After the success of Bowling for Columbine, Moore allows his worst traits to run rampant. He’s repulsively exploitative of a mother whose son died in Iraq (and not to in any way demean her grief, but it’s pretty fucking sad that it took the death of her son for her to realize that the war in Iraq was built on lies, like it didn’t mean enough for her to truly think about the war until it affected her personally), and his ostentatious concern for the troops, particularly the non-white ones, is grating (I have no doubt it is sincere, but it doesn't always seem that way; he's using the troops to make his point in exactly the same way that the Republicans do). He impugns the Bush family by showing them shaking hands with a lot of Arab men, which is disturbingly xenophobic. Christopher Hitchens rips into him in Slate, and though I don’t agree with all of Hitchens' arguments, he makes some good points, and I urge you to read the article.
Moore starts off with the Republicans’ dubious hijacking of the 2000 election, meanders through Dubya’s piss-poor business record (amply discussed in Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose’s Shrub), which leads him to the Bush family’s connections with the Saudi royal family and the bin Ladens, which… um… well, eventually he gets around to the war in Iraq, and all that came before that in the movie is promptly forgotten. Then again, I suppose that’s pretty much how the administration led up to and conducted the war: just keep plowing ahead, don’t bother to think about connecting the dots, and hope no one notices. As with Columbine, he shows far too many disturbing, sickening images: of a beheading, of corpses, of John Ashcroft singing. He throws in a few seconds of footage of American soldiers humiliating Iraqi captives, evidently merely because he had it (there’s quite a lot of that in the movie, unconnected, random fragments, like Britney Spears solemnly opining that we should support the president, apparently tossed in because they’re timely and/or amusing, even if they seem to suggest the opposite of what Moore claims to support, as Hitchens points out with regard to Moore's brief swipe at the airport screening rules), and makes the absurd connection between Bush’s arrogance and these soldiers’.
Maybe you need to fight fire with fire, but I think the facts alone more than justify booting Bush out of the office that he never should have been allowed to usurp. You don’t need to make ridiculous allegations or devise elaborate conspiracy theories. I loathe Bush, but I would never suggest that he didn’t give a shit about the American people. I believe that, in his little monkey brain, he truly thinks that he’s doing what’s best for the country. You don’t need to pull juvenile, albeit crowd-pleasing, stunts like trying to get congressmen to “enlist” their kids in the military (um, right, because we would be so proud of a congressman who forced his child to join the Army for his own political benefit). Moore often just goes too far, maybe to the point of turning off someone who might otherwise be swayed by the facts he lays out, and all too often, it seems to be more in the service of his own ego rather than the good of the nation.
But nothing else seems to work. Somehow, roughly
half the people in this country still seem to think that George W. Bush
is doing a super job and that he really understands the problems of people
like them. So I’ll go along with anything that will shake some sense
into a few more heads, I guess. I wonder how many people who haven’t
already made up their minds about this election are really going to see
this movie, but maybe it’ll motivate enough people to vote when they otherwise
wouldn't have, or to rethink their unfathomably stupid notion to vote for
that self-righteous egoist, Ralph
Nader. With about half an hour or more left to go, though, most
of the audience was slumped in their chairs, overloaded with information
that was too rarely tied together in a coherent, meaningful argument.
As a series of hour-long TV shows, with judicious editing and better organization,
this would be devastating; as it is, I worry that it's just numbing.
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