zoney! said:
You are right. You are missing the point here, though. People keep on lashing out at this movie, calling it all lies, without seeing it.
It's disappointing too, because there are lots of moments in the film that really *can't* be the result of Moore misconstruing the facts. Instead, conservatives just pick on the most irrelevant moments of the film as "evidence." FYI, for those who haven't seen it, the scene with Paul Wolfowitz fixing his hair that is oft brought up is one of those irrelevant scenes; in conjunction with other key members of the Bush Administration, the film begins with them all putting on makeup for the camera and ends with them all taking it off. It is, essentially, a clever way to introduce the "cast of characters" and to dismiss them, but, in terms of the relevance of any of it? There isn't any, and it isn't even implied to be relevant.
But where it works is when they catch the Bush Administration in their lies in the media, where they count on the fact that news media is inherently disposable and they don't expect anyone to dig back far enough to pick on the contradiction. And Moore doesn't need to say anything; watching a clip of Bush saying one thing and saying another is evidence enough. Or how about Bush's military records? Using the Freedom of Information Act, he requested Bush's military records on two separate occasions: once in 2000 (before all the 9/11 hoopla) and once after 9/11. The glaring difference was the name of a person blacked out on the post-9/11 report, but not on a pre-9/11 report. And the name was of a military pal who turned into a business partner, who had extensive ties to the Binladin Group. So what did Bush have to hide? These things Moore doesn't have to make up: the documents speak for themselves. And the connection between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family is really quite eerie; but don't take that to mean that Bush had ties with Osama bin Laden, because Moore doesn't say that. Osama is repeatedly shown to be this kind of aloof religious fanatic, but it does show how Bush's intimate ties with both the House of Saud and the Binladin Group might be why there is a major conflict of interest on this "war on terror." After all, how does the fact that nearly all the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia connect to Iraq? They don't.
Or how about the Taliban? Watching news footage of the Taliban in Texas in April 2001 to discuss an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan to Pakistan is pretty eerie as well. Here we have a regime with aggregious human rights violations, not to mention known Al Qaeda terrorist camps with Osama bin Laden right smack in the middle, and there they were invited to the U.S. so Unocal can get their oil. So what do we do after we topple the Taliban? Appoint Hamid Karzai as President of Afghanistan and Zalmay Khalilzad as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan--both of whom have had extensive ties to Unocal prior to their appointment. So pardon me if people suspect that Afghanistan was primarily about oil, but it is clear that the U.S. was perfectly contented to deal with the Taliban prior to 9/11.
Or how about, prior to 9/11, watching news clips of Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney explicitly saying that Iraq has no stockpiles of WMDs and that we have them under control with the embargo? That has to be one of the funniest moments in the film, and it isn't as if these are ambiguous statements ballooned with Moore's narration. Nope...the statements are pretty damn explicit from them alone.
I think the most interesting thing about this film, if there is to be only one, is how the Bush Administration really does count on the disposability of the media and the general public's collectively short attention span. Moore's greatest strength in the film is the fact that he digs up explicit video clips that make any charge of "bias" pretty damn difficult to back up.
Melon
Pete!!
about the controversy. Pete's entitled to his opinion.
