Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is a movie which, as someone once said of my columns, contains more lies than words. Of course, in keeping with his reputation for honesty, Moore doesn’t outright lie so much as deliberately distort, confuse, and omit. The film is trash: but make not mistake, it’s cleverly developed and laid out trash which is designed to (and will) lead many to jump to the wrong conclusions about the world.

This is a movie directed towards two distinct groups of people: radical Bush-haters who will believe anything bad said about the President and people who have barely opened a newspaper in the past three years and who, therefore, have only a vague (an thus easily malleable) understanding of recent history. The movie so much as true as based upon true events, drawing what it wants from them, sorting them into the order it wishes, and then redacting everything which doesn’t fit its worldview (which, in essence, can be summed up by three words: “Bush is evil”).

Let’s begin with the opening, where Moore tells his version of events in the state of Florida during the 2000 election. Moore begins with the networks calling the state for Florida, ignoring all of the questions about those calls (such as the fact that the state was called when the polls were still open in the conservative Florida part of the state which falls into the central time zone and that the networks called the state for Gore even when they wouldn’t call states Bush was winning by a much larger margin for him). He then goes on to demonize Fox News and John Ellis (who was merely one member of Fox’s election team) for then calling the state for Bush. Notice the omission, the first of many the film will make: no mention whatsoever is made of the fact that, after calling the state for Gore, all of the networks then retracted the call hours before Fox then went on to call the state for Bush. He then goes on to repeat the tired liberal claim that had, in fact, all the votes been counted, Gore would have won, failing altogether to mention that Bush won the initial count, the recount, and maintained his lead through the bizarre process mandated by the Florida Supreme Court in which various individuals sought to psychically mine votes from a few selected Democratic counties in an effort to manufacture enough votes for Gore. He also pulls up the tired myth of “disenfranchised” black Democrats without mentioning either the evidence that felons (the overwhelming majority of them, naturally, being registered Democrats) managed to vote anyways or the shameful Democrat effort to disqualify military ballots on absurd technicalities.

Moore then goes on to the formal count of the Electoral College ballots, where a number of boorish members of the Congressional Black Caucus, in the course of making asses of themselves as usual, tried to object to the ratification of the election result. Moore treats the effort as though it were somehow substantive, rather than a little bit of irrelevant political theatre (even had, somehow, the radical left of the Democratic Party forced a vote, they’ve have been defeated by the Republican majorities in both houses or Congress). Frankly, I found the incident hilarious at the time and I found it so again. If anything, the spectacle provides the best argument I’ve ever seen against the creation of majority-minority districts which, it appears to me, ensure that the only black members of Congress are men who wouldn’t be out of place at a meeting of the Nation of Islam and women who appear to have, in bearing, grammar, and dress, to have stepped out of a 1970’s sitcom.

By this point (only about ten minutes into the film), Moore’s already lost any idea of what point he was trying to make (aside from his “Bush=Evil” theme). He gives us a lot of shots of Bush Administration officials being made up prior to appearing on television (he returns to these later). I’m not really sure what point he’s trying to make here. Is he suggesting that other politicians don’t get made up before they go on television or that Bush’s officials are somehow bad people because they do? From this point on, his arguments lose what slight coherence they once had.

The film begins to argue that Bush paid insufficient attention to terrorism prior to September 11th, accusing him of spending 42% of his time on vacation (with one of the pictures of Bush on “vacation” being, hilariously, of him and Tony Blair together at Camp David) and claiming that, pre 9-11, he was unable to get anything done. This all ignores, of course: the $1.3 trillion tax cut, No Child Left Behind, and the withdrawal from Kyoto, the ICC, and the ABM treaty, all of which the left seemed to think a pretty big deal at the time. Regardless, the point here isn’t to make sense: it’s to throw as much crap as possible at Bush and hope it sticks.

In the course of this, Moore goes back through the familiar litany of criticisms about Bush’s performance with regard to terrorism prior to 9-11. Hitting a low point of distortion, even for him, Moore claims that a CIA Presidential Daily Brief told President Bush that “Bin Laden was planning to attack the United States with hijacked airplanes” a phrase which, while literally true, strips away all context, such as that the threat was, of course, then seen in terms of traditional hijackings and that Bin Laden had maintained a constant threat to the United States for half a decade at that point.

Of course, as all of these criticisms do, they give no indication of what, exactly they would have had Bush do about them? Ground all fights? Round up all potential and possible members of al-Qaeda? Declare Martial Law? What would the Michael Moore’s of the world have had to say about that?

