Matthew Yglesias is the latest lefty reviewer of
Fahrenheit 9/11 to murder it before praising it:
ABOUT THAT MOVIE. I went to see the infamous
Fahrenheit 9/11 last night, and as my colleagues
Nick Confessore (
here) and
Noy Thrupkaew (
here) have said, there's some serious problems with the argument (such as it is) of the film. I was particularly disappointed to see the whole issue of ties to Saudi Arabia and the administration's poor handling of terrorism before September 11 dealt with in such a frankly slipshod manner, since I think there are some good points to be made in this vicinity that haven't gotten enough public attention. The business about the Taliban, Afghanistan, Unocal, and a natural gas pipeline is also deplorable -- see
Ken Silverstein's
old Prospect article on the subject for more if you're interested.
Sounds like a bad movie. Serious problems with the argument, slipshod, deplorable - I think I will skip this move.
But wait a minute!
But beyond the delightfully funny cheap shots (truly worth the price of admission) at various administration figures and members of Congress, I think Moore does a really excellent job of capturing the selling of the Iraq War, something that it's a bit hard to do in a text-only medium. The point here is to recapture the climate of fear the administration fostered, people were supposed to believe (and many did) that Iraq, Iraq's purported WMD arsenal, and Iraq's purported ties to terrorism, posed some kind of direct and immediate threat to the physical safety of American citizens. The issue wasn't whether or not there was once a meeting in Malaysia between someone in al-Qaeda and some Iraqi guy who had a similar name to someone who worked for Iraqi intelligence -- the issue was that Iraq was going to use terrorism to attack the United States. The interviews with soldiers, potential recruits, and the family members of soldiers are also often moving and occassionally informative.
Writing 101 - first impressions set the tone for the rest of your writing, so if you thing something is good, say so first and put your criticisms later. Vice versa if you think something is poor. Why do so many lefty writers get this wrong?
I reported on five reviews
here, where I expressed disappointment in the lack of support from lefty web authors. That provoked a lot of heat such as:
This is bullshit.!!!!
I would personally prefer to hold an earnest opinion that I believe to be true, rather than just provide some sort of mindless counter-balast to outrageous right wing claims.
What good does the latter option really do? If we sacrifice intellectual honesty in favor of irrational shouting to provide "balance", then what happens when we actually have something intelligent to say? Will anyone pay attention?
Don't invalidate honest, well-thought out liberal ideas by suggesting we blindly support F911.
After everyone had moved on to another diaries, I posted the following:
Part of it is simply rhetoric - you are not going to do a good job of convincing people to go see a movie if you start your description of the movie with all its flaws and spend less time on its strengths than on its weaknesses.
Part of it is about treating your fellow lefties with respect. You can disagree with Moore's presentation, you can point out his errors, you can offer suggestions as to how he could have done better, but as long as he is working for the our side, you should respect his efforts. Drum and Thrupkaew showed Moore no respect.
Bill Clinton was a great and popular President and a better President than Ronald Reagan. He made some mistakes and I didn't always agree with all of his policies, but America was a hell of a lot better off when he left then when he started. However, lefties will never convince moderates of the superiority of the policies Clinton championed compared to the policies Reagan championed if they spend the start of every discussion comparing the two presidents by discussing Clinton's flaws.
Gephardt and Leiberman were my last choices for the Democratic candidate and I would prefer every other name thrown out their for VP (except McCain's) to either of them, but I consider them far better than any Republican alternative. I will not make any disrespectful statements about them comparable to Drum's "unfair, full of innuendo and cheap shots, and guilty of specious arguments".
I think Matthew does hit the right tone discussing some of Moore's less-supported claims with
What struck me most about the movie, however, was the massive irony of complaints from the right about Moore's frequent use of quasi-factual innuendos to make his case against Bush. It was like listening to a presidential address! The theory that Bush was somehow in league with al-Qaeda and the Taliban in a massive plot to steal Iraqi oil and Turkmenistani methane may not have much in the way of actual evidentiary support, but by whatever epistemological standards Dick Cheney and Stephen Hayes have been applying on the Saddam-Osama links front, it's an airtight case.