The 2004 campaign is a national referendum on the
CREDIBILITY, COMPETENCE and CHARACTER of the
incredible shrinking _resident...There is an electoral
uprising is coming...
Frank Rich, New York Times: In one of the several
pieces of startling video exhibited for the first time
in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," we catch a
candid glimpse of President Bush some 36 hours after
his mother's breakfast TV interview — minutes before
he makes his own prime-time TV address to take the
nation to war in Iraq. He is sitting at his desk in
the Oval Office. A makeup woman is doing his face. And
Mr. Bush is having a high old time. He darts his eyes
about and grins, as if he were playing a peek-a-boo
game with someone just off-camera. He could be a
teenager goofing with his buds to relieve the passing
tedium of a haircut.
"In your wildest dreams you couldn't imagine Franklin
Roosevelt behaving this way 30 seconds before
declaring war, with grave decisions and their
consequences at stake," said Mr. Moore in an interview
before his new documentary's premiere at Cannes last
Monday. "But that may be giving him credit for
thinking that the decisions were grave." As we spoke,
the consequences of those decisions kept coming. The
premiere of "Fahrenheit 9/11" took place as news
spread of the assassination of a widely admired
post-Saddam Iraqi leader, Ezzedine Salim, blown up by
a suicide bomber just a hundred yards from the
entrance to America's "safe" headquarters, the Green
Zone, in Baghdad.
Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there's no question he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources — foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video — he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/arts/23RICH.html?ex=1086307690&ei=1&en=9478737ff2721eb7
FRANK RICH
Michael Moore's Candid Camera
Published: May 23, 2004
ut why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and
how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many
this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's
not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind
on something like that? And watch him suffer."
— Barbara Bush on "Good Morning America,"
March 18, 2003
SHE needn't have worried. Her son wasn't suffering. In
one of the several pieces of startling video exhibited
for the first time in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit
9/11," we catch a candid glimpse of President Bush
some 36 hours after his mother's breakfast TV
interview — minutes before he makes his own prime-time
TV address to take the nation to war in Iraq. He is
sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. A makeup woman
is doing his face. And Mr. Bush is having a high old
time. He darts his eyes about and grins, as if he were
playing a peek-a-boo game with someone just
off-camera. He could be a teenager goofing with his
buds to relieve the passing tedium of a haircut.
"In your wildest dreams you couldn't imagine Franklin
Roosevelt behaving this way 30 seconds before
declaring war, with grave decisions and their
consequences at stake," said Mr. Moore in an interview
before his new documentary's premiere at Cannes last
Monday. "But that may be giving him credit for
thinking that the decisions were grave." As we spoke,
the consequences of those decisions kept coming. The
premiere of "Fahrenheit 9/11" took place as news
spread of the assassination of a widely admired
post-Saddam Iraqi leader, Ezzedine Salim, blown up by
a suicide bomber just a hundred yards from the
entrance to America's "safe" headquarters, the Green
Zone, in Baghdad.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" will arrive soon enough at your
local cineplex — there's lots of money to be made — so
discount much of the squabbling en route. Disney
hasn't succeeded in censoring Mr. Moore so much as in
enhancing his stature as a master provocateur and
self-promoter. And the White House, which likewise
hasn't a prayer of stopping this film, may yet fan the
p.r. flames. "It's so outrageously false, it's not
even worth comment," was last week's blustery opening
salvo by Dan Bartlett, the White House communications
director. New York's Daily News reported that
Republican officials might even try to use the Federal
Election Commission to shut the film down. That would
be the best thing to happen to Michael Moore since
Charlton Heston granted him an interview.
Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there's no question
he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of
sources — foreign journalists and broadcasters (like
Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic
American TV workers who slipped him illicit video — he
supplies war-time pictures that have been largely
shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of
the planes hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11 once
again, Mr. Moore can revel in extended new close-ups
of the president continuing to read "My Pet Goat" to
elementary school students in Florida for nearly seven
long minutes after learning of the attack. Just when
Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg
make us think we've seen it all, here is yet another
major escalation in the nation-jolting images that
have become the battleground for the war about the
war.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" is not the movie Moore watchers,
fans or foes, were expecting. (If it were, the foes
would find it easier to ignore.) When he first
announced this project last year after his boorish
Oscar-night diatribe against Mr. Bush, he described it
as an exposé of the connections between the Bush and
bin Laden dynasties. But that story has been so
strenuously told elsewhere — most notably in Craig
Unger's best seller, "House of Bush, House of Saud" —
that it's no longer news. Mr. Moore settles for a
brisk recap in the first of his film's two hours. And,
predictably, he stirs it into an over-the-top, at
times tendentious replay of a Bush hater's greatest
hits: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, Harken
Energy, AWOL in Alabama, the Carlyle Group,
Halliburton, the lazy Crawford vacation of August
2001, the Patriot Act. But then the movie veers off in
another direction entirely. Mr. Moore takes the same
hairpin turn the country has over the past 14 months
and crash-lands into the gripping story that is
unfolding in real time right now.
Wasn't it just weeks ago that we were debating whether
we should see the coffins of the American dead and
whether Ted Koppel should read their names on
"Nightline"? In "Fahrenheit 9/11," we see the actual
dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike,
with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the
violence of war entails. (If Steven Spielberg can
simulate World War II carnage in "Saving Private
Ryan," it's hard to argue that Mr. Moore should shy
away from the reality in a present-day war.) We also
see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those
troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at
Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell,
Ky., where they try to cope with nerve damage and
multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk
about their pain and their morphine, and they talk
about betrayal. "I was a Republican for quite a few
years," one soldier says with an almost innocent air
of bafflement, "and for some reason they conduct
business in a very dishonest way."