I was talking to a friend yesterday about this movie. I am not planning on seeing the movie since I think Spiderman 2 is a much better choice for my $9. I guess he hadn’t read some of the reviews that I had read so I did a little research and here is my best choice. I decided to post it so it would be easier to find again. Enjoy!
Fahrenhype Update – Categories: News, The Culture, Movies – Tim Curlee – [email protected] @ 11:36:14 am
For those of you who still intrigued by the lies of Michael Moore, here are a few articles and blogs worth a gander:
Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, hardly conservatives, speak out about Moore’s distortions (excerpts):
n his new movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” film-maker Michael Moore makes the eye-popping claim that Saudi Arabian interests “have given” $1.4 billion to firms connected to the family and friends of President George W. Bush. This, Moore suggests, helps explain one of the principal themes of the film: that the Bush White House has shown remarkable solicitude to the Saudi royals, even to the point of compromising the war on terror. When you and your associates get money like that, Moore says at one point in the movie, “who you gonna like? Who’s your Daddy?”But a cursory examination of the claim reveals some flaws in Moore’s arithmetic””not to mention his logic. Moore derives the $1.4 billion figure from journalist Craig Unger’s book, “House of Bush, House of Saud.” Nearly 90 percent of that amount, $1.18 billion, comes from just one source: contracts in the early to mid-1990’s that the Saudi Arabian government awarded to a U.S. defense contractor, BDM, for training the country’s military and National Guard. What’s the significance of BDM? The firm at the time was owned by the Carlyle Group, the powerhouse private-equity firm whose Asian-affiliate advisory board has included the president’s father, George H.W. Bush.
Leave aside the tenuous six-degrees-of-separation nature of this “connection.” The main problem with this figure, according to Carlyle spokesman Chris Ullman, is that former president Bush didn’t join the Carlyle advisory board until April, 1998””five months after Carlyle had already sold BDM to another defense firm. True enough, the former president was paid for one speech to Carlyle and then made an overseas trip on the firm’s behalf the previous fall, right around the time BDM was sold. But Ullman insists any link between the former president’s relations with Carlyle and the Saudi contracts to BDM that were awarded years earlier is entirely bogus. “The figure is inaccurate and misleading,” said Ullman. “The movie clearly implies that the Saudis gave $1.4 billion to the Bushes and their friends. But most of it went to a Carlyle Group company before Bush even joined the firm. Bush had nothing to do with BDM.”
Richard Cohen, a liberal, doesn’t like the movie and doens’t believe it help those who are opposed to the war. Excerpts:
I brought a notebook with me when I went to see Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and in the dark made notes before I gave up, defeated by the utter stupidity of the movie. One of my notes says “John Ellis,” who is a cousin of George W. Bush and the fellow who called the election for Fox News that dark and infamous night when the presidency — or so the myth goes — was stolen from Al Gore, delivering the nation to Halliburton, the Carlyle Group and Saudi Arabia, and plunging it into war. A better synopsis of the movie you’re not likely to read.
Moore’s depiction of why Bush went to war is so silly and so incomprehensible that it is easily dismissed. As far as I can tell, it is a farrago of conspiracy theories. But nothing is said about multiple U.N. resolutions violated by Iraq or the depredations of Saddam Hussein. In fact, prewar Iraq is depicted as some sort of Arab folk festival — lots of happy, smiling, indigenous people. Was there no footage of a Kurdish village that had been gassed? This is obscenity by omission.The case against Bush need not and should not rest on guilt by association or half-baked conspiracy theories, which collapse at the first double take but reinforce the fervor of those already convinced. The success of Moore’s movie, though, suggests this is happening — a dialogue in which anti-Bush forces talk to themselves and do so in a way that puts off others. I found that happening to me in the run-up to the war, when I spent more time and energy arguing with those who said the war was about oil (no!) or Israel (no!) or something just as silly than I did questioning the stated reasons for invading Iraq — weapons of mass destruction and Hussein’s links to Osama bin Laden. This was stupid of me, but human nature nonetheless.
Some of that old feeling returned while watching Moore’s assault on the documentary form. It is so juvenile in its approach, so awful in its journalism, such an inside joke for people who already hate Bush, that I found myself feeling a bit sorry for a president who is depicted mostly as a befuddled dope. I fear how it will play to the undecided.
Dave Kopel has a great link debunking Moore’s myths. Also check out Moore Watch and Fahrenheit Facts.
Finally, Bill Hobbs thinks Fahrenhype is good for Bush.