Either he was in on it, or, and forgive me for saying this, he was too dumb to see what was going on. Either way, I can't have a man like that working for me.

-Robert DeNiro in Casino

It seems that Bush wasn't really in on it, but he was too stupid to see what was going on. He genuinely seems to believe that invading Iraq, and taking down the regime of two-bit dictator Saddam Hussein, is the right thing to do. I suppose, but why Saddam Hussein of all the supervillain dictators worldwide? It seems that it's because that is who his handlers have chosen for him to face off with. That the country has oil reserves which may be appropriated as payment to the United States for the enormous cost of the "liberation" (and I do know that such things were at least discussed, I saw it independent of Fahrenheit 9/11 on the Cavuto Report) is only part of it. It seems that Bush's handlers wanted a war, any war, to feed America's military industrial complex and such (of which Bush, Cheney, Bush I and many of their friends in the White House are direct stakeholders in). We also needed a war to distract from the fact that the Bush administration could not, and wasn't really interested in, finding Al-Qaeda, with the Bush family's substantial financial ties with Saudi Arabia and the Bin Ladens specifically providing the blockage. But yeah, Bush is too fucking stupid to think of any of this on his own. Those are ideas that he has worked very hard to keep out his mind. To him it's a simple case of good versus evil. We're the good, for no other reason than out of default, I never tire of saying.

The only hint that the film gives that Gulf War Part Deux may have been Bush's idea comes in a line where Bush, trying to convince the American people that Saddam Hussein is evil, says, "And let's not forget, this is the man who tried to assassinate my Dad.” Most of the Bushisms in the film seem to be said with a laugh, as a joke (i.e. the infamous "Behave yourself, go find real work") or are just stream-of-consciousness blatherings, things that Bush clearly didn't think through before he said them. Not this. I searched to try and justify the "they tried to assassinate my Dad" comment as being one or the other, but it just doesn't fit. Bush means that sincerely, and that comment seems to truly represent his feelings. My view toward Bush hasn't really changed since seeing Fahrenheit 9/11. I think that I saw him pretty much in the same way as Moore did; I didn't really buy the charges that he was a Machiavellian mastermind. It does sink in pretty hard with Fahrenheit 9/11 though.

While the advance buzz of Fahrenheit 9/11 says that it is basically an "anti-Bush" documentary, that is really an overly simplified perspective of the film's brand of hatred. Moore actually uses Bush as comic relief. When things get serious and hairy, Bush is trotted out to utter some choice one-liners and our spirits are lifted. The satire of Bush is a little thick near the beginning; Moore is clearly on target, which is easy when your fish are in the barrel. As the film progresses, after establishing the prism in which to view him, Bush is allowed to speak for himself. Moore's films have always been good with the lifting last shot. Roger & Me's felt like a triumphant extended middle finger to Roger Smith and the culture of greed that he represents. And when Moore uses "What a Wonderful World" at the end of Bowling for Columbine he isn't trying to be sarcastic or bitter, he is really being optimistic and hopeful. Fahrenheit 9/11 ends with Bush trying to relate the saying, "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me,” but not quite being able to finish the thought. The scene suggests that not all is lost, that just because we were fooled us once doesn't mean that we have to be fooled again. And it also lets the film off with a great laugh. Bush may be one of American history's most cuddly presidents; I found it difficult to just not fall in love with him as he struggles to find the words to that cornball cliché with that deer in the headlights look on his face. After the film you want to impeach Cheney; with Bush you just want to give him a good home. Has any other president ever been less slick? You can't just say that Moore is exploiting Bush's rare slip-ups, when Bush makes them all the time. Moore provides a montage of Bush saying, of America towards the Al-Qaeda terrorists, "We're going to smoke them out.” We see him saying it again and again in a variety of different incidents and then Moore finishes the montage with a clip from an old black-and-white cowboy show where they say the same thing: "We're gonna smoke them out.” It probably received another one of the biggest laughs in the movie. He's the lovable man-child of the gang, easily the least culpable of all the evildoers upstairs. Well, the least morally culpable in the eyes of God; I mean how much can you blame a child?

That shouldn't be interpreted as an actual defense of Bush, or a rationale to keep him in office of course. In on it or just too stupid to see what is going on, either one points to him having to go. The Casino quote is spoken when DeNiro's character, Ace Rothstein, has to justify firing slots manager Don Ward, played by Joe Bob Briggs, for standing by while three slot machines hit the jackpot simultaneously. Ward got the job because his uncle is county commissioner Pat Webb, played by L.Q. Jones! Life sure has a strange way of imitating art. Stephanie Zacharek complains that the film falsely turns Bush into a dumb hick, instead of focusing on his blueblood roots. It's not a very good complaint. For one, a dumb hick in office is just as bad as one of the bluebloods, as I think we've already established. I do think that Bush seems to be playing the part a little too well for it to be just an act. He's really that stupid. And for two, the good old boy network is every bit the network that the blueblood network is. The closed system is simply dressed up in country-western drag, and I think that most audiences will deconstruct the images in the same way.

