HOW HE SEES IT Don't expect journalism from Michael Moore

By JAMES K. GLASSMAN
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Michael Moore, once a scruffy maker of cheap, funny, satirical documentaries, now puffs himself with the plaudits of the metrosexuals of Hollywood and Cannes. Having portrayed Americans as a bunch of gun-happy lunatics in "Bowling for Columbine," he's now shooting at President Bush and the war in Iraq with "Fahrenheit 9/11," which opens nationwide Friday.
Moore, famous for his puerile diatribe at the 2003 Academy Awards ("We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president"), has higher ambitions. According to Philip Shenon of The New York Times, Moore wants his new movie "to be remembered as the first big-audience election-year film that helped unseat a president."
Miramax Films, which is releasing the movie, "has hired a team of hardened Democratic apparatchiks," writes the Guardian newspaper of Britain, "including Hillary Clinton's former campaign press secretary, Howard Wolfson, top Gore adviser Michael Feldman and Clinton White House advisers Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane," to promote the film and defend it against detractors.
"We want the word out," Moore says. "Any attempts to libel me will be met by force." Shenon notes that Moore makes this threat with "not an ounce of humor in his familiar voice." Mr. Tough Guy, balling up his fists. He dishes it out, but can he take it? We'll see.
The trailer
Now, let me stipulate that I have not seen this movie. I wasn't invited to the screenings, but I have read the advance articles, and I went to Moore's Web site and watched the trailer.
The story line is no surprise. Moore's view is predictably Marxian and conspiratorial. Money and corporate power are behind everything. Republicans -- especially that numbskull graduate of Yale and Harvard who sits in the White House -- are callous, corrupt and stupid. Secret plots abound.
For example, Moore spends several minutes in the film documenting ties between the president and what Shenon describes as an American "financial adviser to a prominent member of the bin Laden family." The adviser even served with Bush in the Air National Guard in the early 1970s!
But don't expect journalism. This is "not a network news report," another member of the Moore team, Dev Chatillon, the former general counsel to the New Yorker magazine, says. This is opinion or, more precisely, oh-so-stylish propaganda.
What's the harm? Plenty. The United States is engaged in a war with a dangerous enemy that killed 3,000 people in New York and would like to kill 3 million more -- take out an entire city with a nuclear or biological device. The cheering crowds in Cannes may not believe it, but the threat to civilization posed by the terrorists is dead-serious.
By the time George W. Bush took office, terrorists had already taken several shots at us, bombing the World Trade Center, Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, embassies in Africa and the USS Cole. Our pitiful response to these outrages encouraged the attack of 9/11.
Accomplishments
Since then, the United States has liberated 50 million people in two countries, captured Saddam Hussein, disrupted the Al- Qaeda network and, contrary to the expectation of the vast majority of Americans, there has not been another terrorist attack on our soil.
Certainly, there have been mistakes, and constructive criticism is always warranted. The sad truth, however, is that the left is so intellectually bereft at this point in its history that the buffoonery of Michael Moore is about all they've got. So they're promoting it like crazy.
Moore's movie draws its title from Ray Bradbury's classic 1953 novel, "Fahrenheit 451," later made into a brilliant movie by Francois Truffaut. "Fahrenheit 451" was about a brutal, futuristic society in which books are banned and burned.
Bradbury is angry that Moore expropriated his title and wants the movie to be renamed. But perhaps it's appropriate that the inspiration was a story about book-burning. The introspection, contemplation, subtlety, adult seriousness and cool reason that we associate with good books are precisely the qualities that are ritually immolated by Moore in his movies.
Moore, like his French confreres, has never had much respect for the intelligence of the American public. He seems to be betting that voters will be so dazzled by his cleverness and cross-cutting that they'll forget about the war on terror and boot Bush out of office.
But, really, will "Fahrenheit 9/11" defeat a president? Fat chance.
XJames K. Glassman is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.