Comments on: Promoting untruths

By: Zizka

Zizka — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 17:59:42 +0000

After 9/11 the Saudis knew that they were in big trouble. So their Taliban and Palestinian clients bit it hard. One of the nice things about being rich is that your surrogates suffer for you. The US has ALWAYS supported Israel and Saudi Arabia simultaneously. Crazy, no? What has not happened: the Saudis themselves have not been called to account for multiple attacks on Americans (Beirut, Khobar, USS Cole, 9/11) which were funded, led, and manned mostly by Saudis. They have also refused to cooperate in the investigations of these attacks. I haven’t been following it recently, but as I recall neither the Bush administration nor the Saudis have been very diligent about either tracing or stopping the flow of Saudi and Gulf funds to al Qaeda. (As far as I know, al Qaeda is funded by Saudi and Gulf oil money, one way or another. For various reasons it couldn’t have been Libya, Iran, or Iraq, and the rest of the Muslim world is very poor—I don’t think that the money comes from Egyptian penny jars and bake sales.)

By: Zizka

Zizka — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 17:53:47 +0000

By: bad Jim

bad Jim — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 07:39:12 +0000

Y’know, it was a pretty good movie. Over $50 million by last Saturday. Audiences continue to cheer. I liked it, and I thought A Beautiful Mind was rather shoddy, after I’d read the book (delusions not being the same as hallucinations, &c). Most of us would rather have made a more detailed twelve-hour exposition, repudiating all the lies we were force-fed, explicitly discrediting this, that, this, this and that other thing, and no one would have watched it. Michael Moore made a different movie – he’s got his own muse – and millions of people have seen it, and more often than not they seem to like it. To borrow the words of Russell Crowe, “At the end of the day, it’s only a movie.”

By: Steve Carr

Steve Carr — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 05:48:35 +0000

Zizka, I knew when I wrote it that the poison-gas example was tendentious. But it’s tendentious on both sides—if the analogy is to the proper response to Bush, then the comparison suggests that Bush and Co. have already been using chemical weapons, etc. So I’m not sure who should be offended. In any case, I think the analogy, however tendentious, is useful. Wars obviously do descend to the lowest common denominator. But we don’t want them to. As I’ve argued a number of times on this site, if we’re so dependent on the Saudis that we can’t cross them, it’s a little mysterious that Bush keeps crossing them, and in fact arguably has crossed them more than any president in the modern era. His over-the-top support for Sharon, complete rejection of the Palestinian cause, removal of the Taliban, invasion of Iraq: on all of these matters, Bush’s actions were in direct conflict with Saudi interests. There’s no doubt that he’s treated the Saudis with kid gloves, but so has every US president. Moore’s film argues that Bush’s financial entanglement with the Saudis has enslaved him to their interests: “$1.4 billion buys a lot of love” and all that. I don’t see a trace of evidence that this is true. Part of my hostility to F911 is sipmly that I think Moore has no interest in making a coherent case against Bush, and that he has no interest in really figuring out what the truth is, and I think that’s just screwed up. But part of it also is that I don’t think the lies add anything to the movie. In fact, all the time that’s spent on misstatements and ludicrous theories could much more profitably have been spent actually taking apart the way the administration went into Iraq, the dubiousness of the case it constructed, etc. And that wouldn’t have had to be any more boring or less polemical: just stringing together the yellowcake lies, the Mohammed Atta-Prague deception, Rumsfeld on how we knew where the WMD were, etc., would have been powerful stuff—and it would have been good for all of us to have it all together. I’m actually much less convinced than you that this movie is going to sway anyone, precisely because I think you have to be in the choir to believe the first half of the film. But I could be wrong.

