Pure garbage


This attempt to "correct the record" is pure garbage. And as we all know now, the Bush administration is made up of liars, incompetents and war criminals. The Republican party, the G.O.P is infested with predators, closet homosexual hypocrites, racists and perverts. Senators George Allen and Larry Craig proved that spectacularly. Michael Moore is a courageous, patriotic American film maker. Farenheit 911 documents the truth in order to inform the American people so that President "Mission Accomplished" and V.P. Halliburton cannot dupe the American people any longer. The truth always comes out.

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Really, was your post anything but one long rant stating your own opinion that you cannot back up without using faulty evidense and lies? Give me a break. Do some research that hasn't been set up by Moore or others like him and maybe we can talk.

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Note that the person above didn't bring any facts themselves.

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[deleted]

As my review/rant is too long for an IMDb comment, I'll leave it here, and this should give your side more to rant back at (but I never re-visit films I've already posted on, due to lack of time and interest, so someone else will have to play along if you want that sort of back-and-forth)

4/10

This film is essentially a giant campaign commercial, for Bush, against Kerry. It's not much of a documentary about anything, than a collection of conservative talking points for the 2004 election. Right there, it fails as a film, because viewing it now, it's so dated and stuck in its time, as any campaign commercial would be (well, except those of particular artistic value, like the anti-Goldwater nuclear one, or comedic value such as the recent "I am not a witch" one) that it's painful to watch. A key flaw in the film is that it starts out about Bush, and is tangentially about Moore, but then turns into an attack on Kerry for no particular reason. Until you view it as a campaign ad.

The quality of the film is bad, overall. But as for the content I have these points:

1. The film glosses over the US Supreme Court's stated bias in favor of Republicans in the Bush v Gore case, and the court's unusual statement within their decision that it could not be used as precedent for any other case (in other words, the case is BS and has nothing do to with principle, and they don't want it infecting the lower courts). It also completely glosses over the fact that the US Constitution already provides for a way to deal with election messes like what happened. The court had literally no need to get involved, except to take the election out of the process already set out by law, and decide it themselves, and the decision itself reveals that. It's just astonishing that the equal right to identical ballot re-counting across an entire state (but not the entire country) wasn't noticed until the nation's third century, and the right is exercised by NOT re-counting ANY ballots. (Nevermind that the same logic requires that votes all be cast and counted on the same machinery to achieve the same rate of error, but nobody cares about that.) Something that astounding is worth mentioning, if you're going to bring up this decision, isn't it?

2. Harris was not an "obscure public official". She was the last Florida Secretary of State to be elected in a statewide general election, rather than being appointed. Secretary of State is a Cabinet-level position. AND she was Bush campaign co-chair, a clear conflict of interest for someone with a government role in the election process.

3. The film suggests that the networks' decision to call Florida ahead of the panhandle polls closing may have tightened the election result, in Gore's favor. Yet, I bet the commercial networks called Florida in every election year, when its Eastern time zone polls closed, out of habit. It's about being watched and selling ad time, not about influencing results. Notably, PBS, a national network who conservatives love to bash as liberal and incompetent, did NOT do this, but that was ignored.

4. It's just a little too convenient how the film nullifies any voting irregularities (Diebold machines, fraudulent overseas ballots, corruption) that would favor Gore if exposed, but focus on the few that favor Bush.

5. While Clinton can be blamed for a lot of the spy failures (can we stop calling spying "intelligence"?) Bush ultimately shoulders the blame for 9/11. He didn't act on the memo. Republicans hate that, but that is the simple truth. Two additional things: the Bush family is certainly well-connected to the CIA and likely other government agencies through Poppy, and the Bush family is also well-connected to the Bin Laden family, so any Bush should have known the seriousness with which to take this threat. However, if Republicans were so incensed by Clinton's failures in this regard, they could have impeached him for it. Instead they impeached his penis.

6. The USA PATRIOT Act was not so much a response to 9/11 as a wish list of expanded government powers that Republicans had always wanted, but could never get due to violations of civil liberties. A cowardly Congress passed it, not because it was right, not because they even knew what it did, but because they wanted to be seen to be doing anything fast. Just because Democrats are generally spineless hypocrites doesn't mean Republicans are doing the right thing. Quite the opposite.

7. I can't believe they actually said that if you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about. This is the most seductive lie about government surveillance. (a) What's right today can be made wrong tomorrow... suddenly you're a lawbreaker. (b) The law in some areas may not be settled... maybe you're a lawbreaker... or not. (c) You may not have violated the law, but you may have angered someone in the system (or you will when the other party eventually gets back in power) and they can now use that information against you in corrupt ways. (d) Because conservatives love to starve government, at least some surveillance will probably be done by private organizations or other proxies, even foreign entities, who have less (or no) requirement or capacity to safeguard that data from thieves, tabloids, your boss, or whoever.

8. Bush (and Blair) lied about WMD. The history speaks for itself, and is beyond question at this point. I'll grant the filmmakers that in 2004, maybe a conservative wouldn't have been able to see that. (I consider Blair's "New Labour" to be a conservative party.)

