fashion.
The same conclusion you've been "pushing all along" are the same things I said to Roger and in a half-dozen other posts. You misread what I repeatedly stated, and took issue with it.

You continued to post excerpts as if they disproved anything I said, or even disagreed with me. And now you've resorted to twisting claims ("Saddam gave away guns to everyone! They're the 'main factor' behind the weapons used in the insurgency!!!") because of whatever problem you've got with me.

why is it a ridiculous question? Why are Americans allowed to defend themselves but Iraqis aren't? The Second Amendment can't be the only reason why.

can train with a weapon handed to you and then taken back /= "...including military assault rifles to keep in their home in the event of an attack...During the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi government provided AK-47s to decommission soldiers Ba'ath party members, and tribal leaders."

The list of factors of arms sources in Iraq is not ranked in order of magnitude, as far as I can tell from reading it.

see, that's why I started this thread:

If A Country Invaded Your Country In Order To Destroy And Replace Your Government, Even If Your Government Was Run By A Brutal Dictator, Would You Fight Them?

I didn't say their position was logical or fair, only that it's a crazy question to ask. There's no reason for gun nuts to support the insurgency when you look at it from their position.

Oh, you're right, he did give weapons to the trainees. My bad. The list reads as an order of magnitude to me, even if it's arbitrary, it doesn't say Saddam's program was the primary factor.

And, to do any real damage (we are very, very spoiled inthinking that a few hundred casualties are a large number - that's a bad lunch in WWI) or to do anything but outwait the US and hope they leave eventually, the insurgents will require more than AKs.

That's a bad lunch in Iraq! Over 10,000 dead over there already.

x-post

Do you think local governments have fewer coercive powers?

Have you heard of this guy?

I guess what I mean is, how are local taxes more legitimate? How close is local? State? County? City?

When I heard old Grover I thought "well, he's consistent."

i don't know where to begin. I'll start with this - you can be a hopeless gun nut.The UN can be useless and, at worst, detrimental. Your desire to be armed has absolutely no relevance to the UN. if you don't already live in New Hampshire, well - you should move there.

Hunter - State.

hstencil, the long answer is too long, and probably not the 'informed' POV you want to hear, knowing the man personally as you do. I just think he's an opportunistic, sniveling shit - in print anyway. And I was always a fan of ol' Chollie.

Taxes, guns and the UN don't necessarily have anything to do with each other - I was trying to stick up for the 'tax protesters' you were all talking about. I wasn't talking about guns.

But I fear and distrust a global, centralized government, yes. And I don't feel the federal government acts in my best interests. I know, to you, these are the rantings of a lunatic.

-- roger adultery (vlad62...), June 18th, 2004.

I still want to stomp on your foot. Everybody fears a global, centra lized government. just for your edification - I am a counselor for mentally ill adults, so yours are so not the rantings of a lunatic. I don't agree with you, but you're quite obviously sane and thoughtful and smart. i get paid to deal with ranting lunatics and fortunately, most of my clients are very much not ranting and not loony. Fortunately. I do have one client who is convinced he is second in command to God.

Not EV-erybody. I don't. It kinda depends on what kind of global government. One world democracy with jurisdiction over, say, environmental protection, basic human rights, trade and labor practices, with all other autority devolved to national, state and local jurisdictions? Not so terrifying -- and the most likely form such a thing would take, at least in the first few centuries of it.

A one-world fascist government, yeah, that would be a problem. But it's kind of the least of my worries at the moment.

I worked with autistic kids for a long time, and have lots of experience dealing with the menatlly ill, so I feel for ya. But, anyone ever projectile vomit into YOUR mouth? :)

Second in command to God? Sounds like low self esteem - why not God himself? I'd watch that one if I were you

One world democracy? How come democracy trumps, like, socialism? Democracy with jurisdiction is, um, Iraq.

Does being raped count?

You're right. But I still fear and distrust global and centralized government. All eggs should never be in one basket.

Conservatives to Counter 'Fahrenheit 9/11'
Thu Jun 17, 3:14 PM ET

By ANTHONY BREZNICAN, AP Entertainment Writer

LOS ANGELES - While the White House and the Republican National Committee have taken an official "no comment" approach to Michael Moore and his new anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11," some conservatives have mobilized a letter-writing campaign and crafted ads that slam the film and its maker.

"Fahrenheit 9/11," which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, attacks President Bush's rationale for the war in Iraq and accuses him and his administration of manipulating the Sept. 11 terror attacks and fostering fear for political gain.

The film will be shown at two New York City theaters starting Wednesday before opening June 25 on at least 500 screens nationwide. It's scheduled to expand to hundreds more in the coming weeks.

One of the organizations rallying against Moore is Move America Forward, a pro-Bush group that evolved months ago from the letter-writing campaign that led CBS to drop its controversial TV movie "The Reagans."

The group has received several thousand e-mails of support for its Moore campaign, said executive director Siobhan Guiney, a former Republican lobbyist. But she did not know how many were sent to the various theater chains.

"Since we are the customers of the American movie theatres, it is important for us to speak up loudly and tell the industry executives that we don't want this misleading and grotesque movie being shown at our local cinema," the group says on its Web site, above a listing of phone numbers and e-mails for various cinema companies.

Said Guiney: "(Moore) is critical of what's happening right now, and there's no problem with being critical — but his movie is not a documentary, it's a piece of propaganda." [uh Ms. Guiney, please read up on the history of documentary cinema, thanks -h]

So far, however, Move America Forward's letters about "Fahrenheit 9/11" haven't changed anything.

"There has been some communication, but not an overwhelming amount. And we do intend to play the film," said Dick Westerling, spokesman for the theater chain Regal Entertainment Group, which has 6,020 screens in the United States.

Move America Forward is funded through private donations, not the Bush campaign or the Republican National Committee, Guiney said.

Who is behind the group?

Howard Kaloogian is the chairman, a former California Assemblyman who helped organize the Gray Davis recall campaign and made a failed bid for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination.

And who is behind Moore?

One of the filmmaker's press strategists is brass-knuckles political operative Chris Lehane, a former press secretary to Vice President Al Gore and frequent Democratic aide who worked on the presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Wesley Clark. Lehane earned a reputation in 2000 for gathering information on political enemies and bringing it to reporters.

Neither Lehane nor Moore would comment for this story.

Another independent conservative group, Citizens United, is crafting video ads for television and the Internet that slam Moore.

The group's head, David Bossie, is a former Republican congressional aide who was one of President Clinton's harshest critics. He was fired in 1998 by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich for withholding the public release of testimony transcripts favorable to the Clintons in a campaign fund-raising probe.

Bossie said the ads would target Moore and George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who donated nearly $13 million to various groups seeking to defeat Bush.

"Look, this guy (Moore) is simply producing and advertising this movie at this time to try to affect the election," Bossie said. "And so clearly organizations like mine ... it seems to be left to us to make sure that the media is educated, as well as the American people are educated, as to just what they're up to."

The liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org is trying to counter the conservative campaign with mass mailings asking members to "pledge to bring their friends, relatives and neighbors" to "Fahrenheit 9/11" on opening night.

Supporters also are sending letters to theaters on Move America Forward's list, urging them not to give in to pressure to block the film.

"My guess is that their efforts will backfire and only rally support for the film, which will be terrific as far as I'm concerned," said Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate Films, which is distributing the movie. "We need less censorship in this country, not more."

I personally can't wait for this film; at the very least it puts bush supporters on the defensive, and some of these things, even if explained away as circumstance or politics (the relationship with the Bin Laden family) don't sound good any way you put them.

was this mentioned???? the trailer is creepy

http://bls.gov/news.release/reloc.nr0.htm

www.justborn.com/about/historytimeline.pdf

http://www.geekbabe.com/peeps/peepfaq.html

While manufacturing labor productivity continued to grow in 10 of the 12 countries, Canada and Japan experienced their first declines in output per hour since 1998 and 1986, respectively. The U.S. productivity measure posted its lowest annual growth rate since 1991.

Output is related to productivity.

I don't think its any secret that overall manufacturing capacity in the U.S. has steadily been moved overseas over the past decade. I'm not sure if I can find much actual data (and I'd be surprised if the BLS, esp. under the current administration, supplied much backing figures), but it's more than anecdotally true at this point.

Uh, anyway ...

exactly my guess. all good points rasheed. Also, productivity has grown from, I assume, greater efficiencies and domestic/global demand has fallen because of offshore competition. BTW, is the software industry considered part of the service sector?

GEORGE & ME
by DAVID DENBY
Michael Moore’s viciously funny attack on the Bush Administration.
Issue of 2004-06-28
Posted 2004-06-21
In Michael Moore’s new documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” George W. Bush sets his jaw, leans forward, and tells a group of reporters that terrorism must be destroyed. Then, turning away, he says, “Now watch this drive,” and tees off. A golfer, a bird hunter, a sportive wit at gatherings of the super-rich (“Some people call you the élite. I call you my base”), the President is often at play in “Fahrenheit 9/11.” In this incendiary and viciously funny attack on the Bush Administration—a whirlwind of political charges, sinister implications, and derision—the President comes off as a betrayer and a fool who has all the substance of a stuffed doll. Moore accuses Bush of handing part of America’s sovereignty to the Saudis; he implies that the president, after 9/11, was more effective at frightening the electorate than at pursuing the terrorists. Given its mixture of anguish and contempt, “Fahrenheit 9/11” can’t miss becoming a hit, with the result that the Republican Party and its allies will be all over Michael Moore for months. I have some difficulties with Moore myself, and I’m not entirely impressed by the standing ovation and the Palme d’Or that the film received recently at Cannes, where the audience may have been all too eager to applaud its own detestation of the United States. Still, this is Moore’s most powerful movie—the largest in scope, the most resourceful and skillful in means—and the best things in it have little to do with his usual ideological take on American power and George Bush. In the last third of the film, Moore gets hold of a genuine protagonist, and he has the good sense to stay out of her way.