By: robbo

robbo — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 05:26:08 +0000

Why is everyone here accepting the simplistic notion that Clarke alone authorized the Saudi flights, and that his statement essentially ends the discussion of this aspect of 9/11? Here’s part of the Daily Howler critique (link in my previous post): The suggestion that Clarke had contradicted himself was made in The Hill on May 26. Alexander Bolton had interviewed Clarke about these flights. Here’s how his report started: BOLTON: Richard Clarke, who served as President Bush’s chief of counterterrorism, has claimed sole responsibility for approving flights of Saudi Arabian citizens, including members of Osama bin Laden’s family, from the United States immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In an interview with The Hill yesterday, Clarke said, “I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again.” Later, Bolton suggested that these statements contradicted Clarke’s earlier testimony: BOLTON: This new account of the events seemed to contradict Clarke’s sworn testimony before the Sept. 11 commission at the end of March about who approved the flights. “The request came to me, and I refused to approve it,” Clarke testified. “I suggested that it be routed to the FBI and that the FBI look at the names of the individuals who were going to be on the passenger manifest and that they approve it or not. I spoke with the—at the time—No. 2 person in the FBI, Dale Watson, and asked him to deal with this issue. The FBI then approved…the flight.” “That’s a little different than saying, ‘I claim sole responsibility for it now,’” [9/11 commissioner Tim] Roemer said yesterday. Did the FBI deal with this situation properly, consistent with standard investigatory procedures? I don’t really know, but it’s interesting that only Michael Moore seems to think it’s a question worth examining. I’d love to see how just half of this BS would have played under Clinton or Gore.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 05:00:51 +0000

Doesn’t everybody see? They are bullies. They want us to be afraid, afraid of terrorists, afraid of their media machine, afraid to make a rhetorical or factual mistake. Michael Moore is not afraid. That is what the people are responding to. The courage of Michael Moore. That is what he is communicating. You don’t have to be afraid. And they want to fisk the guy? Facts are so trivial beside this message.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 04:49:37 +0000

Steve, realizing the poison gas example, etc., was just a rhetorical example, I still find it pretty bloody-minded, shitty, and asinine for you to begin your presentation that way. (In point of fact, wars often and perhaps usually do descend to the lowest common denominators, e.g. aerial bombardment of civilian populations, which once was taboo.) My main point is that if a team has been repeatedly using a tactic for a long itme, its partisans should be ignored if they complain when the other team uses the tactic. A second point is that high-minded partisans of a consistently losing team should be forcibly invited to sit out whenever they say “I’d rather lose than win that way”. A third point is that certain electoral demographics don’t respond well to logical, factual presentations, but do respond to impressionistic presentations. I do not accept your idea that the Democrats have been winning. You’ve done the best job anyone has of finding the errors in Moore’s film. Even so, some of them are not errors and some of them are fairly insignificant in the total picture. Saudis WERE able to fly internally when Americans weren’t, though the international plane didn’t leave then. Clarke took the fall for the departure authorization, but who else was involved? In any case, Clarke has his agendas and so maybe he should be looked at too—he was then working for Bush, you know. The financial involvements between the Saudis and the Bushes are real, though they’re mainly charities. You’re probably right about the Afghanistan pipeline, and I was sorry to see that in the movie. The dollar-value statistics about Saudi ownership are crappy, but the movie isn’t exactly an economic report. More and more the message I get about the Saudis is that we’re so dependent on them that we can’t afford to cross them. This hardly damages Moore’s main points. A point I haven’t made so far is that there’s a lot of true or possibly true stuff in the movie that most people wouldn’t have heard about without Michael Moore. The professional truth-tellers seemed to have failed miserably. That should certainly be placed on the balance of this imperfect film.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 04:48:02 +0000

I comes and I goes, If I haven’t been banned for uncivil behavior. Sorry, hosts. “But what they seem to be asking for right now is a Chomsky type movie.” Who is they? Repubs are asking us to shut up and take our medicine. Pundits (save Krugman, may he win a Nobel Peace Prize) seem to be asking us not to make Repubs angry and spoil Sally Quinn’s cocktail parties. Millions of Americans are asking for somebody to tell the truth, truth being something other than indisputable facts. Moore is answering that prayer, and his critics are simply covering their shame with sophistry. “Shrill” means to me 500k in front of the Pentagon, and four dead in Ohio. We ain’t even lukewarm yet.

