(As opposed to the son-of-the-whore-Raj-Feridun's incoherent blather,
here's a truly revealing review.)

The importance of being Michael Moore

June 29, 2004

Mark Steyn

Excited about Fahrenheit 9/11? It's the Palme d'Or-winning and
soon-to-be Oscar-winning documentary from average blue-collar
multi-millionaire Michael Moore, and it opens in Britain next week. I
saw it over the weekend on my side of the Atlantic, with an audience
comprised wholly of informed, intelligent sophisticates.

I knew they were informed, intelligent sophisticates because they
howled with laughter at every joke about what a bozo Bush is. They
split their sides during the patriotic ballad - eagles soaring, etc -
composed and sung by John Ashcroft, the famously sinister US
Attorney-General. Moore reveals - and if you feel that knowing the
plot would spoil the movie, please skip to the next paragraph - that
Bush is a privileged simpleton under the control of war-crazed Big Oil
interests who arranged to have the 2000 election stolen for him. I
hadn't heard that before, had you?

Once Moore gets past his recounting of the Florida recount, I was
pleasantly surprised by how much I agreed with in the movie. For
example, he's very hard on the Saudis, and the unique access to the
Bush family enjoyed by their oleaginous ambassador in Washington,
Prince Bandar. He's also very mocking of the absurdities of post-9/11
airport security, alighting on a poor mom forced to drink a beaker of
her own breast milk in front of passengers before boarding in order to
demonstrate the liquid wasn't anything incendiary.

As we left, the couple ahead of me said they thought Bush would have a
hard job responding to these shocking revelations. I didn't like to
point out they could have heard about all this stuff years ago just by
reading yours truly. I mentioned the breast-milk incident in this very
space on August 10, 2002. I called for Prince Bandar to be booted back
to Saudi in a Spectator column from November 2002, and I've been
urging the dismantling of the kingdom - Washington's out-of-control
Frankensaud monster - for almost three years now, since within a month
of 9/11.

So in theory I ought to welcome Michael Moore as a comrade in arms.
But the trouble with Fahrenheit 9/11 is that you don't come away
thinking about the Saudis or America's useless bureaucracy, you come
away laughing at Bush.

And, if feeling snobbishly superior to the President isn't your bag,
what's left is an incoherent bore. Moore follows his GUT, by which I
mean his Grand Universal Theory: Bush is to blame for everything.
Because of Bush, the Saudis secretly run US policy. Because of Bush,
the Taliban were in bed with Texas energy executives. Because of Bush,
the Taliban got toppled.

Whoa, hold up a minute, I thought he was all pals with the Taliban.
The Saudis certainly were, which is why they opposed the liberation of
Afghanistan. But by now Moore's moved on to pointing out that Bush's
Afghan stooge Hamid Karzai used to work for the Texas energy company
panting for that big Afghan gas pipeline.

But hang on, I thought the Texan energy guys already had the Taliban
in their pockets and were funded by the Saudis. "Connecting the dots"
is all very well, but not when you've got more dots in your picture
than Seurat.

Bush has always been the issue for Moore. On September 11 itself, his
only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and DC
instead of Texas or, indeed, my beloved New Hampshire: "They did not
deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did
so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston,
New York, DC and the plane's destination of California - these were
places that voted AGAINST Bush!"

The fellows at the controls of those planes were training for 9/11
when Clinton was president and Gore was ahead in the polls, and they'd
have still been in the cockpit had Ralph Nader been elected. Though
Mohammed Atta took flying lessons in Florida, he apparently wasn't as
exercised about its notorious hanging chads as Michael Moore. Mr Moore
is guilty of what I believe psychologists call "projection".

The "Why didn't you terrorists kill the Bush voters?" line is not
reprised in the movie, but the strange preoccupations it betrays drive
the entire picture. Here's the way it works: if Bush is wearing the
blue boxer shorts, they're a suspicious personal gift from Crown
Prince Abdullah. If Bush is wearing the red boxer shorts, it's a
conspiracy to distract public attention from the blue ones he was
given by Crown Prince Abdullah. If he's wearing no boxer shorts, it's
because he's so dumb he can't find his underwear in the morning.

So, shortly after 9/11, Moore wrote that footage of one of the World
Trade Centre planes showed that it was being trailed by an F-16 - ie,
the government could have shot it down but chose not to, so it could
hit all those Al Gore voters. Imagine if, on September 11, the USAF
had blown four passenger jets to kingdom come. Moore's film would be
filled with poignant home movies of final Christmases and birthday
parties and exploitative footage of anguished parents going to
Washington to demand the truth about what happened that day and an end
to the lame Bush spin about "threats" to public buildings.

Midway through the picture, a "peace" activist provides a perfect
distillation of its argument. He recalls a conversation with an
acquaintance, who observed, "bin Laden's a real asshole for killing
all those people". "Yeah," says the "pacifist", "but he'll never be as
big an asshole as Bush." That's who Michael Moore makes films for:
those sophisticates who know that, no matter how many people bin Laden
kills, in the assholian stakes he'll always come a distant second to
Bush.

I can understand the point of being Michael Moore: there's a lot of
money in it. What's harder to figure out is the point of being a
devoted follower of Michael Moore. Apparently, the sophisticated,
cynical intellectual class is so na$(D??(Bve it'll fall for any old hooey
peddled by a preening opportunist burlesque act. If the Saudis were
smart, they'd have bought him up years ago, established his anti-Saudi
credentials, and then used him to promote the defeat of their nemesis
Bush.

Hmm. Maybe they don't need to. Stick him in a headdress and he looks
like King Fahd's brother. All I'm saying is connect the dots.


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 "Ah yes, we must mollify angry fanatics who seek our destruction 
because otherwise .. they might get mad and seek our destruction."
- Ann Coulter 9/26/2002