Her name is Lila Lipscomb, and he finds her in Flint, Michigan, the home town to which he obsessively returns—Flint, the former industrial paradise destroyed by General Motors, whose emblematic decision in the eighties to close many of its plants in the city arrived like a Biblical curse. Years have gone by since the ruination, and Lila Lipscomb is still in there fighting—she works at a non-profit agency, helping the unemployed. Lipscomb, who is white, is married to an African-American, and the couple have several children, two of whom have served in the armed forces. A conservative Democrat who used to hate antiwar protesters, she describes her family as part of the “backbone” of the country. She’s not an intellectual or analytical person, but she knows who she is and what she wants to say.

All this is established in two initial interviews. Then the unimaginable happens: one of Lila’s sons, Sergeant Michael Pedersen, dies in the Iraq war. And, as we find out in a letter from Pedersen that Lila reads to her family, he died without knowing what in the world he was doing in the desert. At which point, Lila gives way to unappeasable grief. Dazed and untethered, she makes a pilgrimage to the White House. In a way, she becomes a more authentic version of Michael Moore, who is always seeking to confront power. In Washington, Moore and his crew follow her around; we can guess that he urged her along, and, sure enough, some skeptical woman—a stranger—rushes into the frame and says, “This is all staged.” Lila’s response to the intruder is devastating; it goes beyond eloquence. And at last, in the street, she loses her strength, unable to move. Why my son? As everyone who’s been through the experience says, nothing can console a parent for the death of a child. And when death is robbed of meaning, and tinged with betrayal, the pain flows over the lip of ordinary grief and engulfs us all.

“Fahrenheit 9/11” has a kind of necessary shock value: it reveals the underside of the war, the bloody messes not shown on news broadcasts. Moore makes use of footage given to him by American and foreign cameramen—scenes of Americans who were blown apart near Baghdad, or of maimed and nerve-shattered men trying to put their lives back together in a Washington hospital or at their home base. One soldier achieves a memorable clarity as he says, fighting pain and incapacity, that he’s disgusted by the lying way the Republican Party conducts its business. However embroiled the movie becomes in the upcoming election, no attack can lessen the impact of these scenes or diminish the anger they create in the audience; Moore, for once, offers experience rather than attitudes, sharp immediate suffering rather than his usual exasperated nostalgia for, say, the good old days, when the unions were strong and the workingman was king. If the rest of the movie had been created with this kind of directness and force, Michael Moore would have made a masterpiece.

The great documentary filmmakers of today—Frederick Wiseman, Marcel Ophuls, and Andrew Jarecki (of “Capturing the Friedmans”)—know that truth in an absolute sense is unattainable. It’s not even imaginable. Who would validate it? Who could say that another interpretation besides the filmmaker’s was out of the question? Movies are made by men and women, not by gods hurling thunderbolts of certitude. But the great documentary filmmakers at least make an attempt, however inadequate, compromised, or hopeless, to arrive at a many-sided understanding of some complex situation. Michael Moore is not that kind of filmmaker, nor does he want to be. He calls himself a satirist, but he’s less a satirist than a polemicist, a practitioner of mocking political burlesque: he doesn’t discover many new things but punches up what he already knows or suspects; he doesn’t challenge or persuade an audience but tickles or irritates it. He’s too slipshod intellectually to convince many except the already convinced, too eager to throw another treated log onto the fire of righteous anger.

Yet Moore has talent and mother wit, and he has become a significant figure in this culture—a shrewdly manipulative humorist-crank sticking pins in the hide of American self-esteem. The persona he offers to the camera is that of a commonsense man caught in the senseless machinery of capitalism. In such documentaries as “Roger & Me” and “Bowling for Columbine,” Moore created a kind of negative utopia in which the strong and the rich enjoy a triumph marred only by the disruptive efforts of Moore himself—a discontented American Everyman who pads around with his heavy gut and his baseball cap and harasses powerful people by asking them literal-minded questions. Moore has turned pain-in-the-neck intrusiveness and self-dramatization into a political jester’s provocation. In “Fahrenheit 9/11,” he works his famous shtick one more time: in front of the Capitol, he stops congressmen who voted for the Iraq war and asks them if they would consider urging their sons and daughters to join the armed services. As polite as a wine steward, he holds out the recruiting literature. Most of the congressmen skitter away like water bugs.

This is first-rate mischief. But a lot of Moore’s teasing comes off as tricky and too easy, or as motivated by a paranoia so engulfing that it has blocked out normal skepticism—his own and (if he has his way) ours, too. The ideological framework of “Fahrenheit 9/11” goes roughly like this: America is not a democracy; America is an oligarchy in which the wealthy pull the strings behind a façade of manufactured democratic consent. The Bush clan rigged the national election in 2000; still, the new Administration was failing until 9/11, an event that the President exploited to create an atmosphere of endless fear and a practice of endless warfare. In the aftermath of the attacks, the White House allowed many Saudis, including twenty-four members of the bin Laden family, to fly out of the country after perfunctory questioning by the F.B.I. Why? Because the bin Ladens, along with the house of Saud itself, have been intimately connected for decades with the rise of the Bushes—funnelling money, in return for influence, into businesses controlled by the family or their friends. In brief, the republic has been bought. Moore implies that Afghanistan was invaded partly so that American oil interests could follow up on a deal arranged earlier with the Taliban to set up a natural-gas pipeline that would run through the country; Iraq was invaded so that military contracts would be pumped up and the Bushes’ friends enriched. On the ground, the war is fought by an impoverished class created by the ruthlessness of capitalism—men and women who, faced with dim economic chances, have no choice but to “volunteer” for the armed services.

Saying that pieces of this are true—or partly true, or true when joined to counterclaims (isn’t the Army mostly a boon for the working class?)—doesn’t settle the journalistic issue. The movie’s more radical allegations, which arrive like a shower of poison darts, are impossible to sort out and evaluate. On the Bush connections with the Saudis, for instance, Moore takes a line similar to that of Craig Ungar in his recent book, “House of Bush, House of Saud,” but Ungar cites his sources in footnotes, and you can check up on him if you want to. Moore uses documents here and there, but much of the movie is too enraged and malicious to offer proof. “Was it all just a dream?” Moore asks at the beginning, reviewing the past four years, which have taken on the character of an ominous hallucination—so ominous that most of us, he believes, can’t quite wrap our minds around it. To jolt us out of complacency, he depends on an editing method of flat-out contradiction—say, a Donald Rumsfeld claim of “humanitarian” bombing followed by shots of an Iraqi family’s home destroyed by bombs. Is Rumsfeld’s insistence that we have killed as few civilians as possible refuted by this heart-wrenching juxtaposition? No, it’s neither proved nor disproved. Moore also gathers single shots together in volleys of didactic montage—for instance, Administration figures and Saudi ministers greeting one another fervently, or images of the President’s men being made up before television appearances, a sequence implying that the Bush people are all in the grip of frivolous vanity. But this is cheap and meaningless. Everyone who goes on television gets made up.

Moore teases the powerful by playing them off against cornball pop-culture archetypes—turning the Afghanistan war into a “Bonanza”-style TV Western in which Tony Blair appears in a ten-gallon hat. How much water will that joke hold? And is this joker opposed to the Afghanistan war? (In “Bowling for Columbine,” Moore presented Bill Clinton’s intervention against Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing as a case of slaphappy American militarism.) Moore never talks about Islamic fundamentalism and training camps, obsessive anti-Westernism, or suicide terrorists and the difficulty of guarding against them; he never asks how the American government should conduct itself in a war against religious totalitarians. There are, apparently, no justifiable fears, only hysterical fears manipulated by the authorities, whose every act is purposive and conspiratorial. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Moore that people like Tom Ridge may simply not know what they’re doing and are desperately trying to appear on top of the situation.

Moore can’t resist amusing his campus and conspiracy-nut following, along with the gleeful sophomore in all of us, but, as the man said, when you aim at the king you had better kill him. At the moment, the stakes may be too high for shenanigans. “Fahrenheit 9/11” offers the thrill of a coherent explanation for everything, but parts of the movie are no better than a wild, lunging grab at a supposed master plan. Did Bush, as Moore implies, allow Osama bin Laden to survive because of American financial ties to Osama’s protectors, the Taliban? (If so, the Pentagon war planners were part of the plot.) Moore is a genuine populist, but what he can’t deal with is the unpleasant possibility that Bush, as people used to say of Nixon, has made a shrewd assessment of the lack of virtue and curiosity in the American public. A lot of Americans still admire the ignorant, smirking, chest-out, crotch-forward triumphalism. Michael Moore has become a sensational entertainer of the already converted, but his enduring problem as a political artist is that he has never known how to change anyone’s politics.

barf.

WASHINGTON (AP) _ A conservative group asked federal election
officials on Thursday to investigate whether television ads for
director Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary ``Fahrenheit 9/11''
violate campaign finance law regulating when commercials may
feature a presidential candidate.

Moore called the complaint ``a blatant attempt on the part of a
right-wing, Republican-sponsored group to stop people from seeing
my movie.'' He said he would fight the complaint, and members of
the Congressional Black Caucus appearing with him at a news
conference near the Capitol promised to help.
``It's a violation of my First Amendment rights that I cannot
advertise my movie. It's a movie,'' Moore said. ``I have not
publicly endorsed John Kerry. I am an independent, I am not a
member of the Democratic Party.''