One punch that Moore noticeably pulls is over the matter of Bush’s Air National Guard service. While the movie briefly mentions Moore’s referring to Bush as a “deserter” in January of this year, he make almost no further mention of the issue, avoiding any snide remarks or substantive attention to the issue of Bush’s supposed “AWOL” status. This leads me to think that it’s probably, at long, last, a dead issue. If Michael Moore can’t bring himself to seriously use it, then no one will.

The Air National Guard records, however, are used as a jumping-off point to where Moore really wants to go, the connections between Saudi Arabia and the Bush family. Major James R. Bath, who served with Bush, was an advisor to the “Bin Laden family”. I use quotation marks, because the Bin Laden family is massive, a fact which Moore never bothers to mention. Osama Bin Laden is the seventeenth of fifty-two children sired by his father. Osama himself has a number of children as, presumably, do many of his siblings. Given these numbers (and this isn’t accounting for other relatives) there are, in all likelihood, several thousand people out there related to Osama, most of whom have probably never met him (given that he hasn’t been in long-term residence in Saudi Arabia for about two decades).

In a scene which, if it came from any other filmmaker, would be declared to be blatantly racist, Moore shows an extended sequence of President Bush and his father shaking hands with various Saudis (and, perhaps, other Arabs). What point this is supposed to make, I’m not sure, beyond that Bush is evil because he’s connected with scary-looking Arabs. At one point the film criticizes the United States for allowing a representative of the Taliban to come to the United States pre-September 11th (I thought these people were in favor of diplomacy!) and attacks President Bush for having dinner with Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador, on September 13th, 2001. Apparently Moore is somehow of the opinion that the President of the United States ought to have had nothing to discuss with Saudi Arabia’s representative at that point. Or he’s looking for an excuse to show more pictures of Bush and scary-looking Arabs. Your choice.

As for the story of “$1.4 billion” in Saudi money that has gone into the businesses of the Bush family, their friends, and various other related groups, I’d sure like to see the exact dollar breakdown (I’d bet good money that the $1.4 billion figure was arrived at by the same process that is used to inflate the membership of some organizations: namely, counting anything associated with the Bush’s in the remotest way as money that has gone to them). Of course when, as the film state, the Saudis have a trillion dollars in assets in the United States, it’d probably be hard to find anyone in any big business, let alone the oil business, who isn’t tied closely to the Saudi Arabians in one way or another.

At this point we get to see the famed “seven minutes” of footage of Bush in the Florida Elementary School on September 11th itself. I’m not really sure what we’re supposed to get out of this (well, I know what Mr. Moore wants, but in general…). I mean, what exactly was the President supposed to do? He’s clearly taking a moment to think things through. Remember, at that time in the day, no one had any clear grasp on what was going on. At the same time, certainly he was aware that new arrangements for his travel would have to be made. As for the bizarre assertion that he should have left for his own physical security: if there was any real danger, the Secret Service would have dragged him bodily from the room, if necessary.

Of course if, on hearing the news, Bush had immediately gotten up and sprung into action (doing what, exactly, I don’t know), that footage would be in this film as proof that “Bush Knew” or whatever other nonsense Mr. Moore wishes to peddle at this particular moment.

We then launch into the story of the invasion of Afghanistan, in which Moore advances two totally contradictory arguments. First, he allows Richard Clarke to accuse the United States of using insufficient force in Afghanistan (leaving out, of course, that staging such a force would have taken months, months in which al-Qaeda would have skedaddled). Then he advanced the kook-left argument that the Afghan War was, naturally, really about oil (or, in this case, natural gas), namely the construction of a pipeline across Central Asia. To prove this, he trots out stories from 1997 about the Taliban attempting to negotiate a deal to construct such a pipeline (post-Taliban Afghanistan has since agreed to such a deal). Of course he never explains why the “evil” companies behind such an endeavor wouldn’t simply have bought off the Taliban, instead of going through the convoluted process of triggering a war and then having to deal with the chaos of present-day Afghanistan.

Later, Moore launches into the PATRIOT Act, with help from Rep. John Conyers and “Baghdad Jim” McDermott. However, in the process, he proves the virtues of the law. Following an extended rant about all of the evil things that the PATRIOT Act supposedly does, Moore then cites three examples of “violated” civil liberties, all of which have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Act. First, he shows a peace group in Fresno which was infiltrated by a local cop (a decision, of course, entirely up to the local sheriff), then a man who was visited by the FBI after some people at the gym turned him in for making pro-terrorist comments, and then a woman who the Transportation Security Administration wouldn’t allow to bring breast milk onto a plane. Presumably, Moore wants us to think that these are all examples of the evils of PATRIOT, though he’s careful never to, in words, claim that any of the actions occurred due to the legal provisions of the Act (though, if one was unfamiliar with the it, you would assume they did).

