Jeff Jarvis: "He is the O'Reilly... the Bush of the left."
Jeff Jarvis ("Buzz Machine") blogs his first impressions of Fahrenheit 911:
- "As I walked out of the theater on the opening day of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, I thought (read: hoped) that even here, in the East Village of Manhattan, true Moore country, where the flick was already sold out all night, surely even here they wouldn't fall for all his obvious, visual/rhetorical tricks, his propaganda too unsubtle for the cheapest tin-horn demagog . . .
- Moore's assumption is venality. He assumes that President Bush and his confreres are venal, that their motives are black, that they are out to do no good, only bad, and that the only choices they make in life are between greed and power. That's inevitably a bad analysis. . . . Oh, you can argue Bush is incompetent; sometimes I do wonder. You can disagree with his policies; I disagree with many. You can question his intelligence; jury's out still. I didn't vote for Bush the last time and don't plan to this time. But I don't buy Moore's Bush. To say that he's the dark force of the universe only leads to simple-minded over-generalizations and bilious caricatures.
- "The real problem with the film, the really offensive thing about it, is that in Fahrenheit 9/11, we -- Americans from the President on down -- are portrayed at the bad guys."
- "Of course, it was all about Iraq.... Wasn't it?... : If you don't believe that, well, says Moore, you're an idiot. You're Britney Spears, shown in all her ditziness saying, "Honestly, I think we should just trust our President." There's your spokesman for the other side: Britney.
Or you're a bloodthirsty American goon, which is how Moore portrays soldiers who rush into battle hopped up on rock 'n' roll. He spares us the obvious napalm, morning, smell thing.
In Moore's view, you're either with him or against him. Hmmm, who else looks at the world that way?
Yup, Moore is just he mirror image of what he despises. He is the O'Reilly... the Bush of the left.
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