The complaint also contends that because Lions Gate is
foreign-owned, the ads are subject to a ban on the use of foreign
money for ads identifying presidential candidates close to
elections.

Uh-huh, I see. Here's the disinfofedia article on them. I remember this group because they called for a boycott of France.

"So is Citizens United, a front for agitator David N. Bossie, last heard from as the congressional aide who got fired for doctoring audio tape in a failed attempt to incriminate the Clintons in the Whitewater affair. Citizens United is also responsible for the infamous "Willie Horton" ads aired on TV in 1988 to help elect Bush's father."

who happened to be a Republican.

Jeeeeezus Christ that's disgusting.

The two main al-Jazeera reporters they followed were amazing, and the main US press officer comes off really well.

i shouldn't have said that rosenbaum is out of his depth. he's an intelligent guy. but as so often in his columns, he seems to betray his own better judgement in some attempt to make a strong statement and a typically misguided attempt to appeal to some imagined broader audience.

i think what he's saying, or rather what lies behind that statement, is that the mainstream news notion of "objectivity" is a canard. that's true. but he needn't concede the notion of objectivity in the process. trying to be "fair and balanced"--a striving for objectivity (and sure "pure objectivity" doesn't exist, but few--few who would bother to read rosenbaum anyway--are claiming this, so any such militant assertion has a straw-man quality to it) IS desirable, and doesn't mean having to avoid pointing fingers, etc. it seems to me that the fact --are damning enough. one can construct these facts into a pointed narrative without resorting to falsehood or even baser appeals to sympthay and outrage. (appeals based, say, on deliberate misrepresentations or such silliness as showing cheney et al getting made up for TV).

in a weird way i think rosenbaum is undercutting what might be his own case. by throwing out any idea of "objectivity" he's implying that the criticisms that moore's film has and will have, on the basis of factual inaccuracy and the dubiousness of parts of his narrative, are irrelevant. so he's refusing to engage those criticisms. so he's almost--i know he doesn't intend this--conceding a very vital part of the debate to moore's critics.

i feel the same way as i did upthread, that simply saying "this movie is propaganda, it doesn't have a responsibility to the truth" is selling it short, and selling short the potential debate (or the very real debate) it has and will arouse.

does that make sense?

....It is Kiarostami's most complex refelction so far on reality and misrepresentation. For Rosenbaum it is his most uncompromising exposure of misrepresentation:

"Beginning with one lie, Sabzian's impersonation, Kiarostami proceeded to generate several other lies--or at best half-truths--by getting all of the people to impersonate themselves. The reporter, Sabzian, and Kiarostami are playing three different versions of the same game, each capitalizing on the awe and intimidation ordinary people feel about movies; by the time the film is over, every participant--including the family, the judge, Makhmalbaf, and the audience--has agreed to become an active part of the boondoggle."

For Rosenbaum impersonation is indeed a crime of which everyone here is guilty, though Kiarostami wins acquital because he is seen to plead guilty. This is a postmodern view of the matter, the view that everybody lies, artists and politicians, institutions and individuals alike, that there's no such thing as the truth and even if there were you couldn't get to it anyway, that the only thing to be done is critique, an assertion that you're not being taken in. This may be the view we've come to in our society of the spectacle, but it is not the view Kiarostami expresses in his film.

(It would not be fair to impute this complacent postmodern skepticism to Rosenbaum, a humane critic and seeker of truth. But this skepticism is so much in the air these days that it seeps into his article even if he doesn't subscribe to it himself. There have been times when skepticism and cynicism could be a resistance to the established order, but this isn't one of those times: skepticism and cynicism are practically the official philosophy of late capitalism.)

Rasheed OTM.

I think Rosenbaum's saying the exact same thing I have been - that is, that documentary films are not objective news, nor should be treated as such.

-- hstencil (hstenc!...) (webmail), June 25th, 2004 12:50 PM. (hstencil) (later) (link)

but aside from a portion of the right, do you think this is an idea that is held dear to most people who pick up the chicago reader? maybe i have too much faith in the average, er, reader reader's intelligence.

personally, i feel faintly condescended to when rosenbaum reiterates this point and feels the need to do so in such a.... manichean way. as if the actual, more subtle, relationship between truth-telling and documentary form was too far out of our ability to grasp. (sometimes i think rosenbaum is just being plain lazy, and doesn't have the energy to make a more subtle point.)

I understand the difference between striving for objectivity and abandoning it altogether, but I think you're making too much of a defense/aside's comportment with a perceived worldview. Rosenbaum isn't defending the movie as an efficacious polemic, but rather as a taste of its subjects' own medicine. Moore isn't striving too hard for objectivity because he feels that the supposedly-objective media itself has not striven very hard during much of the administration's tenure, creating a meta-narrative that survives even into these more objective times. If Bush has exerted power over our discourse, Moore is going to exert some power in the opposite direction.

Among Moorean Cheap Shots, Many Legitimate Revelations in 9/11

by Andrew Sarris

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 should be carefully studied by John Kerry’s political advisers—not for its good taste, profundity or even originality, but for its sheer bulldog tenacity in laying waste to the patriotic mythology spun out of lies and half-truths in Karl Rove’s White House.

As it happens, I attended the local anti-Bush revival meeting masquerading as an all-media screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Ziegfeld Theatre on a recent warm late-spring night in New York. Mr. Moore was on hand—in his patented green baseball cap—to acknowledge the plaudits of the glitterati. I couldn’t help thinking that he had every right to gloat after the rough treatment he’d received at the Oscars from many of the same people now imploring him to overthrow King George II, after having deemed Mr. Moore in bad taste for prematurely condemning Mr. Bush for the war in Iraq.

Of course, gloating was the last thing on Mr. Moore’s mind, judging from his gracious and constructive remarks after the film. One could feel that he was still basking in the 20-minute standing ovation he’d received at this year’s Cannes Film Festival after his film won the Palme d’Or. Still, much of the anti-Americanism that fed the mostly European applause at the festival may have ignored the fact that it is difficult to imagine a filmmaker from any other country in the world daring to produce and exhibit a film so explicitly denouncing his own country’s political leaders.

By contrast, the response after the showing at the Ziegfeld was generally enthusiastic, but hardly overwhelming. I detected some nervousness and uncertainty in the audience about the tactics Mr. Moore employed to discredit President Bush: How many of them were cheap shots, how many of them were legitimate, and how many were breathtakingly revelatory? Like all of Mr. Moore’s enterprises, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a mixed bag, and you take the bad with the good. In fact, you have to take the bad for the sake of the good.

Mr. Moore begins his unbridled assault on the Bushites by reprising the charges of grand larceny and the stealing of a Presidential election—footage of the media confusion over the results in Florida is intercut with shots of Jeb Bush looking taller, handsomer and more Presidential than his brother, George, who was clearly not the family’s choice for heir apparent. Mr. Moore never stresses this point, preferring to reduce Jeb, the infamous Katherine Harris and even the majority of members of the Supreme Court to hirelings of the Bush gang. Crude but effective.

What was new to me was the spectacle of one African-American member of the House of Representatives after another parading before the Senate to block the certification of George W. Bush as President because of voting irregularities in Florida affecting African-American voters, and not being recognized due to the failure of a single Democratic Senator to sign their petitions. Mr. Moore takes dead aim at Vice President Al Gore as the presiding officer of this parliamentary travesty, in which the Democratic Party surrendered to the Republicans’ power grab without offering any resistance. Is history about to repeat itself this year through the efforts of Diebold (whose owner is a major contributor to the Bush campaign), a company that has manufactured new electronic-voting machines which don’t produce a paper trail, to be used by millions of voters in the 2004 elections? We also have the same Supreme Court that decided in Bush’s favor in 2000; Jeb Bush is still prepared to do his brother’s bidding in Florida; and the Republicans have more money to spread around in 2004 then they had in 2000. No wonder the audience seemed nervous. I am, too. Even before 2000, the Republicans displayed a flair for stealing elections—for example, in the Hayes-Tilden fiasco of 1876.

But most of this is old stuff, and Mr. Moore doesn’t get into high gear until he zeroes in on 9/11 and its immediate aftermath, with the still-mysterious authorizations for airline flights to spirit bin Laden family members out of the United States and back to Saudi Arabia. I don’t believe The Times and the other media have ever done their homework on this issue, failing to connect the dots to uncover the Bush family’s compromising connections with the bin Laden family’s networks and sundry other Saudi-American financial dealings. There’s been no attempt to follow the money, as was done in the Watergate case.

As for the war in Iraq and the alleged weapons of mass destruction therein, American journalists were so deeply embedded in the Bush administration that they fell sound asleep when questions of verification were raised. Here Mr. Moore trivializes his arguments by taking cheap shots at the unpopular members of the Bush team with Candid Camera–style footage of them primping for their television appearances. Neocon ideologue Paul Wolfowitz gets the biggest laughs when he salivates on his comb to smooth his hair, but this is a game of "gotcha" that you can play with any target, from the extreme left to the extreme right.

Mr. Moore is on stronger ground when he returns to his populist roots in heavily unemployed Flint, Mich., a fertile ground for U.S. Army and Marine recruiters with their promises of a college education, to illustrate the fact that it is the poorest young men and women who are doing all the fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Moore does show some restraint in his showboating antics with Congressmen in front of the Capitol, as he asks them to send their sons and daughters to Iraq. He points out also that the President has slashed benefits for the troops and the veterans, while at the same time professing his love and appreciation for their sacrifices.