One of the underlying themes of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, one that I don't think is picked up on quite enough, is that both the rich and the poor are diseased. They respectively exist beyond and below the morality of which most of the rest of us live our lives. The rich can afford to lose anything and the poor have nothing to lose, and both identities then allow for a true ethical freedom. The only ethic that either obeys is the will to and the perpetuation of power. Is there not an ideological equivalency between Monty Burns trying to block out the sun, and the stereotypical redneck that beats his wife and goes to Klan meetings? The actions essentially circle around the same thing, don't they? The small-town hickism that the Bush persona encompasses is romantic, but so is blueblood regality. Why do we regard the former as so much cleaner? Why is it so offensive that a blueblood would try and adopt the small-town persona? I suppose you could argue that it's cynical, but I think that again, Bush's enemies loathe the cowboys just as much as the richies. It's only in being nauseated by the values of both extremes that true socialist thought can thrive. So what does it matter if Bush is cowboy or blueblood?

One of the biggest charges that have been levied against Moore, for my money the biggest and the most legitimate of all the charges, is that he says that he stands up for the little guy while taking every opportunity to make his audience feel superior to the little guy. The interviews with the soldiers in Fahrenheit 9/11 mimic that faux-documentary scene in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Of course, what separates the two is that Kubrick's soldiers seemed to have some kind of upper-middle class background. Oh, maybe not in terms of their actual characters, but there was certainly something between the lines. There somehow was a cleanliness to their speech and appearance; the dialogue wasn't really military-speak, but an academic's idea of military-speak. They were aware of the degree of artifice in the documentary process. The soldiers in Fahrenheit 9/11 all look like they crawled out from under a rock. One soldier is especially repulsive to the eyes; we watch as a fly crawls on his enormous malformed face as he talks in that southern, country fried-dialect. I will, indeed, be dipped in shit; Spike Jonze nailed the type in Three Kings.

Jonze, as you remember from Three Kings, was young, scrawny, a little sweet, a lot of dumb, and I refuse to put it in polite terms, classic white trash. The icon exists somewhere between Harmony Korine and David Gordon Green. Jonze's character starts off the film as a casual racist against Arabs, but by the end he is shot and makes a dying wish to be buried in a Muslim shrine that washes away all your sins. Three Kings director David O. Russell seems to see the character as unformed clay, as basically an innocent that can go either way. I think that the phrase, "Don't mind him, he doesn't know any better," is used a good number of times. Moore sees his soldiers in the same way. There are some powerfully disturbing images in the picture; we see the soldiers put the "Abu Ghraib" hoods on Iraqi prisoners, and there is much talked about scene where some soldiers jokily touch the still-hard erection of an Iraqi soldier's corpse. The most chilling moment comes when we're told that during war, many of the soldiers listen to music on CDs. One of their favorites is "Fire Water Burn" by the Bloodhound Gang, which includes the refrain, "Burn Motherfucker Burn.” Moore briefly gives us a taste of what it may be like to burn Iraqis alive while listening to that song by laying it on the soundtrack over video of the carnage, but he never lets it go long enough to really develop its potential. (The video game visuals are too brief also, the effect is only fleeting.) I think that Moore may have been trying to score a PG-13 rating (he was challenging the MPAA right up to the film's release); he may just be humanistic, but he may be trying to keep our opinions high of the troops. Support the troops but reject the war seems to be the film's battle cry.

An interview with the mother of a fallen soldier is given substantial weight in the picture. She reads a letter from her son saying that Bush put them there for no reason and that he hopes that we don't re-elect him for a second term. The mother goes from supporting the war in Iraq to now becoming a harsh critic. Moore directly states his opinion late in the movie that Bush and his cronies have corrupted the lower classes, and as they are responsible for their deaths, they are responsible for dirtying their very souls. Harsh criticism for Bush and Cheney, but right now think about how this reflects on the lower class soldiers. I'm reminded of that discussion at the end of Dogville (which if I didn't tell you already is probably the best film of this decade so far, in part because it struggles with these issues in a way that Fahrenheit 9/11 does not), which brings up the position that in denying people moral consciousness, but saying that they don't know any better, you are in fact dehumanizing them. That position of "Forgive them father, they know not what they do" is based on a fundamental disgust of human beings. You value them enough to preserve them, but you still distance yourself from their kind of thinking. Moore has two ways to approach Abu Ghraib: he can say that the soldiers knew what they were doing and are essentially evil, or he can say that they did not know what they were doing and are essentially moral simpletons. Not wishing to reflect poorly upon the soldiers, he adopts the latter position and is then guilty of an intellectual (or at least class-based) elitism.