By: Steve Carr

Steve Carr — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 04:07:12 +0000

Zizka, you’ve been peddling this “competitive sport” line for a while now, and what I’d like to know is how far does the metaphor extend? You say that if travelling and pushing off are allowed for one side, they have to be allowed for the other. So does that mean that in a war, if one side is using chemical weapons or deliberately targeting civilians or beheading captives, then it’s okay for the other side to do it as well? Is there no point at which you say: Well, no, we don’t do that, because it’s wrong? Now, perhaps Moore isn’t using the same tactics as Bush and Cheney. Given the incredible array of innuendo, absurd conspiracy theory, and outright lies that are in F911, I think the differences are clearly only of degree rather than kind. But in any case, that’s not the argument you’re making. You’re saying that whatever rotten tactics Republicans can get away with, the Democrats have the right to—and, it almost seems, the duty to—use as well. That’s certainly a pragmatic point of view. But I hate it. I also fail to see any evidence that deception and innuendo are politically necessary. The Dems got more votes in the last three presidential elections, and in all three they were by far the more honest party (if you exempt questions about the private life). It seems to me the rule is simple: Don’t lie. So if you’re Michael Moore trying to make a movie, don’t say the Saudis were able to leave the country when Ricky Martin couldn’t fly. Don’t quote Byron Dorgan saying we need to know who authorized the Bin Laden flights out of the country when you know Richard Clarke authorized them. Don’t say the Saudis have a trillion dollars in the US when it’s half that. Don’t say they own 6-7% of the US when they own 1-2%. Don’t say the Saudis invested $1.4 billion in businesses of Bush and his associates when they didn’t. Don’t say Bush cares more about the Saudis than he does about the US. Don’t say he went to war in Afghanistan to build a pipeline for Unocal. Don’t film a sequence making it look as if all the congressmen turned away from your petition to have their children go to war when Rep. Mark Kennedy told you he’d be glad to distribute the petition to his colleagues. And so on.

By: robbo

robbo — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 03:57:44 +0000

Sebastian wrote: Are you talking about the ones that darling of the left Clarke authorized? Because if you are, the conspiracy theorizing takes place by making allusive statements while omitting those facts. Since Sebastian brought it up, it’s worth noting that Clarke’s testimony about the flight authorization is far from straightforward: http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh062904.shtml Clearly, the Right could care less about “facts”—the previous commenters are correct that the Right is scared silly at the thought that Moore may have figured out how to capture lots of the ill-informed “undecideds” that brought the Right to power starting with Reagan.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 03:46:22 +0000

Walt, Bob, if you’re still here: Imagine Fahrenheit 9/11 if Chomsky had done it. LOTS and LOTS of facts. LOTS and LOTS of rational arguments. On and on and on. B-O-O-O-O-R-I-N-G! No one would watch it, and that would prove that Americans hate the left, and the critics would hate the movie just as much. But what they seem to be asking for right now is a Chomsky type movie.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 03:32:09 +0000

All I really say against Moore is that his method is impressionistic, insinuating, and polemical rather than factual and logical. And as many of said, it is a bit like Bush’s method—never flatly saying something you can be called on. At the same time, he is much more honest that Bush, much less Coulter or Limbaugh. But there are questions. I myself used to push the Afghan pipeline story, but I quit. What I have specifically said about Bush-Saudi is that Bush failed to look closely enough at the Saudis because of his involvements with them. Moore’s film seems to leave it more open-ended. The Saudis are specifically guilty, in my opinion, of “looking the other way” until things spun out of control, and also of protecting themselves by concealing the results of their own investigations of Saudi-led anti-American terrorism. This is bad enough, and Bush doesn’t explicitly say more than that. I really, strongly believe that Moore will help Kerry enormously by talking to people that the Democrats have forgotten how to deal with. This is much more powerful than all that BS about Nascar Dads and Respecting Religion More and The Swing Voters, etc., etc.

By: Walt Pohl

Walt Pohl — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 02:56:32 +0000

Bob: I meant Zizka is too cynical about Moore, not about Republicans (I would probably say that he was too cynical about Republicans, but then they would fall all over themselves to prove me wrong yet again). I’m glad that the U.S. still exceeds the lofty Cuba standard of democratic government. That may be good enough for you, Sebastian, but it’s not good enough for me.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 02:32:21 +0000

Ok, Holsclaw proposes “compassionate conservatism”. Repubs are nice guys, just misunderstood and maligned. Present day Repub party just coincidentally has its emotional and electoral center at Meridian, Mississippi. Yes, Holsclaw, that is who you are. Get the fuck out of my face.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 02:25:11 +0000

Ah, yes. The left just isn’t ruthless enough. What a crock. “These guys are Bull Connor and Lester Maddux, and don’t let them try to tell you different.” Yeah that is why Moore is winning awards and making millions instead of rotting in jail like real documentarians in a real leftist-country just off the Florida coast. Ok, sure. And if we want to play at that level, you guys are Stalin and Mao. Gee this is an enlightening non-discussion.