Still, even in Mr. Moore’s footage, there are depressing shots of crowds of Bush supporters cheering for the President. As we sat in the Ziegfeld in more or less political and cultural harmony, we had to wonder who all those people in the red states (and all the red-state people in the blue states) were, and whether any of them would see Fahrenheit 9/11—and if they did, would it change any hearts and minds?

The distribution of the film has already been penalized with a restrictive R rating for its allegedly graphic images of the horror of war and the sight of American amputees and Iraqi civilian casualties, neither of which are likely to have been officially sanctioned by the Pentagon. And the movie business pages are full of Harvey Weinstein’s agonizing struggles with the Disney organization, reportedly because of Jeb Bush (again!) and his ability to cause trouble for Disney’s theme-park holdings in Orlando, Fla.

So Fahrenheit 9/11 emerges as yet another salvo in a holy war between the Bushites and the anti-Bushites, with no quarter given in what promises to be a long, hot summer. I urge all my readers to see the film and judge it for yourselves. It is, at the very least, one of the most thought-provoking releases of the year.

London Gangland

Mike Hodges’ I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, from a screenplay by Trevor Preston, works so hard to be something more than a genre crime film that it spends most of its running time edging toward a terminal obliqueness. This is to say that from the beginning, it is hard to say who or what the movie is about. As an early admirer of Mr. Hodges’ Croupier (1998), I was particularly on the lookout for Clive Owen, the then-unfamiliar actor who played the earlier film’s writer-croupier protagonist.

Mr. Owen makes his entrance in the new film in semi-long-shot, first seen in a forest where, from the window of his live-in van, he witnesses a mob beating. He then helps the victim to a nearby farmhouse, where he’s confronted by a snarling dog and a woman wielding a rifle. There is a desultory, unrevealing conversation about the woman recognizing him as one of the workers in the forest.

Much later in the film, we learn that Mr. Owen’s almost unrecognizably bearded and rumpled character, Will Graham, is a self-exiled South London crime boss on the run from his past due to some vaguely articulated spiritual malaise. The problem for most moviegoers is that Mr. Hodges and Mr. Preston are very stingy with the back story’s exposition, so it takes an inordinately long time to piece together a fairly basic revenge plot of brother avenging brother.

There are also many unexplained and unidentified scenes with shady characters sitting in cars at night. The cars are sometimes parked, sometimes moving, but it’s clear that the people inside are up to no good. Still, we hear no one’s name mentioned for the longest time, until a young drug-dealing scamp named Davey (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) bursts upon the scene with the sexy, womanizing bravado of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s Breathless (1960). After his latest predatory seduction, Davey is seen walking home when two well-dressed hoodlums suddenly attack him and drag him into a deserted room, where their boss, Boad (Malcolm McDowell), brutally sodomizes him without a word of explanation.

We then discover that Davey is the beloved younger brother of Will Graham, whose name still strikes fear in the hearts of the London underworld. As the showdown looms between Graham and Boad, people begin either taking sides or running for cover. Other friends and associates appear, including the interestingly cast Charlotte Rampling as Will’s discarded elderly mistress, Helen, and Jamie Foreman as Will’s erstwhile second in command, Mickser. Does the film work? All I know is that it stays in my mind for its ambitiously autumnal essence, but it may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

Fishing for a Doctor

Jean-François Pouliot’s Seducing Doctor Lewis (La Grande Séduction), from Ken Scott’s screenplay, is closer to the sociological pathos and social pathology of Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty (1997) than to Scotsman Alexander Mackendrick’s folksy anti-British film Tight Little Island (1949)—a high point of the Ealing comedy tradition that’s proving so hard to resurrect. Mr. Pouliot’s and Mr. Scott’s sweet-natured fable of community activism is set in a dying fishing village on a tiny, impoverished island in Northern Québec named Ste. Marie-La-Mauderne.

Once, the men of the island were busy scouring the local harbor, feeding the nation and earning an honest living. Now, with the collapse of the fishing industry, the once-proud fishermen are sustained only by a monthly welfare check. Even the mayor of the village, a man named Réal (Jean-Pierre Gonthier), is on the dole until he deserts his post to take a job with the provincial police.

There is hope, however, that a plastics factory will settle in Ste. Marie, but only if the community has a licensed doctor. Germain (Raymond Bouchard), a retired fisherman, schemes to fill the vacuum by sending out fliers to all the doctors in Montréal with glowing descriptions of the village, but to no avail. Then Réal—now a traffic cop—pulls over Dr. Christopher Lewis (David Boutin) for speeding and finds him in possession of cocaine. He blackmails the doctor to work in St. Marie for a month, after which he can decide to register permanently or not. The rest is up to the villagers and Germain, who serves as the prime architect of the deception. What follows is only moderately amusing and almost totally lacking in suspense, surprise or even uncertainly. It is much too late for either Ste. Marie or Mr. Pouliot’s film to become another Tight Little Island.

You may reach Andrew Sarris via email at: [email protected]

This column ran on page 23 in the 6/28/2004 edition of The New York Observer.

COPYRIGHT © 2004
THE NEW YORK OBSERVER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

As expected, Moore is exploitive, manipulative and crass. His tenacious attempts to 'put a face' on his subjects (which is becoming something of a trademeark) is tiresome and dull.

That said, I expected to walk away agreeing with 50% and walked away agreeing with much more. I hate Moore like poison, and I think his cheap shots in regard to vernacular that go largely unchecked play right into his detractor's hands. The movie is rife with inconsistencies and, as expected, a dearth of attribution and corroboration for ANYTHING. BUT I found the whole of the movie, at least it's message, hard to disagree with, if only in a 'no duh' kinda way. He's crafty, not offering up any guesses about the REASON the towers were bombed - I would have thought a movie bearing the title Farenheit 9/11 would have felt the need to speculate. But that's just me. Surely he's not suggesting, as my crackpot leftist movie companions did in the car ride home, that the Bush / Cheney / Rumsfeldt axis had something to do with 9/11? And yet...

Number of times the word 'Israel' was mentioned: Zero.

Number of mentions of John Kerry, Bush's only feasible alternative, and his support of the war: Zero.

All this considered, I'm glad I saw it and I feel everybody should, so long as they don't suspend their disbelief TOO much. You should have heard the nutjobs I drove home with.

As a side note, did anyone else have to sit through some very unironic commercials encouraging enlistmnet in the Marines before the previews?? All sandwiched between commercials for war-centric video games? I found this very, very strange. "It's no coincidence," said my Jerry Brown lovin' buds...Hmmm....

Your various attacks on Moore would hold more weight if they had a rational basis.

It isn't a documentary? MY ILLUSIONS HAVE BEEN SHATTERED! SWAYZE, WHY HAVE YOU LIED TO ME?!?!

Estimates from opening night show Moore hitting #1, even though he's showing on less than 1/2 the screens of any other Top 13 movie, with a per-screen revenue nearly four times that of his closest rival. If Saturday and Sunday maintain his pace, he'll break the full-run documentary box office record (set by Bowling for Columbine) in a single weekend.

funny, a Republican stronghold that voted for Al Gore for President?

Interesting side note: Staten Island is believed to be the most heavily Italian-American county in the U.S.

Lots of Italian-Americans, yes, but not the nice, eloquent and crafty kind you see in the Godfather movies, or those kindly old bread-eaters from the 'old country' - this brand of greaseball is boorish, ignorant and territorial. Racist without cause, materialistic and stupid beyond your wildest nightmares. I could write a book, my friend.

And the moms and dads of the people I grew up with were almost always civil servants. Cops, firemen and sanitation workers. The rent here is outrageous, and just GETTING here from anywhere else (via the Verrazanno Bridge) will cost you an $8 toll. So the ratio of cost-of-living to actual income makes it a VERY working class place, as most of the retards here live well beyond their means by accumulating as many 'status' points as their salaries will afford. It's not uncommon to see a family of five living in a townhouse, connected on three of it's four sides, with a $100,00 car parked in the driveway. Or women who work at McDonalds venturing out in fur coats and jewelry that could pay back my college loans with money to spare.

I appreciate your research, gabbneb, but this is one of those cases where statistics do not even begin to tell the story. This place, at least the past two generations of it, is xenophobic White Flight run amok. Do some research on the mass exile from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, when the bridge opened. Why did all of these people move their families to a place that used to serve as a punchline for jokes on The Honeymooners, a place that was tantamount to farmland? Too many 'moolies' began crowding their precious neighborhoods. So they high-tailed it to the site of the world's largest man-made landfill (that's a fact). So what you have here is a lineage of people who'd prefer to live, and raise their families, among garbage, than among people of different races and ethnicities.

subtitles obv. (see the birth of a nation for reference.)

seeing this in three hours.

Really? Want to explain why it's worse than Harlem or the South Bronx or East New York? South Central LA? Pine Ridge, South Dakota? Owsley County, Kentucky? the Yazoo Delta of Mississippi? Houston's Fifth Ward? Chicago's Cabrini Green? Loup County, Nebraska? Starr County, Texas? Wagon Mound, New Mexico? Southeast Washington, DC? East St. Louis? East Carroll Parish, Louisiana? McDowell County, West Virginia? Anniston, Alabama? the Great Divide Basin of Wyoming? Battle Mountain, Nevada? Bakersfield, California? Hollywood, Florida? San Bernardino, CA? Did you know that in 2000, Richmond County was the 124th-richest county in America, by median household income, richer than any of the other boroughs of NYC by that measurement?

Is Bill O'Reilly your dad or something?

Back to F9/11... on Moore's site and on DailyKos, there are anecdotal reports of packed or sold out theatres across Alabama, Florida, Indiana, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, etc., and in places like Lincoln, NE, and Highland Ranch, CO, just across the county line from Columbine

Wow.

