Farenheit 9/11

Just got home from seeing Farenheit 9/11. Nothing really new to report. Michael Moore tries to educate and entertain. Sometimes he uses unflattering shots to amuse the audience, like when he shows Paul Wolfowitz sticking his entire comb in his mouth to wet it to slick back his hair. Moore was pretty restrained though. Brad DeLong wrote about it a few weeks ago.

Fahrenheit 911: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: "Moore was also in many places in the movie much softer on Bush and Cheney than I would have been in his shoes. When Cheney talks about how proud he is of Halliburton, I would have cut to somebody describing the Halliburton accounting fraud--the failure to disclose material changes in accounting practices that moved a big chunk of profits forward in time to the current year--that Cheney presided over, and linked that to Bush's Harken Energy trading and to Halliburton's billing practices in Iraq. I would have had a section on Cheney's claims that persons nobody can find told him of a direct threat to Air Force One on the morning of September 11.

When Bush talked about how the have-mores were his 'base', I would have set out some numbers about the effects of his... tax shift... on the people then in the room. When Moore showed the picture of the Supreme Court, I would have read out the portion of the decision--'Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities'--in which the Justices reveal how ashamed they are of the possibility that Bush v. Gore might ever be used as a precedent. I would have juxtaposed the investigation of PeaceFresno and of something like the 'extraordinary rendition' of Maher Arar to the kid gloves used to handle the bin Laden relatives after 911: why not keep them until September 16, and send the FBI and CIA through to ask them all to 'tell us everything you can about your uncle'?

I wonder if this was a deliberate decision by Moore to soften the edges of his targets: Consider Cheney: Who, after all, would believe that someone could misrepresent the earnings of his company by $150 million in a year and still go on to become Vice President? Who would believe that Cheney would make up the story of a direct threat to Air Force One on the morning of September 11 for reasons I still cannot comprehend? Much of what I know about how this crew operates still strikes me as incredible--still is incredible."