Now the movie (the same movie, I might add, which earlier went to extravagant lengths to criticize the Administration for failing to react to signs of terror) goes off on a tangent about terror alerts, claiming that they were designed merely to frighten the public into compliance. Moore can have it one way or the other, but not both. Either the threat is real (and wasn’t watched closely enough prior to 9-11), or it’s a manufactured product of the Bush Cabal. It can be one or the other. But not both.

By the time the movie finally gets to the Iraq War, Moore’s simply lost all focus whatsoever (and perhaps some of his connection with reality as well). The movie depicts pre-war Iraq as a paradise, with children playing amid scenes of carnivals and opulent restaurants (and what sort of people, I ask, would have been dining in fancy restaurants in Saddam’s Iraq?). The scene is then interrupted by an extended montage of Allied Air Power smashing Ba’athist buildings in Baghdad, the only sequences in the entire film which managed to cheer my heart, if only a little.

At this point we veer off in every which direction, with one bizarre scene featuring a pair of nondescript old women reciting, at length, Democratic talking points in a restaurant somewhere in the middle of nowhere. What point this scene is supposed to have, I don’t know.

Soon, we’re off to visit with the US Army in Iraq, which doesn’t seem nearly as demoralized as Moore would like us to think. If that’s the worst footage available (and, given Moore’s attitude towards the military, I’m quite sure it is), then things are going a lot better than we think. The footage also comes across as already quite dated, making references to the uprising of the Shiites under al-Sadr which, of course, has already been suppressed. What little film Moore has of supposed “abuse” of Iraqis by American troops is so mild as to be laughable (the Iraqi terrorists are placed in hoods and photographed. The horror!).

Another scene, in which US troops burst into an Iraqi home on Christmas Eve, is clearly meant to be horrifying, but comes across as a prudent and firm action by American troops (Moore never bothers to tell us why the American Army wants the young man they’ve come for, but I assume that if he were innocent, Moore would be shouting it from the rooftops).

Moore recycles the old allegation that the Bush Administration is “cutting veterans’ benefits” when, in truth, it is doing no such thing. This allegation is based upon the fact that it plans on cutting overall veterans’ spending. However, this isn’t a function of Administration greed, but of biology. By far the largest group of veterans in the United States are those of the Second World War who are dying at a fast clip, thereby reducing the number of veterans and the need to spend money on them.

Another scene takes us back to Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, which he depicts as a sort of third-world hellhole, with Marine recruiters running around like a 19th Century Royal Navy Press Gang. Now, I’ve never been to Flint, Michigan but, given Moore’s depiction of Toronto’s suburbs in Bowling for Columbine (where no one locks their doors, or would ever think of doing so!), I assume the real state of affairs there to be rather different.

The climax of the film features the mother of an Army Sergeant killed in Iraq (from Flint, naturally) whose obvious grief is unseemly (and, I think, unscrupulously) exploited by Moore in an effort to hammer the point home. There isn’t really anything left by this point in the movie, and Moore mostly uses the grieving mother to claim that protestors are patriotic and offer a scene of a confrontation in front of the White House between a lunatic Korean peace protestor, the mother, and an eminently sensible woman who tells the grieving mother that she ought to blame al-Qaeda, and not George Bush, for her son’s death. That woman’s views, of course, are not given an airing here: we’re only interested in blaming George Bush.

Finally, Moore closes with a final argument, quoted from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, by which he seems to argue that the War on Terrorism is being manufactured simply for the sake of keeping society in line. Of course, naturally, he omits the entire context of the quote (which, in the book, is a part of Goldstein’s book within a book which may or may not be simply another layer of the totalitarian state’s edifice of oppression).

In short, the film is utter nonsense. But it’s effective and unusually manipulative nonsense. In other words, it’s a perfect Moore movie. Those of us from the sane side of the political spectrum are going to be spending months (and perhaps years) attempting to rebut the ramblings of some of our friends who happen to see it and pick up bits and pieces of its nonsense.

Of course, in a real way, it’s alarming that such a film would be allowed to be exhibited at the present time. Its content is plainly treasonous: designed to aid and comfort the enemies of the United States. When Hezbollah is offering to help you distribute your movie, you’re miles past the fine line which divides “dissent” from treason.