You also misunderstand the content of my post. I'm not saying that Staten Island is rich, necessarily (I don't have a very good definition of 'rich' to begin with). I'm questioning, and seeking discussion of, whether it's accurate to call it working-class, as roger did. Roger lives on Staten Island, and I've been there a handful of times at best, so I assume he knows better than I do, but his characterization doesn't comport with the figures I'm looking at, which suggest that it's a pretty comfortable place to live (which, admittedly, provoked incredulilty/anger at the myopia of roger's apparent belief that it's a worse place to live than some of the poorest/most violent/least healthy/most divisive/most remote parts of the country). Moreover, I'm not calling Staten Island liberal. Rather, I'm pointing out that it appears to have lost its historical preferences for Republican presidential candidates. Though it voted for them for years and years, it switched to the Democrats in 1996 and stuck with them in 2000, the same switch/stick made by multiple suburban areas along the I-95 corridor from Bethesda, MD to Bridgeport, CT. I often make my points in shorthand, because I have limitations on my time, and assume a certain intelligence upon the part of other ILXors.

The difference between Staten Island and a lot of the places you name are community and culture - don't you liberals prize that stuff? Anyway, there's none of that here.

Right, I forgot that it's 50 cents away from the greatest city in the world.

(xpost) That's exactly what I'm implying. At the conclusion of some of my friends's idiotic applause at the credits of Bowling For Columbine, I challenged each of them to spot anyone other than a young white liberal in the audience as we walked out, and none of them could. Not even for a dollar a head, which I offered. We almost got into a physical altercation in the lobby afterwards. So I'm guessing this new one is resonating a bit more strongly. I was surprised, that's all. Good for the rich, fat fuck.

No, I don't. Not caring what he says in general, and given his history of insensitive and/or offensive comments, there's no shock.

My concern was voicing and arguing over a more accurate depiction of Staten Island after Roger's misleading description of it, something that hits at my amateur interest in the intersection of politics, demography and geography, heightened by the fact that the subject is part of the city I live in.
So, really, you weren't responding to Roger or what Roger said, but just stroking your own ego there?

Good to know.

I would take issue with the implicit assertion (and it's not the only one) in his statement that the movie could otherwise have been (and elsewhere might continue to be) presumed not to do well in such areas, as if, for instance, blue collar conservatives would have no interest in even seeing a movie that addresses two of the great issues of the day, or that criticizes the President.
Blue-collar conservatives are not known for their favorable reaction to lefty propaganda, no. I'm sure that comes as a shock to you. Nor are they the usual art-house crowd.

So, to say that Moore was playing well to an audience that isn't normally his, is a compliment.

Your primary reaction was... "no! Moore's audience lives up to the stereotype! Limo lib'ruls everywhere!" At every turn, on ILX you seem intent on honoring and supporting every godawful liberal stereotype that the right trots out. Limo liberals, hypocritical environmentalists, whining about the meanies in the red states.

Your primary reaction was... "no! Moore's audience lives up to the stereotype! Limo lib'ruls everywhere!"

I thought I already corrected this, but apparently not - this is a serious misreading of what I was saying.

Roger was conceding that the audience he saw didn't live up to his stereotype of Moore's audience.

You immediately came back with "nah, dog, they're rich!" I responded to that (and your response is consistent with your defense of millionaire liberals and so on).

The actual fiscal status of the people of Staten Island was irrelevant. It was a non-issue. Roger was conceding something good for Moore, and you immediately sought to correct him.

For fuck's sake! I didn't say the audience was rich, I said residents of Staten Island have a higher than average household median income (which may mean only that there are fewer poor people, not more rich people). My point was tangential and had nothing to do with the fucking movie. What do you think I meant by "Back to F9/11..."?

I'm glad you came out with the "millionaire liberals" thing, though, so we know what your real problem is.

I'm glad you came out with the "millionaire liberals" thing, though, so we know what your real problem is.

Haha, I've totally kept my beliefs in class and general disdain for the overprivileged a secret!

Or just enlightening grudgefests?

i also thought he had a great point about the administration's frequent attempts to confuse al qaeda and saddam hussein in the minds of americans--but he didn't make the point with a great clarity. in that sense i agree with his politics but lament his filmmic skills. although there were some very nice bits of montage throughout the film.

not like you.

who the FUCK is that woman? moore should have chased her down.

what did she think was happening? that someone was filming some woman who was pretending her son had died, for effect? as though no one has actually died?

Did I like the movie? I think so. I'm still taking it all in. Denby's review is the most OTM I've read so far. Every Moore movie comes with its own set of caveats and we all know what those caveats are, but I thought that hiding behind all the cheap shots and grotesque sentimentality there was some very strong stuff. Would have been even stronger if he'd let the information speak for itself without all the extra editorializing. The music choices sucked too; I know Moore's M.O. is to approach weighty issues in a satirical happy-go-lucky style, but F 9/11 seems more earnest and solemn than all that, and the use of jokey goofy rock music felt inappropriate, even in the jokier, goofier scenes.

P.S. Roger Adultery OTM about Staten Island.

has anyone here seen in the year of the pig by emile de antonio? a very similarly-styled, but much superior, committed documentary about the vietnam war. antonio and moore play similar tricks with news footage (antonio: "out-takes are the confessions of the system") but antonio always seemed purposefuly and thesis-driven where moore often seems scattershot.

Is there really a theatre in NYC that is showing it 24 hours a day? I heard that somewhere.

I also didn't think that the Bush at the elementary school 7 minute thing was as strong as it could have been. The commentary seemed kinda lame to me. The only point that had to be made was: "The country is under attack and you are sitting here reading children's books!" You know?

I don't think that there's a 'point' to be made. Rather, there are questions to be asked. From what I understand of how it works, he's allowing you time to think of them.

And I agree with Scott about the classroom scene - when I read about it in reviews beforehand, I expected it to be very powerful, I thought Moore would actually show the entire eight minutes. That would have at least had some impact. But what was he supposed to do, jump up and go "I don't want to alarm all of you kiddies, but the country is under attack and we're all gonna die!! RUN!!!!!"?

(It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be at all)

when i read about these shots in the reviews, i thought immediately, "oh god there's moore taking another cheap shot." because, after all, everyone who goes on tv gets primped a little (even against their will, as seems the case with powell for instance) and no one looks their best while it's happening.

but in the film the ridicule aspect seemed to take a back seat to a more basic formal aspect, i.e., a kind of rhythmic device in the film. like those old silent movies where you are introduced to all of the characters by moving mug shots before the drama begins. i thought the shots actually functioned very well this way, setting an ominous tone without really pushing the ridicule petal too hard. i only wish the film that followed was as well-organized and paced as the opening would suggest.

(roger: he could have gotten up and said there was some "important presidential business" to attend to, or anything like that. though to be honest i still find that event more confusing than damning really. i'm not sure exactly what it says about bush and why it should really be the thing people pick up on from the movie.)

yeah, what's a couple thousand people dead when you might alarm some kiddies?

amateur!st - I kinda liked that beginning 'introducing the villains' scene, but it had the reverse effect on me. When I think of Bush, Ashcroft, Rumsfeldt (ESPECIALLY Rumsfeldt - that dude seems tough as nails), Rice and Powell, all together, looking all stoic and serious, whilke that ominous drone playts behind them, they just seem like the baddest gang of badasses that ever bad-assed.

Ashcroft is a real badass

gabbneb is just picking fights but i'll dignify his little dig in spite of myself - why alarm a bunch of kids when you don't have to? If he went into a state of panic, he would have looked much worse. This seems obvious to me.

amateurr!st, I know, I know he's a dum-dum, but you gotta admit, he does have a certain John Wayne-ness about him.

that opening scene is like the Dagobah Cafe and the badass slo-mo scene in Reservoir Dogs rolled into one. Excellent filmmaking!

oh i dunno, to order some F-16s scrambled? i guess what mattered was how he looked, not whether people died.

amateurr!st, I know, I know he's a dum-dum, but you gotta admit, he does have a certain John Wayne-ness about him.

Yeah, he's as much of a pussy as John Wayne was.

-- roger adultery (vlad62...), April 14th, 2004.

Would have been more effective if I didn't still stand by that statement, but I do. I AM highly suggestible - that hasn't changed since April 14th. I was referring more to the late night Don Lapre kinda stuff, but it's applicable here too. I go into everything - EVERYTHING - with an open mind. That's why I had no problem announcing to this board that I was 'impressed' by several aspects of a film which I have been mercilessly and openly bashing for months. I wouldn't have it any other way, really.

I'm aware of my few flaws - are you aware you're a total weenie?

xpost I just ate a Boca Burger (doctor's orders). I'm watching Beavis and Butthead for some reason.

Impressionable = gullible, easily swayed by whatever group is making an argument (my grandmother, wonderful woman, etc. knows little or nothing about politics and governing, she tends to support whomever she heard last).

Being open-minded demands that you have some concept of where you stand and the context of an issue, so that you can hear both sides and judge. Impressionability comes from the opposite - being unsure or unaware and not thinking as critically.

milo - I didn't say I wake up some mornings quoting Leroi Jones poems and other mornings reciting from The Turner Diaries. I have a very firm grasp on my 'beliefs' but when something makes sense to me, rather than systematically attempting to disprove or ignore the facts being argued, I take them into consideration and can usually filter them through my own ideas / ideologies and come away with a better understanding of the opposing POV. Sometimes things find their way into my own personal philosophies. But whatever. I'll choose more words more carefully next time, milo.

