Promoting untruths

Please, at least state the facts correctly:

“Farenheit 9/11 is tendentious, promotes unproven conspiracy theories”

Contrast with what Krugman ACTUALY said:

“It would be a better movie if it didn’t promote a FEW unproven conspiracy theories” (my emph.)

A little honesty would go a looooog way. Ironic you’re blaming Moore about inaccuracy.

Thomas Paine: I’m happy to accept that correction, my beef here is with Norm’s reaction to Krugman on Moore and, for the purposes of argument, I’ve taken on board his characterization of Krugman.

jrv: no, I think you need to read the piece again, more carefully this time….

I was wondering if anyone here read Norm Geras. When I saw he had written a book on Rorty, I figured he was a somebody. Then when he was a sort of lefty, but supported the Iraq war, I wondered why there wasn’t more dialogue. CT does more back-and-forth with DenBeste, for goodness sake.

Then I decided it was an English thing, and I didn’t want to know.

“to promote untruths, unproven conspiracy theories, other tendentious stuff, in the service of partisan political judgements.”

I know somebody like that, and I ain’t gonna vote for him. Ditto Krugman.

“…viewers may come away from the film believing some things that probably aren’t true.”

…as opposed to coming away from a Bush/Rumsfeld/Rice/Cheney speech believing things that certainly turned out to be untrue.

But of course the influence of a movie can be far more devastating. Ahem.
Anyway, I’m curious as to which specific proven untruths or unproven conspiracy theories Moore promotes, according to that view. Is there a list somewhere?

That the Bush family has long-standing business and personal connections with the House of Saud is inarguable. That a couple planeloads of Saudis were, at the request of Prince Bhandar, flown out of the US between Sept. 13 and 15 is also true. That the Bush administration for over two years steadfastly denied the flights took place is a fact. Can pointing out these things out be fairly characterized as promoting conspiracy theories?

It seems to me that Moore is successful in Fahrenheit 9/11 because he tells a good story, like a good prosecutor. The story is making facts real to much of the public, just as a good case for the prosecution makes evidence real to a jury. Do I wish the public was using a more reliable way of evaluating the evidence? Hell, yes! (And I wish juries did so too–there would be fewer innocents on death row.) But I’ll take what I can get–voters are people on earth, not saints in heaven.

(my comments copied and edited from a similar discussion on Matthew Yglesias blog)

Mike f, are you talking about the bin Laden family flight that took place AFTER commercial airlines were flying again? 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.

“Mike f, are you talking about the bin Laden family flight” Holsclaw

Commercial air on the 13th, private air had not yet been authorized on the 14th when bin Ladens left, on a private jet.

Q: “on orders from above?”
Clarke: “Yes”

The Isikoff stuff has been fisked and refuted as nauseaum all over the blog world.

Norm writes that he thinks it wrong, as he claims Krugman does not,

Fair enough. But why then is Norm so tolerant of such promotion when it appears in papers such as the Daily Telegraph?

More to the point (as Krugman was saying in the first place), why does he tolerate such promotion from the Bush Administration?

In current Bush apologist mythology, any critic of the administration immediately grows a soul patch and begins holding court in a Madison coffee house.

disgruntled former employee, trying to sell a book, has a “weird” personal life, WaPo sez he meditates to read bin Laden’s mind (even tho it doesn’t), etc.
How many times have we heard that?
The only thing the adm. can pull off decently, since its members’ decade-old plan to find a pretext to invade Iraq and screw OPEC has now gone FUBAR, is character assassination.

Only w/ Moore, it’s too easy, so derriding him gets ya no points, and too many of his ‘fabrications’ have been fabricated by those braying over them (one is still trying to pass off that shite right here on this thread). Thus he comes off as an affable ass who looks OK next to enemies whose antics show them as petty, cruel, and floundering, and this unlikely movie is popular in the most unlikely of places, and still going…

It’s certainly not the movie I would have made.

My only question is whether this movie is effective at changing anyone’s mind about Bush’s competence as president. If it is, then debating its truth or lack thereof is a useful discussion. If it’s Preaching to the Choir, Part 3243, who cares?

Because his opinions are WRONG, Mr. Pohl! WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

Next Mr. Boyle will be telling us that we can’t use ‘biased,’ or ‘liberal,’ or ‘Castro’s neighbor’ to dimiss people. Harumph, I say.

[I didn’t get a ‘harumph’ from that man!]

Michael Moore made a movie. That’s all. Even he admits that it’s just a way to get people fired up, to think and talk about subjects that normally get ignored in the media. We can quibble over every detail and tally the truths agaisnt th elies agaisnt the untruths against the spun, against the stretched but int he end, it’s mostly true. Unlike, say, Fox News which is mostly full of crap.

Next, can we compare apples with oranges?

On the “preaching to the choir” issue: the Moore film will be very effective with nonideological, intuitive, centrist gut thinkers who don’t pay close attention to politics and are moved by images, rumors and insinuations rather than by facts and logic.

That’s a very hefty demographic in the US, and because it’s not committed in advance, one of the most important in any election. For decades the Democrats have been losing this group because of very effective images, rumors, and insinuations spread by the Republicans. They’ve got it down to a science and spend tens of millions of dollars on this annually.

So when finally the Democrats learn to play the game (Moore isn’t really a Dem, BTW), then we are to be SHOCKED.

Jesus fucking Christ. I can see this coming from freelance pests and wreckers like Sebastian (you forgot to mention Clinton’s penis, Seb!) as well as from conservative operatives. These are people who have to be ignored, because they’ll never say anything worthwhile.

But a lot of liberals are saying this kind of shit. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what did I do to deserve this?

Moore’s true failings have been covered elsewhere.
More than once.

Jesus Christ, Russell, look at the way Roosevelt or Kennedy campaigned. Politics is never conducted entirely on a high-minded level — except by losing minor-party candidates, of course, and not always even by them.

All I admit about Moore is that his film is polemical, impressionistic and insinuating, like about 80% of political propaganda. He is not grossly inaccurate or dishonest.

Have you ever paid close attention to any actual political campaign anywhere?

As a longtime leftist, one thing I know for sure is that I have failed to convince the American people of my point of view. So I’m doing lesser-evil politics and playing the game the way it’s played. Do you have a better suggestion?

I think Zizka’s comment comes off as too cynical. It’s not that someone like Michael Moore lies (it would take a ten-hour movie for him to in falsehood any two minutes of talk by Dick Cheney) — it’s that he plays by the rules the Republicans play by. Since Republicans can’t take a punch, and Democrats don’t like to punch, this produces a lot of wailing on both sides.

Moore’s charge that Bush deliberately used Iraq to divert attention from Saudi links to terror, or used 9/11 as an excuse to pipe stuff through Afghanistan are serious charges — so serious that both journalists and scholars should require strong evidence before they accept them as proven. But there’s nothing wrong with Moore raising them as possibilities. They’re both more plausible than any of the craziness the Bush administration and their enablers have been peddling for the last four years. The only purpose the outrage serves is to shut down debate; outrage has shut down enough debate already. If you had asked me a year ago if we would torture prisors in Iraq, or if we had staged the Saddam statue-toppling, I would have been outraged. I also would have been wrong.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.)