9. The film delves into whether spies and politicians (believing their spies) believed Iraq had WMD, but then ignores the fact that inspectors were never finding any. There was never ANY hard evidence of WMD, just beliefs. You can't launch a pre-emptive war based on beliefs. You typically need facts. If all these other countries believed in WMDs, why didn't they go to war in Iraq too? Surely nuclear annihilation overrides any cash that might be made. You can't buy much with radioactive euros, no matter how many, because you're dead and the products are destroyed. Notably, the US's best friend and trading partner, Canada, did not go to war in Iraq. Sometimes you should listen to your friends when they tell you no. Saddam was completely contained and powerless, and was going to stay that way.

10. The film pretends that Kerry claims that the French would be fighting alongside the US in Iraq. Kerry would not have gone into Iraq in the first place, and that's key. The wars he would choose to fight would be wars of necessity (such as the hunt for Bin Laden that Bush abandoned in favor of Iraq) and as a result, the US would have the respect and reason that would attract allies like France and others to the cause, instead of inspiring worldwide protest and anti-US scorn. However, since the US was already in Iraq in the 2004 campaign this film was created for, Kerry is stating the obvious truth that he'd get more allies then Bush did. The film doubts France and Germany. But I'm certain he could have had Canada, even though Canada was already in Afghanistan for the US. Canadians, by far, regarded Kerry (or anyone, frankly) more trustworthy and intelligent than Bush.

11. The film suggests that the US has been at war with radical Islam since 1979 with the revolution in Iran, but then also suggests that this is a radical fringe of Islam. How can a "fringe form of Islamic extremism" be running Iran AND Iraq AND Afghanistan ETC.? It may be radical, but Bush is wrong to call it a fringe, just as he was wrong to call for a crusade, and wrong about just about everything else. Still, it's clear to anyone looking at history that there was never any link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, until the US created it. The Iraq War drew Al Qaeda to the region to fight US soldiers. The film even admits they don't have the evidence, and basically states that just believing is evidence enough.

12. The film promotes pre-emptive (illegal) war. The idea of the West is that we value certain principles. We don't pre-empt. We wait for facts, and then act on them. We don't act on imagined nightmares. Even so, Kerry says (right in the film) that he will repel any attack. Not "respond to", but "repel". That involves some amount of prevention, a thing which Bush utterly failed to do. In fact, Bush is the one who prevented nothing, and then flailed about wildly attacking whoever was convenient when the US got hit.

13. The Iraq War is justified as though it cost less in lives and dollars than another attack on the US. But more US soldiers died in Iraq than US residents died in the 9/11 attack (about 3000 versus about 4200 as of late 2009), and those 9/11 attacks were highly dependent on chance going the way of the terrorists and not likely to be duplicated. I'd guess more was also spent in the Iraq War than was spent building, and cleaning up the WTC and Pentagon.

14. In 2004, having failed to find WMD, and with coalition members jumping ship already, the war suddenly became about bringing democracy to Iraq. Does it have democracy now? And more importantly, is life better under the new masters? Life was not great before, but it got worse for many. Ask a woman or a gay man. As for Afghanistan's "democracy", they don't even have a functioning government at all. After spending nearly a decade in both Afghanistan and Iraq, did you get what you paid for? Was it worth your home, your job, and your future? That's what you borrowed against to pay for it. A far better way to encourage true democracy and freedom in the Mid-East is to simply bring them the internet, which they've figured out themselves already. That has nothing to do with Saddam.

15. Swiftboating. Enough said.

16. At least the partisan Medved reveals that his attacks on Kerry are personal, based on his inability to accept Kerry's input. I surely find Medved at least as insufferable as he found Kerry, and I only know the guy on my TV screen where I can mute him, pause him, and delete him.

17. Yes, shocking though it may seem, thinking men do change their minds.

18. And before you conservatives say that Bush's election in 2004 was such a great thing, look what you got in 2008, as a direct result of Bush's idiocy: yet another Bush-like arrogant but empty head in Obama, elected by independents desperate to have ANYONE other than Bush or your crowd, to save the country. Now, imagine if this was Kerry's second term. I suggest that the country would be far better off right now, financially and otherwise, for not having Bush screw it up for four more years, and Obama fail to clean it up (or do hardly anything else he was elected to do either).

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The first post in this thread fits the thread title to a tee, as it is "Pure Garbage".

Overzealous, uneducated, slobbering sheep will always follow wherever the lead sheep takes them, regardless of facts presented. The people that follow (and believe) that fat slob Michael Moore's slanted, out-of-context 'quotes', and propagandist *beep* movie as "facts" really need to pull their collective heads out of their collective asses.

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@DirectorLawrence
Note that the person above didn't bring any facts themselves.

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Exactly. Straw-Boy can bash and tell everyone they are liars, but he hasn't posted any facts with source to prove any in Fahrenheit 9/11 to be false. No conservative have been able to do that. All they say is, "Michael Moore is an idiot." and obviously that's not true either. lol!!

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