Admittedly, Republicans win a lot. But Susan Molinari was pro-choice and seen by Republicans as a moderate, if not a liberal. Vito Fossella, Guy Molinari's protege, is a former pro-choice Democrat first elected in an unusually low-turnout race in an off-year (1997) running with Rudy Giuliani and a big chunk of RNC soft money against an opponent on a ticket with the very liberal Ruth Messinger. The race was expected to be close enough that it was treated as a bellwether for the following year's Congressional elections, and Dole, Bush and Clinton campaigned with the respective candidates. Fossella has shown himself to be much more conservative. He allied himself with Bush in 2000, when Guy Molinari backed McCain. Recently, he made noise about mounting a primary challenge against Bloomberg that got slapped down when Molinari, supported by Giuliani, threatened to run against Fossella.

An interesting note - Richmond County is the fastest-growing in New York State.

The White House has been mostly silent about the film, although communications director Dan Bartlett said the claims it made were "outrageously false".

And Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt said "the American people can tell the difference between fact and fiction".

But the Washington Post reports that the Bush political team debated how to respond to the film.

Some in the White House wanted to attack Mr Moore like they did former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke when he released a book critical of the war on terror, the newspaper reported.

But Mr Bush plans to play down the film. "To take it on would give it too much credibility," a Bush strategist told the Washington Post.

"He's not going to get into a debate himself with this little filmmaker guy," the strategist added.

(BBC news)

the FUCK he is. Beers on US, for fuck's sake. For the rest of his, and his great great grandchildren's lives.

-- roger adultery (vlad62...) (webmail), June 27th, 2004 5:48 PM. (roger adultery) (later) (link)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

roger i actually do not know what you mean to imply here. sorry for my dense-ness.

I like the myth of myself as a closet pinko. It saddens me that deep down, I know that Bill O'Reilly and Ted Nugent would totally never be my friends because of so many ideological differences.

My comment above was a simple one - that Michael Moore is becoming rather wealthy from all of this. If that raises the fires of ILM hell, as many of my passive comments seem to these days, then so be it. It's true.

the reason that i think it will affect the election is that there are a million moms out there just like the one in the film, and their viewing of F911 wll hit home. in addition, all those combat soldiers who were clearly pissed off that they had been duped, if they vote, i don't think it will be for Bush.

Orbit - I dunno if I'm that skeptical. Do you really think there's any way ANYTHING dirty can occur in this next election due to this precedent? I'd think EVERYONE would be monitoring the entire process to the point of absolute tedium. But maybe I'm just optimistic. No, I don't think we'll see another stolen presidential election in our lifetime.

Apparently you haven't read this yet: Election Fraud 2004? - Florida wants to purge its voter rolls AGAIN

Although he will give him face-time on his own campaign commercials. Heh.

sorry to harp on this but i would like to clear it up.

capitalists and right-wingers have no such restrictions on their behavior

doesn't it all make sense now?

That comment puts an end to any rational and productive exchange of views that could ever possibly take place. Why is anyone still paying attention??

I have a suggestion - why don't you ask one of the moderators to censor me? No sense having me here to impede the status quo.

amater!st - we're splitting hairs here, my friend, but my point was that we ARE all buying. We're all helping to make him rich. So, in a sense, we're funding his Twinkie habits too. Get it now?

Yeah, but by paying taxes aren't we funding George's recovery from Segway/bike accidents?

Symplistic - of course. That's fine. I've given money to Kathy Acker and Boyd Rice; Dr Phil and Whitehouse; David Lynch and Keanu Reeves. It's a fact of life (or a fact of consumerism) - still, you have to admit it gets hazy when things are done under the guise of a 'public service' or something, no? Like, 'Let's all applaud the rich altruist for enlightening us."

Not sure if there's irony in your comment, but...

What happened specifically is that Fox called the election for Bush, on the grounds that Florida's infinitesimally small margin with all precincts reporting (but not absentee ballots, right?) favored Bush. The Bush cousin apparently was the person responsible for the decision. The other networks jumped on the bandwagon (I think ABC might have held back), and Bush was the winner. The story was presented as a Bush win, a concensus that shaped the immediate news coverage, instead of a more judicious "too close to call" storyline. So what could have been a scenario in which election officials sought to get an accurate count was replaced with a situation in which a Gore "win" would have ostensibly "reversed" the election result. Maybe this outcome is what galvanized, for example, the near-riot with Republican hacks storming that election board meeting, creating an atmosphere of intimidation that prevented debate over how to proceed with a south Florida ballot recount.

This is from memory, so someone correct me if I have the details wrong.

x-post they kind of all cluster-humped each other and then smoked cigarettes. IIRC.

Yeah but wasn't Ellis' actual job to oversee election results? The actual decision to call Florida was in his hands, as opposed to just remarking on what was going on like the ex-Clinton hack did. Legit or not it seems like it might fall under a conflict of interest heading.

For the election, the local sticking point seems to be that Kerry is regarded as a traitor for protesting Viet Nam, even though the locals didn't approve of that "war" either, after they learned what went on years later. Kerry has a PR problem.

My aunt called my mom from Estes Park, Colorado, to insist my mom go see F9/11 too, and to report that the middle class and upper middle class population of Estes Park was seeing the film. I don't have a report on the cafe talk yet.

I think the film is aimed at the "average person" and it looks like the average person is seeing the film. I think the average person who has a relative in the war, on the ground, will strongly identify with the mom in the film. If some of you have working class relatives perhaps you could report. But FWIW, rural southeastern North Carolignians are in the theaters.

and the ENTIRE Senate, Republican and Democrat who refused to back up members of the House of Reps

-- miloauckerman (suspectdevic...) (webmail), June 28th, 2004 6:14 PM. (miloauckerman) (later) (link)

that's what my friends said. i disagreed. what was the poor man supposed to do?

Obviously no Republican was going to back up the liberal black Reps. protesting the confirmation of a GOP Pres. We don't expect principle or honor from them anyway. Liberals and lefties, on the other hand, remain under the delusion that the Democrats are better. (better as opposed to less evil)

-- cinniblount (littlejohnnyjewe...) (webmail), June 29th, 2004. (James Blount)

Oh and Blount, take your ad hominem and shove it up your ass. After you fuck off, that is.

but why the fuck did not a single dem senator sign the objection? didn't they want to do anything possible to prevent Bush from becoming Prez? Did the Republican mafia break all their wrists??? I just don't get it.

xpost

haha orbit otm

It is better that they're fighting, but it's a meaningless election-year fight. Once that's settled, it's back to craven business-as-usual. But I have a severe and specific problem with Kerry/Gore/the DNC's self-righteousness about Bush and the war, given their conduct.

"A Senate President" doesn't need to be anything of the sort. That's like saying the Speaker of the House should be unbiased. Nice thought, but a joke.

But yeah, I'll criticize him for being a coward, because it wasn't about impartiality. It was "please don't beat me up anymore, Mr. Republican!"

The Senate and the government are best served by healthy, lively debate and battle. Collusion with the GOP != healthy.

Bend them? Hell yes. That's what you're supposed to do with the rules - find a way to work within them to accomplish your goal.

I think it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If he had raised a stink, republicans would accuse him of taking unfair advantage of his position as Senate President.

In what way would it have been an abuse of power to let a Democratic Senator off his leash, or to give the Representatives time to make their argument without being gavelled down?

Yes, oops, Republicans would have whined and moaned and gone on Fox News 24/7. That's not a good reason to roll over.

Still, with 50% of this country refusing to vote for the national executive, and less than a third voting for their representative in the federal government, one has to ask: what's the problem, here? Why no significant alternative parties? Too lazy? Not enough good organizers? Better money in pint-jockeying?

AND YET: 'we're better than Bush' seems to be enough to get people to listen. Why shouldn't they take this tack? Are the democrats in fact making a shrewd decision in deciding not to say anything but, since most of us aren't listening and won't vote anyway?

It's a political office. Gore was elected (allegedly) to fight for his platform, his party, his side. We don't elect people to be good friends and confidants with the other team. (cf. 2002 midterms, when the Democrats got their asses handed to them on precisely that kidn of platform)

You don't see a difference between bending rules and breaking them?

But yes, you can also have an objection to when the side your opposed to 'bends' the rules. You can have an objection when your opponent follows them, even! That's part of what having a belief-set and an ideology and all that good stuff are about. Then you get together and argue about things and try to convince other people you're right. Yay democracy!

You agreed that Republicans would make a fuss if he had shown bias. Now imagine if the situation was reversed, and a Republican Senate President/ presidential canidate (this is the main conflict, not sen pres vs democrat) cleary showed his bias, would you put up a fuss? (rhetorical since i know you would ha!)

Oops, you still haven't explained exactly how I've suggested Gore "show his bias." Not gavelling down immediately and not ridiculing one of the Reps (to the delight of the GOP) != abuse of power.

x-post wow, why not try "China calls itself a republic!" as long as you're going down the line of meaningless statements?

Why is it better for Gore to gavel them down without debate on election fraud and disenfranchisement, better for Gore to not let a Democratic Senator off the leash? Do you prefer Bush getting in without any kind of formal ackowledgement by the Democrats of his illegitimacy?

You don't seem to understand the role and duties of Gore in that session.

Again, you are right. Impartiality is stupid. Rules should only be strictly followed until the cease to benefit you.

I dunno. I'm guessing you mean Clinton or Gore. You think Wellstone took orders from them? Bob Byrd? Moynihan? (was he still serving? when was this?) Kerrey? (same as Moynihan) Biden?