But still, the fact that Bush is a blueblood cowboy purifies Moore's satire of Bush's common-man iconology. The blueblood manages to distinguish Bush in a way from the real common men. Bush is stupid, the common man is stupid, but the common man actually works for a living. Bush says that he works for a living, and I think he believes it, he just doesn't know what real work is. (Moore is on-target in pointing out that Bush spent nearly half of his first few months in office on vacation.) I do believe that Bush was genuinely shocked at Abu Ghraib, but it sort of bothers me that he's shocked. I'm also bothered that his spokesperson said that he and the President are not interested in seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 and that they basically have better things to do. Bush's response to the backlash against him and his administration is typically that the 1st Amendment gives them the right to say whatever they want, but they have much better things to do, they're trying to win the war apparently. That was basically the response to Fahrenheit 9/11, this "it's insignificant, ignore it and it will go away" kind of thing. But I'm bothered by the spokesperson's following comment that if they wanted to see a movie they would see Shrek. I'm also bothered that after September 11th, George Bush told Americans to go and visit Disney World in Florida. Moore includes this in the movie in part to strike a blow at Disney, who produced Fahrenheit 9/11 but shied away from distributing it as they depend on Bush brother and Florida governor Jeb Bush for tax breaks for their parks. Moore was implying that in trying to get people to go to Disney World, in suggesting that going to Disney World is a highly patriotic act, Bush is feeding into Florida's tourism industry and helping his brother out. But my complaint about Bush doing this is more fundamental; I don't like the idea of encouraging visiting Disney World post-September 11. I'm also bothered by a speech where he talks about how he has no idea what it is like to lose a father, son, husband or wife. No shit you don't. Bush is detached from the horrors of war, he had never been exposed to them himself of course, and instead lives in a magical kingdom were unpleasant thoughts rarely make themselves known.

One of the most valuable contributions that Michael Moore has contributed to discussion of these issues is the emotional appeal. Winston Churchill said that any man under the age of thirty who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart and any man over the age of thirty who isn't conservative doesn't have a brain. I think that this is why most political films tend to have a liberal slant. Movies are an art form and obey emotions over logic. None of the conservative positions ever really rely on emotions; the reason that they would never make good movies is because conservatism goes against better human instinct. Conservatives very literally argue that rooting for the underdog just plain doesn't work. Moore doesn't have a plan and I'm not sure it can be said that he is really making an argument. It's nutty to view any of his pictures really as thesis films. There is a thesis but it's a rather simple one: Bush is killing off Americans and Iraqi children, GM and the culture that produced its way of thinking is responsible for the poverty of Flint, Michigan, we have a culture of fear that produces a culture of violence. Et cetera. The thesis is not the important thing; Moore does not have any answers for anything, the best that he can do (or at the very least hopes to do) is shed a little light on these subjects and open things up to discussion. I don't think I really reviewed this film as a "documentary" as much as a work of political art. People who complain about Moore's movies being full of lies really don't seem to get it. I mean if they were, then fine, we'll take what Moore says with a grain of salt and not trust the editing too much. The attitudes don't lie though, the images don't lie either. The attitudes and the images are what matter in a film, in this film in particular; they are what liberals are really buying.

I don't even think that Moore’s films are filled with lies really; to me a lie means an actual statement that is untrue, whereas what these people are complaining about is a point of view or idea that isn't present or potentially misleading juxtapositions. There is a sequence in the picture that is kind of brilliant, but touches on something that these kind of critics would complain about. Several Iraqi children are playing in Iraq, flying kites, riding the Ferris wheel, et cetera. Suddenly the sky darkens and there is a huge explosion. It's propaganda, Moore stole the sequence directly from Lyndon Johnson's "Daisy" ad! Ha ha ha ha! It's saying that everything was really hunky-dory in Iraq before the United States attacked. Saddam Hussein gets maybe fifteen seconds of screen time in the whole film. I do believe that Saddam Hussein is a bad egg, and I do believe that he has murdered thousands of his own people. And you probably wouldn't sense any of this if you were born yesterday and all you knew about Iraq was what you saw in Fahrenheit 9/11. One of the very few appeals to emotion that conservatives could use in a movie is to show what Hussein did to the Iraqis and show some Iraqis genuinely grateful to American troops. Moore could come back with the point that we already have seen all of that in the major news media anyway; but yeah, the absence of footage like that leaves the film decidedly unbalanced. I don't think that that is the same thing as lying however; there isn't anything blatantly untrue, in terms of pure logic, about what Moore is doing here. I mean, the concept of things being hunky-dory in Iraq before America attacked seems quite unprovable, just as proving that they weren't hunky-dory is quite unprovable. "Hunky-dory" is hardly a term that could be supported or refuted by quantitative data.

