Moore means more

I'm no better than Michael Moore when it comes to being fair and balanced. He and I are both admittedly hardcore liberals with nothing but contempt for the current presidential administration. I didn't have to see his new film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," to make up my mind on who to cast a vote for on November 2. I already have my Kerry bumper sticker. I did, however, see his film five times since it's nationwide release on June 25. Each time the theater was full of people of every age and race. Each time saw equal parts tears and cheers from the audience. Forget "Spider-Man 2," folks. You WILL leave the theater engaged in fervent discussion after "Fahrenheit 9/11," and in an election year as divisive as this one, nothing serves this great nation better than some good old fashioned left-wing propaganda to get things all stirred up.\n Yeah, I said the "P" word. "Fahrenheit" is certainly a documentary of the highest order, and the information and insight it brings to light will undoubtedly win Moore a second Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, but what Moore has truly offered the masses in his follow up to the astounding "Bowling for Columbine" is a pure, unfiltered, propagandized hatchet job on George W. Bush and his cronies. The difference between "Fahrenheit 9/11" and the majority of other propaganda is that other stuff didn't have a team of fact checkers assigned to go over every frame with a fine-toothed comb to find anything untrue in order to filter it out. If you really research the claims in this film, which I have, you'll find, either to your delight or dismay, that everything Moore states as fact in the film is actual fact.\n Don't tell that to staunch conservatives though, or you'll be subject to the spewing vitriol of a person desperate to keep ahold of the power they have. Ask yourself, why does every member of the administration in question seem proud of the fact that they haven't even seen the film, and at the same time, they assign a White House spokesperson to state that "This is a film that doesn't require us to actually view it to know that it's filled with factual inaccuracies."\n "Factual inaccuracies" include brain-searing images of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians and U.S. Marines, testimonies from U.S. soldiers who would rather serve jail time than fight insurgents in the streets, wounded soldiers who question the reasons for war and pledge their newfound and undying allegiance to the Democratic party, as well as the gripping story of a military mother who loses her son in combat and finds that the White House is the best place to finally place all of her anger and hatred. These are the tales not told on broadcast news, and thankfully, Moore is not afraid to shove them in our ignorant faces and force us to come to grips with what we're seeing.\n Moore haters, including the jaw-droppingly asinine Jason Clarke of www.Moorelies.com and Michael Wilson, director of the upcoming right-wing documentary (and collective cry for help) "Michael Moore Hates America," have accused Moore of being unpatriotic and despising the nation in which he lives. It's all too clear that they themselves have either not seen the film, or are so blindly devoted to Bush and his agenda that they can't see the forest for the trees. \n In "Fahrenheit," Moore praises American troops and their heroism, sympathizes for the dead among their ranks and even gives us a few American Flag money shots. Moore villainizes the people in charge of the United States, not the values in which we trust. Moore is one thousand times more a patriot than Bush. Moore challenges that the neverending occupation of Iraq is less about the fictional incarnation of freedom that the "war on terror" has brought about than it is about lust for profit, and anyone who has any sense about them will agree.\n Come November 2, I truly believe that Moore and his film will have a profound effect on the election. This is not because liberals are gullible and easily swayed, as some conservatives I know are quick to claim, but because slowly but surely, young people in this country are beginning to realize that there is more factual information in a Moore film or an episode of "The Daily Show" than in the annual State of the Union Address. I know at least a few of the people in my showings were swayed, and given the countless screenings all over the country (even 13 total theaters in Montana and Utah!), there are bound to be exponentially more people who were stunned by what they saw in the two hours Moore offers us.\n I can't claim to have said it best, so I must give that honor to Richard Corliss of Time magazine, who in his July 12 article, "The World According to Michael," writes, "We may come to look back on its ("Fahrenheit 9/11") hugely successful first week the way we now think of the televised presidential debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, as a moment when we grasped \nfor the first time the potential of a mass medium, in this case, movies, to affect American politics in new ways … Could Michael Moore's dream be George W. Bush's nightmare"