(interesting note - Biden is tied for the 6th-seniormost Senator after Byrd, Kennedy, Inouye, Hollings and Stevens. He's been there 31.5 years.)

x-post Biden has scary teeth

No, you're right. Whenever it's someone you don't agree with, they break the rules. When you do agree with them, they are merely bending them.
Funny, I never said that. Difficulty reading much?

You don't seem to understand the role and duties of Gore in that session.
The "role and duties" of Gore are the same in every session. To represent the best interests of the American people, the Constitution, the law, his party, his platform and his constituents. Which of those was served by rolling over?

Again, you are right. Impartiality is stupid. Rules should only be strictly followed until the cease to benefit you.
You're confusing "bending" with "breaking" again, oops.

But yes, impartiality is fucking stupid in a political office. If you're talking about a system set up on impartiality, great. But politics, the American government, running Congress - those have never been about impartiality. Nor should they be.

Yeah, 'cuz no one has ever quietly ignored something before. (ie exactly what I said like a dozen posts ago - let the Senators off the leash, or simply don't gavel the Reps down immediately and ridicule one)

There is no room for any bending there.
Of course there is. See above. There are always ways to bend the rules.

Yeah, I am being an asshole, because I don't appreciate your being an asshole and misrepresenting what I've said, and changing from bend to break and back again. Pick one and stick with it.

....

Funny, I never said that. Difficulty reading much?

This is the condescending asshole bit. No, you never said that, I inferred it, kinda like you inferred Gore's motives. I was forced to infer it because of your answer to this:

Isn't that what "evil" corporations do all the time? Bend the rules in order to make more money (money=the justification)? You approve of this, Milo?

was:

Bend rules vs. break them, oops. Corporations have a tendency to break them outright.

And so do politicians. However, both corps. and politicians are apt to bend them, as well. Is it okay when a corp. bends the rule in order to make a larger profit, but in the process fucks over a bunch of people?

Already responded to the corporation thing, too. Whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, preferable or not preferable has absolutely nothing to do with the rules (broken or bent) or the laws (ditto). But your has no substance, because you're relying on its universality to keep me from answering. What does it mean for a corporation to bend the rules to make more money. Gimme an example. What did bending the rules include? Who was hurt? Who wasn't? What rule was bent? Was it bent, or was it really broken? (That's why I said they have a tendency to break the rules, not bend them.)

x-post Biden is also a plagarist

xpost that's preferable to being one, tracer.

"I seriously can't believe you envision a world where people don't work within and around the rules. That's what being human is." - ie subjectivity, not living in fantasy land where being Senate President is akin to being on the Supreme Court.

And yes, I would criticize people for "bending rules" in order to harm people - greed, Iraq, etc.. But most often that greed and killing innocent people thing falls under "breaking rules." Bending the rules of the Senate to give people time to protest != dumping waste in a river

Milo, you're right, there's a big difference there. And that's why I was confused when you seemed to be giving excusing any form of rule bending because "that's what humans do".

Amateurist, neither of those outcomes was expected. The Congressmen wanted to raise, on record, issues about the elimination of black voters in Florida. At that point, tactically it was irrelevant, there was no possible way to reverse the results, it was a protest.

Taking flak from the right over it is not a valid reason. So what if Gore was unpopular on Fox News? There were no "potential legal ramifications." None.

Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' was the deserved triumph of Cannes, but will it really help unseat Bush, asks B. Ruby Rich

Winning the Palme d'Or lends an air of destiny to the choice, but the Cannes film festival was an odd place for Michael Moore, man of the people, to premiere his magnus opus. Fahrenheit 9/11 smoulders with barely controlled rage over what is being done to the US by the most mendacious administration since or even including the Nixon regime. Yet Moore, heartland hero, went out of the country to France's notoriously hoity-toity event to debut the movie. A Memorial Day picnic in Detroit a fortnight later might have been more in character.

No matter. Moore is nothing if not a master strategist. Winning the Palme d'Or certainly puts the frosting on the cake, while going to Cannes in the first place let him assume the mantle of an exile, as though the film could not be shown in his native land. In France he could be received as an alternative diplomat, a deposed prince wrongfully ejected from a government now out of his hands. A fat Hamlet, minus mommy and daddy, but just as set on exposing the plot at the top. Meanwhile, acres of press coverage later, the film's lack of US distribution is presumably a matter of fine-tuning a contract geared to ever-increasing profitability, a matter that will presumably be sorted out in time for Moore's cheerfully announced dream-date opening on 4 July. He'll get the picnic after all.

I loved the euphoria of watching F*9/11 in the Palais crowd, but throughout the nearly two hours I was constantly transporting myself across the ocean and into the future, wondering anxiously how it would play back home and how much or little it might effect its stated aim: to convince the American voter to push Bush out of the White House. And, hey, while we're at it, why not get him and his VP indicted as war criminals and profiteers too? So I tracked the film's strategies both in terms of its cinematic chops and its electioneering rhetoric, switching my focus back and forth to check one against the other. Consider these ruminations, then, as a preliminary scorecard. The final tally awaits November, and the future.

Crescendo of accusation

In many ways, F*9/11 is a victory. First and foremost Moore has kept his own on-screen appearances to a relative minimum. It's a gesture of political and aesthetic maturity that lets the lights shine on a brilliantly selected cast of characters whose personal experiences and specialised knowledge build to a crescendo of accusation that is both emotionally and factually persuasive. Along with the expected boilerplate (Bush's lust for oil, settling scores for daddy), there's substantive evidence that has either not been heard or seen before or never been assembled into this level of critical mass. One example is Moore's footage of how George W. Bush spent his first seven minutes after learning, on the morning of 11 September 2001, what had just happened at the World Trade Center: in an elementary school, reading My Pet Goat to the children. A good move for a teacher, maybe, but not for a president.

Another jackpot is located in Bush's National Guard records, evidently censored between Moore's original requisitioning of them in 2000 and the version released to the US public after the scandal broke over Bush's disappearance from duty. The name blacked out? One James R. Bath, who was Bush's AWOL buddy back then and later became his oil associate and the bagman for the investments of the Saudis, including the Bin Ladens, in Texas oil.

And there's more, and Moore. Even the trademark shticks are more finely tuned, such as when Moore takes a disenchanted military man to Congress and tries to recruit congressmen to send their own children on active duty in Iraq. We see him pitch John Tanner, a Democrat from Tennessee, among others. On the soundtrack Moore tells us that only one member of Congress has a child stationed in Iraq, yet they vote to send the American voters' children there instead. Moore has developed a new tone for this opus: aggrieved dismay. This time around he lets the audience supply the rage.

In a particularly strategic decision Moore departs from his anticipated muckraking to portray the dilemma of patriotic families whose children are killed in action, patriotic soldiers who've decided they're being wrongly deployed, and the military's targeted recruits (back home in Flint, of course). F*9/11 spends quality time with Lila Lipscomb, a flag-waving mom whose attitude is changed not only by the death of her beloved son in Iraq but by his last letter, written shortly before his death and received after the fact, in which he bemoans a misbegotten war and expresses his hope that Americans will vote this man out of the White House. Moore structures whole chapters to show the degree to which African-Americans and the very poor, shut out of other options, join the military and uphold its alleged values. The chapter in which Moore tracks military recruiters – who in turn are busy tracking African-American youth at a downscale shopping mall – is just as chilling as the chapter focused on trying to discover just how and why so many Saudis managed to get out of the US on private chartered jets on 12 September 2001, a day when all aircraft were supposedly grounded.

Smoking guns

Moore's strategies here are very much in keeping with the ways Americans these days absorb information and gauge veracity. It's the personal that counts, not the abstract. Experience is more valued than evidence; appeals to emotion tend to succeed over the most perfectly crafted argument. It's autobiography and pop culture that move American consumers, not sense or sensibility. So Moore and his accomplished team of editors and producers layer on the music, ratchet up the montages and strap their audience into the rollercoaster ride of outrage, supplying enough smoking guns along the way (almost) to build an arsenal.

I have high hopes that F*9/11 will capture the imagination of the US electorate. But whether it will capture the votes is a different matter. While Moore is a master rhetorician, I'd like to think I know something about the subject too, teaching film as I do in the Rhetoric Department of the University of California, Berkeley. Moore has the instinctive grasp of rhetoric found in successful populists. Indeed, it's hard not to think of Argentina's Juan Peron when watching Moore in action, the shadow of the demagogue hanging just over his shoulder. Waiting in the wings is the spirit of P.T. Barnum, a circus-master who knows how to give the public what they want and to convince them that what they want is, in fact, precisely what he's got in stock. Moore is a muckraker in the finest American tradition. It's no wonder he supported Ralph Nader in the 2000 election, jumping ship late in the game when it became clear that Nader was on a fool's errand, set to topple Gore instead of Bush.

Like Nader, however, Moore has a tendency to pick his battles symbolically rather than strategically. As restrained as F*9/11 may be in comparison to Moore's earlier films, and indeed it is his most mature and polished film to date, it nonetheless bears the marks of his two greatest weaknesses as a film-maker and politician: a tendency to lampoon instead of indict and a need for enemies that's so intense he'll sacrifice potential allies in their pursuit.

Stupidity is not the issue

The reliance on lampooning is seen most conveniently in the title of Moore's best-selling book Stupid White Men. Their stupidity is not the issue, Mike! It's their lying, thieving, conflict-of-interest-laden, greedy evil-doing that's the problem. Their smarts, if you will. Though hardly a textbook man of the left, Moore shares with the US left a scorn for leadership that focuses on stupidity as the primary sin, like some sort of Ivy League snobbery in reverse, a good ole boy gleefully outsmarting the blue-chip lads. But the problem with multi-national corporations is hardly that they're stupid; it's that they are so savvy at putting their own bottom line ahead of the public and national good, then spinning brilliant rhetoric to make the public swallow it.

