Category: Media

I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 today, after downloading it for free with BitTorrent (more about that later) and I have to say it’s even worse than I thought: a completely cynical exercise in the exploitation of simple minds. As a piece of conspiracy theater, it’s much less convincing than Oliver Stone’s JFK, and as a polemic it’s weaker than any given episode of South Park. I fail to see how anyone can sit through it without laughing uproariously.

It claims that Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings take their orders from a consultant at Fox News, that presidential weekends with Tony Blair are “vacations”, that the Coalition of the Willing was formed exclusively by ethnically colorful simpletons, that the war in Afghanistan was for a pipeline, and that the Iraqis lived an idyllic life under Saddam. Somehow Moore managed to cover the length and breadth of 9/11 without showing planes crashing into the WTC.

Only a fool of immense proportions could take it seriously.

Joe Wilson’t reaction to the exposure of his three big lies about Saddam’s efforts to buy uranium in Niger and the Congo is to go into hiding; nobody’s seen the normally camera-hungry employee of the Kerry Campaign on TV for a couple of weeks. The reaction of the liberal media is to either to pretend he never existed or to publish mild stories in the back pages about disputed testimony.

Democratic partisans are similarly split, with some playing dumb (“what’s the big deal here?“) and others circling the wagons and trying to mount an actual defense, as odd as that seems.

So how do you defend a guy who’s been caught lying on three major issues:

1. He was recommended for a CIA mission in Africa by his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame; he said she had nothing to do with it. (see Novak: “Plame sent out an internal CIA memo saying ”my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” A State Department analyst told the committee about an inter-agency meeting in 2002 that was ”apparently convened by [Wilson’s] wife, who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue.””

2. His mission in Africa concerned the narrow question of whether anyone wanted to admit to selling uranium to Saddam illegally; Wilson said he learned enough to assert that Saddam never had tried to buy uranium.

3. Wilson said the President’s 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address on uranium were a lie, but they’ve been confirmed by the Butler report.

It turns out it’s easy to defend this guy as long as you have a bunker mentality and a tin-foil hat. So far, I’ve seen these techniques used:

1. Find something Wilson said that might actually be true and say “see, he didn’t lie.” I got a three page e-mail with a complete chronology of Wilson’s trip to Niger that tried to do that (see this incredible piece of work here.)

2. Find some disagreement over one of Wilson’s lies and say “see, some people think the gun was only hot and not smoking”. A reader does that in comments regarding the Plame memo of recommendation.

3. Change the subject to the outing of Valerie Plame, preferably with fist-pounding and red-faced outrage. This doesn’t work because the name of Wilson’s wife is all part of the story regarding his selection by the CIA and the stories he subsequently told.

4. Blame the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy on the Wilson outing. This is the approach taken by Salon, and it has the virtue of avoiding the subject of Wilson’s lack of credibility. Written by a former press aide to Wesley Clark, this attack is apparently part of a coordinated response.

The scorecard on the “Bush lied, people died” canard is beginning to tilt pretty strongly in favor of “no, he actually didn’t, but you did” as we know that Wilson, Michael Moore, Richard Clarke, and many other Democratic Party attack dogs aren’t credible.

Overcoming the media bias is going to be the prime issue in this year’s presidential election, so I’ll close with Newsweek editor Evan Thomas’ statement that we can’t afford to forget (h/t Blogs for Bush):

There’s one other base here, the media. Let’s talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win and I think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox. They’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there’s going to be this glow about them, collective glow, the two of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.

It’s going to take a full-scale, Lott-sized effort to get the Wilson story the prominence it deserves.

Continue reading “The Invisible Man”

Apparently we all agree that the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain has a political bias; liberal ex-blogger John Kowalski accused them of pro-Bush bias and Stephen Hayes accuses them of anti-Bush bias.

Knight Ridder itself cops to the Hayes charge, which no doubt confirms the Kowalski theory:

By Wednesday, Knight Ridder had posted a correction. “President Bush’s comments about terrorism were incorrectly reported in that saying the president insisted there was an operational link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The president suggested that such a link existed, but didn’t explicitly make that connection.”

It strikes me that it’s difficult to tar all the writers for all the Knight-Ridder papers with the same brush, so I won’t play. In the last election, their San Jose paper endorsed Gore, and their paper in the next country endorsed Bush, so do the math.

Sharkansky is all over the AP’s coverage of the Butler Report. Here’s an actual quote:

…even now it is premature to reach conclusions about Iraq?s prohibited weapons. But from the evidence which has been found and de-briefing of Iraqi personnel it appears that prior to the war the Iraqi regime:

a. Had the strategic intention of resuming the pursuit of prohibited weapons programmes, including if possible its nuclear weapons programme, when United Nations inspection regimes were relaxed and sanctions were eroded or lifted.

b. In support of that goal, was carrying out illicit research and development, and procurement, activities.

c. Was developing ballistic missiles with a range longer than permitted under relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions.

d. Did not, however, have significant – if any – stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment, or developed plans for using them.

Blair got a strong vote of confidence from an interesting source:

Blair received some supportive words Wednesday from former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who said Britons needed to remember that “it was very difficult in the aftermath of 9/11 for any world leader not to act on his intelligence.”

“And the British intelligence, whatever Lord Butler says about it, was clearly even more forward-leading than the American intelligence in believing that Saddam was trying to get nuclear materials, in believing that Saddam had some kind of relationship with al-Qaida,” Clinton told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

See the report here and the AP’s spin here.

Fifty-six Deceits in Fahrenheit 911 by Dave Kopel is the definitive point-by-point takedown of the movie.

