Boston.com: Opinion / Editorials / Flick flap

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Opinion / Editorials / Flick flap: "LOVE IT OR HATE IT, Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' challenges people to think hard about their country and their president -- and that offers fine training for sharpening one's critical eye and ear for the spin machines being generated by all candidates as the country moves toward a national election.

The film, which grossed a whopping $21.8 million its first weekend, is not popcorn-munching entertainment, nor factual documentary. It is Bush-bashing propaganda that offers fine training for sharpening one's critical eye and ear for the spin machines being generated by all candidates as the country moves toward a national election.
Whether sputtering or cheering, the 'Fahrenheit 9/11' viewer should try to tamp down the obviously manipulated emotion and ask: 'OK, what is Moore trying to do here? And do the dots really connect?'
Moore's attempt to link Saudi influence on President Bush with Osama bin Laden's escape is tenuous at best, and the suggestion that bin Laden family members got air passage out of the United States when all flights were grounded is not based on fact.
The stringing together of sound-bites and photo clips that make Bush look goofy could be done just as easily to John Kerry, or any candidate.
But Moore is devastatingly accurate in his depiction of the victims of war -- Iraqis weeping over relatives buried in rubble, a family terrified when soldiers invade their home, an American mother grieving the loss of her son, and wounded US soldiers screaming on stretchers.
The film rightly questions the Bush administration's justification for war, the politicizing of the terrorist threat, and the strictures on individual liberty in the US Patriot Act."