Time and again here Moore resorts to humour to carry his jump-cuts, editing footage to elicit the easy laugh, encouraging the audience to feel smug. It's a show-biz tradition to keep the gallery entertained, but I'm not convinced it's the right gesture. And it gets him into trouble, as in those sequences in which he ridicules the Saudis and casts suspicion on Bin Laden relatives; in a US that's only dimly aware of differences between Middle East nations, it's a tactic that can be received too comfortably as Arab-bashing. The same thing happens when he makes fun of the Coalition of the Willing, then engages in a low level of stereotype via found footage. This year the game is too serious, the stakes too high, for pratfalls. Does humour enrich outrage or diminish it? I don't believe that Moore knows the answer. Or the difference.

Meanwhile, Moore's focus on enemies can be a distraction from alliance-building. Given that one of the prime features of Bush's dastardly actions these past four years is the arrogant disregard for global alliances, I'd hate to see Moore adopt a domestic version of the same thing – yet the evidence is troubling. First, he attacks Democrats with nearly the same fervour as he does Republicans. Fair enough. They've both made a mess. But consider the scene of Moore cornering a congressman with his recruitment pitch. The Republicans won't stop to talk to him, so it's Tanner, the Democrat, whom Moore manages to hornswoggle into a damning conversation. Over and over he pictures the Republicans as evil, the Democrats as hapless. This is hardly a get-out-the-vote strategy unless he's pimping for Nader again, or for the Greens, or Dennis Kucinich. I think there's a grave danger that Moore's tactics will misfire and let Bush glide into home plate once again.

Crash course in rhetoric

In an effort to decode Moore's strategy, I found myself turning to his only American predecessor in the cinema realpolitik game: the late, great Emile De Antonio, who hated Nixon and Hoover at the same at-boil temperature that Moore maintains for Bush and Rumsfeld. De Antonio boasted of his appearance on Nixon's enemies list, but he never appeared in his own films (until the very end, his last, an autobiography), relying entirely on montages of archival material grasped from a stunningly wide range of international sources. Moore seems increasingly to be learning this lesson, amassing materials missing from the mainstream media and letting others speak for him. It's a strong strategy; De Antonio was effective in discrediting McCarthy and helping to jumpstart opposition to the Vietnam War, among other causes. But he never sought to speak directly to voters: instead he focused on communicating with those in power, the policy-makers in a position to depose false kings. He was a prep-school boy, whose rich pals provided the financing, and commoners rarely speak in his brilliant films: instead experts skewer false gods and potentates incriminate themselves.

Well, Amerika has changed since then. Moore's demagogue is a much better fit for a country attuned to talk radio and reality TV, a populace made ignorant by decades of tax cuts to education. Moore isn't really a man of the left, anyway. He comes from Michigan, a prime militia state. In the midst of the Cannes festival, at a café table not far from where the French police were assembled to combat any escalation by the ranks of striking performing-arts workers (who briefly provided Moore with a photo op), a museum curator explained Moore's politics to me. She knew Michigan enough to assure me that, in its terms, Moore is a classic Libertarian. With elements that can look both right and left to the casual viewer, Moore stands up for the little man whose way of life is being destroyed by big corporations and big government. Moore's desire to fight for the rights of Everyman is what unifies the logics of his films and political gestures.

The Democratic Party desperately needs a crash course in rhetoric if it is to have any chance of evicting Bush. Alas, from the evidence of his documentary, Moore the blue-collar he-man doesn't seem to want to help out Kerry the Brahmin gent. Why not? For all his hatred of the Bushes and their hitmen, I suspect Moore can't quite stomach the Democrats either. Too bad. There's a very simple statement that has to be made: the only way to defeat George W. Bush is to elect John Kerry. But F*9/11 doesn't make it. I get the feeling Moore is wishing for some other way to do the deed.

In the end, I fear Michael Moore is content to play the lone prophet once again; no Ayn Rand certainly, but a suspiciously Libertarian individualist nonetheless. While he prepares for his imaginary showdown at the OK corral with George, the Republicans will be busy loading their rhetoric and preparing to blast everyone out of the way. As a film critic and as an American, I so want a bullet-proof F*9/11, a documentary firm in its arguments, outrageous in its evidence, aimed at the electoral season like a surgical strike. Instead Moore struts on his glorious stage with tremendous finesse, justifiably proud of what he has wrought. But to what end? Where are the July theatrical release and October DVD campaign meant to lead us, beyond the box office and home-entertainment centre? I'm afraid that, unless his godfather Harvey Weinstein has a plan up his sleeve that's equal to his infamous Oscar coups, we could well be in trouble, come November.

This feature appeared in the July 2004 issue of S&S. Order a subscription online now

Why would he though? It would've been pointless and I think he realized that, especially by the time the 37th representative came to the podium.
Why would he? Why would he let Representatives air a legitimate complaint about the handling of the election? Why wouldn't he let a Senator off the leash to help? (You don't think that Gore could have pulled a favor and gotten a Senator to sign on, if nothing else?)

Gee, I dunno why he would.

Do you not see the (very specific) role he was playing at that moment? His "joke" tips you off to his motiviations moreso than any guesswork using vague things such as "how party politics work" (which I don't get: wouldn't typical party politics at work result in him NOT cutting off the reps?)
His "joke" tips me off that Al Gore's a worthless, tail-tucked-between-his-legs conservative Democrat who never would have been elected dog catcher if not for his daddy.

The whole point was that it was NOT a legitimate complaint. A senator's signature was required to make it legitimate. And hello, there were 37 people making the same point.

A senator's signature was required to make it legitimate.
No, a "senator's signature was required" to let Congress debate the complaint. The legitimacy or lack thereof does not depend on any signature. If one rep had raised the argument, it would still be legitimate.

Why do you insist on defining good/bad, right/wrong, legitimate/illegitimate by "the rules" (which you've yet to show any understand of to start with)?

How does one Senator's signature make their argument any more legitimate?

And hello, there were 37 people making the same point.
Yeah, why does anyone need so many people to protest? One guy hitchhiking to Selma would have been just as effective, right?

xpost - Jesus fucking Christ, learn to read, that's already been covered. Possibly multiple times.

xpost - it's not my fault you asked a question that had already been discussed in basically the same wording.

I apologize profusely. This discussion has been going on for a few days and I do not remember everything that has been discussed. Perhaps you could've just said "it's been discussed....look upthread" instead of taking the condescending asshole path.

I'll say it again: the only thing a Senator's signature does is force Congress to debate the matter. That's it. Legitimate/illegitimate, valid/invalid are not things decided by the rules.

And it's not like the response was a hundred posts back or two weeks ago. Yesterday, less than 50 posts back.

Why can't I find more of this genre of porn?

Obviously your response upthread to that question didn't make a big impression on me. Would it kill you to restate your position or were you just mad that I was violating the protocol of how things should be discussed?

It doesn't matter if I think there was a valid point, just as it doesn't matter if Gore thought there was a valid point.
Of course it does. Remember that whole "bending the rules" thing?

But you claimed the complaint was invalid and illegitimate because no Senator signed on. Are you backing off that now, do you see that validity and legitimacy have nothing to do with the rules here?

My understanding is that the Senate has many, many things which it must debate and not enough time to be able to debate things which are not made into a formal objection. If one person had the power to decide what should or should not be debated according to their own whim and ignore the protocol, I think that'd be, you know, bad.
Well, then your problem is that you have no understanding of the situation. This was a joint session of Congress, not just the Senate, that is provided five days to get through the process of confirming the election.

If not validity or legitimacy, what special signifigance does an objection that meets the requirements posess?

Likewise, I'll ask it again - why was Gore's "impartiality" preferable/better/good aside from "impartiality for impartiality's sake" circular reasoning.

Fuck a bunch of gauche. You really think looking "gauche" is a good reason to deny these folks their chance to air a legitimate grievance in whatever way was possible? (again: even if you want to pretend that the unified DNC front wasn't planned, you don't think a Senator would have signed on if Gore or a leader had asked? Gore had all the power to let them speak, he refused to use it.)

That's assuming you agree that there was a legitimate grievance to be had in the handling of Florida's voter rolls. Which you've tip-toed around answering.

You really think looking "gauche" is a good reason to deny these folks their chance to air a legitimate grievance in whatever way was possible?

No, that was more of a personal reaction thing, but perhaps this was a determinant in why Gore chose to act the way he did. My main point was about the conflict of interests itself.

xpost Maybe dems are like that because they are extremely wary of their character being attacked?

Maybe Dems are like that because they've spent so long losing and running to the right they don't know any better. Or maybe Dems are like that because they're owned by the same people as the GOP. Who knows. The only thing I know is that there isn't a good reason for it.

xpost - But he'd already lost. Without much hope of a comeback, and if he was going to make one, it would be with Democratic anger. So what was the need for?

"Had my top aide whispered in my ear, 'America is under attack,' I would have told those kids very politely and nicely that the president of the United States had something he needed to attend to," Kerry told about 7,000 people at Unity 2004: Journalists of Color Conference.

Pretty decisive answer, if you ask me.

YOu mean Cheney?

Basically, Moore, buoyed by those figures, decided not to submit the film for documentary consideration on the off-chance that he could secure a television broadcast before the election that would allow more people to see the film.

not bad for a polemic.

Long excerpt (~20mins) but worth a revisit:
https://vimeo.com/82098716

If Christian Slater tells me who I should vote for I would totally listen to him.
― martin m. (mushrush), Tuesday, June 15, 2004