It is with great disenchantment that I’ve witnessed film critics, journalists, former heads of state, friends, and family – people whom, to varying degrees, I respect – praise Michael Moore’s latest exercise in celluloid dishonesty. I grow tired of all the hagiographic responses to this film (quite literally in the case of this paper, which pronounced him “Saint Michael Moore”). If Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns, Moore’s 24 frames-per-second are the speed at which the truth blurs.
Moore bafflingly claims that Bush’s true motive for invading Afghanistan was not the Taliban’s protection of the barbarians who murdered 3000 American civilians, but the construction of an oil pipeline. Nearly three years after the invasion there remains no Afghani pipeline. There is, however, a highway and other necessary additions to the nation’s infrastructure.
Later Moore describes Iraq as a sovereign nation that has never murdered an American. I’ll allow that American combat casualties don’t count as murders, but the Iraqi Secret Service attempted to assassinate former-President George H.W. Bush, and that’s to say nothing of Saddam’s support for Palestinian militants who have indeed killed Americans.
Even Moore’s Daily Show-lite clips can’t avoid bending the truth. Yes, Bush did call the “haves and have-mores” his “base”, as depicted in a piece of seemingly damaging footage. But it does in fact matter where he said it and in what context. These words were spoken at the Al Smith Dinner, a sort of campaign equivalent to the White House Correspondence Dinner, that later saw Al Gore make similar jokes at his own expense.
To take Moore seriously is to make a huge mistake. I wouldn’t be so concerned by this vile film if so many people weren’t deluded by its deception. The anti-Bush movement needs neither Moore’s wretched distortions nor his dime-store punditry.