According to John Kowalski and to Michael Moore, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was an idyllic paradise where everyone was happy, healthy, and well-fed, where nobody had any complaints. The trains ran on time, the government was sovereign and legitimate, no government employees worked with banned weapons, and terrorists were the enemy of the state.

I wonder what these boys are smoking.

If you haven’t made up your mind about just how vile Michael Moore really is, go read Jonathon Foreman’s review:

But you certainly don’t have to be a fan of Bush or his policies to be offended by “Fahrenheit 9/11” lies, half-lies and distortions, or by Moore’s shockingly low expectations of his audience:

Moore’s favorite anti-administration interviewee is former National Security Council aide Richard Clarke. Yet the film never mentions that it was Clarke who gave the order to spirit the bin Laden family out of America immediately after 9/11. Moore makes much of this mystery; why didn’t he ask Clarke about it ?

At one point of the film, he portrays GIs as moronic savages who work themselves up with music before setting out to kill. Later, he depicts them as proletarian victims of a cynical ruling class, who deserve sympathy and honor for their sacrifice.

The film’s amusing (if bordering on racist) Saudi-bashing sequences rely for their effect on the audience having forgotten that President Bill Clinton was every bit as friendly with Prince Bandar (or “Bandar Bush,” as Moore calls him) and the Saudi monarchy as his successor. In general, the movie is packed with points that Moore assumes his audience will never check, or are either lies or cleverly hedged half-lies:

Moore says that the Saudis have paid the Bush family $1.4 billion. But wait ?the Bushes aren’t billionaires. If you watch the film a second time you’ll note Moore saying that they paid $1.4 billion to the Bush family and (added very quietly and quickly) its friends and associates.

Moore asserts that the Afghan war was fought only to enable the Unocal company to build a pipeline. In fact, Unocal dropped that idea back in August 1998. Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan are looking at the idea now, but nothing has come of it so far, and in any case Unocal has nothing to do with it.

In a “congressmen with no kids at war” stunt, Moore claims that no one in Congress has a son or daughter fighting in America’s armed services, then approaches several congressmen in the street and asks them to sign up and send their kids to Iraq. His claim would certainly surprise Sgt. Brooks Johnson of the 101st Airborne, the son of Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.). And for that matter the active-duty sons of Sen. Joseph Biden and Attorney General John Ashcroft, among others.

The most offensive sequence in “Fahrenheit 9/11″‘s long two hours lasts only a few minutes. It’s Moore’s file-footage depiction of happy Iraq before the Americans began their supposedly pointless invasion. You see men sitting in cafes, kids flying kites, women shopping. Cut to bombs exploding at night.

What Moore presumably doesn’t know, or simply doesn’t care about, is that the building you see being blown up is the Iraqi Ministry of Defense in Baghdad. Not many children flew kites there. It was in a part of the city that ordinary Iraqis weren’t allowed to visit ? on pain of death.

The most offensive — and most blatantly false — part of the movie is the depiction of life under Saddam. Had Saddam been a Republican, Moore would have painted a very different picture.

Lefties never tire of telling us of the depth of their compassion for the poor and downtrodden; it’s probably their favorite mantra. But so often, when the tire hits the road we find that this pretension is bullshit and they’re really the party of hate:

Think about the Seattle area — Bainbridge Island to be exact — and you think scenic views and liberal-minded tolerance.

At least the killer views are still there.

The bucolic island’s deep reputation for civility got a gut check this week during the annual Grand Old Fourth of July celebration.

That’s when Jason Gilson, a 23-year-old military veteran who served in Iraq, marched in the local event. He wore his medals with pride and carried a sign that said “Veterans for Bush.”
Walking the parade route with his mom, younger siblings and politically conservative friends, Jason heard words from the crowd that felt like a thousand daggers to the heart.

“Baby killer!”

“Murderer!”

“Boooo!”

To understand why the reaction of strangers hurt so much, you must read what the young man had written in a letter from Iraq before he was disabled in an ambush:

“I really miss being in the states. Some of the American public have no idea how much freedom costs and who the people are that pay that awful price. I think sometimes people just see us as nameless and faceless and not really as humans. … A good portion of us are actually scared that when we come home, for those of us who make it back, that there will be protesters waiting for us and that is scary.”

This much of the Liberation of Iraq is just like Vietnam.

Is it just me, or is it deja vu all over again? When Bill Clinton, carefully parsing his sentences, denied having an affair with Gennifer Flowers for 60 Minutes during the 1992 campaign, his supporters gave him a pass. When he lied about Monica Lewinsky in a much more blunt manner, they gave him a pass again, and when he was busted they said it simply didn’t matter.

With Michael Moore’s movie, we have a variety of lying techniques ranging from bald-faced lies (The bin Laden’s weren’t interviewed before the Bush Adminstration whisked them out of the country) to lies of association (all Bushes and bin Ladens have the same interest) to lies of speculation (George Bush probably wakes up wondering what he can do for Saudi Arabia each day).

The basic enterprise is intended to reiterate every Urban Legend that’s gone around about 9/11 with just enough information to keep it going and not enough to get Moore busted for straight-up lying (in most cases.)

And the people who believed Clinton believe Michael Moore and say only the stooges of a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy would dare question his royal ass.

Moore has a hidden agenda, and it has nothing to do with electing Kerry: it’s all about the money. A Kerry presidency will cost Moore money.

Gabler is also wrong when he assumes the Moore attack dog stance against the media. Moore goes on the offensive when people point out that his movie is more propaganda than documentary; Gabler simply apes him.

Being balanced is not a bias, it’s journalism’s job.