Howard Dean's revelation that he and not Bush allowed the Bin Ladens to leave the country after September 11th, and the talk that the FBI did interview them before they departed, doesn't bother me enough to make a fuss. Yes, those accusations harm Moore's cause, but let's look at the bottom line. The Bush family does have several business connections with the Bin Ladens and the terrorists that are attacking America are overwhelmingly from Saudi Arabia. It's obvious to me, and I doubt that I'm the only one, that we need to boycott Saudi Arabia because they aren't doing their job in protecting America from terrorists. Not from September 11th exactly, but when Americans are in Saudi Arabia and they get their heads cut off by terrorists, well, it's Saudi Arabia's responsibility to make sure stuff like that doesn't happen when they're playing host. If an Israeli student were to come to the United States on a visa, and get a similar beheading from members of the Aryan Nation in an attempt to cut off Israeli/American ties, don't you think that the United States would want to kick some serious Aryan Nation ass? I sure do. Either what will happen is that the terrorists will win and we'll cut off the relationship (logical people shouldn't give a shit as long as that means Americans will no longer get their heads cut off) or Saudi Arabia will rise to the challenge (which I doubt, but I'm hopeful about). What our government will do instead is probably create a costly, ineffective, dose-of-gasoline-on-the-fire military operation to bring the terrorists to justice personally, and just leave the Saudi Arabian government and the richies they house alone. The reason that what needs to happen will never happen is because somebody like Bush is in office.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is a very provocative film, but it's not quite as good as Bowling for Columbine or Roger & Me. I don't think that the problem is really Moore's dubious celebration of the common man; like Quentin Tarantino's man-hating lesbianism in Kill Bill Vol. 2, his attitudes are primitive but worthy of discussion. As I have mentioned, the debate about the film's "accuracy to the facts" doesn't bother me as much as others. I don't agree with all of Moore's political positions. He starts the movie bellyaching about the 2000 election and seems to be reaching to convince that it wasn't won fair and square. What bugs me about the "2000 election bellyaching" is that it may end up deifying Gore. If George Bush can be likened to that lovable simpleton Forrest Gump, Al Gore can be likened to the similarly retarded Chauncey Gardiner. Gore's every movement, sound and blink seemed calculated for maximum effect. I didn't vote for Bush or Gore, but in the voting booth I did lean slightly more towards Bush. As a film lover I frankly loathed loathed loathed Gore's running mate Joseph Lieberman. I never felt that our culture was ever under attack by Bush. When Bush talks about God, he's talking about his God and the God of several other Americans. He's an idiot, but I never felt like God may be actively shoved down my throat the way that I did with Gore and Lieberman. I mean gay marriage, Gore was against gay marriage also, we have to remember. In talking about the move of our culture towards the right, Gore was at the very best no better than Bush. I think he actually may be worse, simply because he was more active about it. Like Reagan, Bush is a "war" president. I don't think that we would have gone into Iraq under Gore, but who knows what other kind of nightmare we could have gone through?

The 2000 election stuff is a problem with Fahrenheit 9/11 but it's not really the key problem. I think the key problem is really that Fahrenheit 9/11 is too specific, and as an overly specific film it moves more towards an argument film than a work of art, and as an argument film the attacks on logic have more credence than usual. And as an argument film it's going to date more poorly in the next fifty years, whereas I think that Bowling for Columbine and Roger & Me will prove to be perennial. The target is just Bush and his satellites; Moore doesn't put his aim on the culture or the philosophy that motivates them. The scope is too limited.

Still, part of me sort of wants to see it again. I had a great theater experience, some people yelled "Fuck you Bush" at the screen and the audience laughed in response. It only happened once, and it sounds awfully minor when I write that here, but Fahrenheit 9/11 is one of those rare films that can genuinely be classified as a social experience. I think it's a pretty good picture, but it's possible that, like Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," its reputation fifty years from now will be focused more on its historical significance than artistic merit.