SubscribeSo this Michael Moore, he vibrates?Not very quickly. And girls are not that interested in straddling him. Assuming that's even possible.
How can we deny, then, that paving the way for indirect control, at least, of oil was a factor, and perhaps a major motivator, for the war in Iraq?Because it's almost certainly not true? There are about eight-billion obvious, not-secret and equally morally dubious reasons this administration wanted a war in Iraq. If they had been truly serious about long-term strategic control of the region with regard to the oilfields, they'd have taken the post-war occupation much more seriously. As it is, we're going to leave Iraq in an unstable state that very possibly could put its oil under the control of Islamic radicals. What we've done has acted as a destabilizing force on Saudi Arabia—it could become overtly what it's been covertly, very anti-American. The neocons, without a doubt, saw Iraq's oil as a prize in their utopian westernized Iraq fantasies. But the neocon fantasy was never what motivated this administration, it was its cover.
Rep. Mark Kennedy, a Republican, is a little annoyed at leftist film maker Michael Moore after an edited version of an interview between the two appeared in the trailer for Moore's upcoming U.S. release of the film "Fahrenheit 9/11."
"I was walking back to my office after casting a vote, and all of a sudden some oversized guy puts a mike in my face and a camera in my face," Kennedy said. "He starts asking if I can help him recruit more people from families of members of Congress to participate in the war on terror."
Kennedy said he told Moore that he has two nephews in the military, one who has just been deployed in the Army National Guard. But to Kennedy's annoyance, his response to Moore was cut from the trailer, which was released Thursday. His response was also cut from the film, according to a spokeswoman for the movie.
"The interesting thing is that they used my image, but not my words," Kennedy said. "It's representative of the fact that Michael Moore doesn't always give the whole story, and he's a master of the misleading."
After a year spent covering the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, I was recently allowed to attend a Hollywood screening. Based on that single viewing, and after separating out what is clearly presented as Moore's opinion from what is stated as fact, it seems safe to say that central assertions of fact in "Fahrenheit 9/11" are supported by the public record (indeed, many of them will be familiar to those who have closely followed Bush's political career).Michael Moore does Agit-Prop wonderfully. He talks directly to the man in the street, something that the right in the US thought it had a monopoly on - more than that, he's media savy and is smart enough to not base anything on lies, while choreographing his documentaries for maximum emotional effect. Thats why the right-wingers hate him more than all the ineffectual leftish intellectuals, those who might as well be speaking a different language than the masses that grew up on pop culture and MTV. Finally the left has produced a pop-culture media personality that's willing to clobber the right in what they imagined was their own home turf. Good.
For the White House, the most devastating segment of Farenheit 9/11 may be the video of a befuddled-looking President Bush staying put for nearly seven minutes at a Florida elementary school on the morning of September 11, continuing to read a copy of My Pet Goat to schoolchildren even after an aide has told him that a second plane has struck the twin towers.Moore stipples his film with damning (and in some cases doubtful) statistics—for example, that Mr. Bush spent 42 percent of the first eight months of his presidency on vacation—and vituperation. But, Shenon concludes, while "Mr. Bush's slow, hesitant reaction to the disastrous news has never been a secret,…seeing the actual footage, with the minutes ticking by, may prove more damaging to the White House than all the statistics in the world."
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posted by Keyser Soze at 3:16 AM on June 22, 2004