The Australian: Bob Brown: Whose lies hurt more? [July 29, 2004]

The Australian: Bob Brown: Whose lies hurt more?: "MICHAEL Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which officially opens today in cinemas across the nation, is a polemic. It mercilessly reveals the inadequacy and, at times, immaturity of US President George W. Bush and, in doing so, turns the tables on the farce we often get when watching television news.

What about Bush's scrambled eulogy to Howard in Canberra in which he claimed that the term 'man of steel' was the Texan equivalent of the Australian fair dinkum. Howard would have vetted the speech. He let the gaffe stand -- it made him feel so good. That helps answer Moore's question: 'How is it that someone like John Howard could get in bed with George W. Bush?' Which begs the question: Has our Prime Minister seen Fahrenheit 9/11 and did he feel as good afterwards?

Moore a villain? How about Howard's 2004 justification of the Iraq imbroglio despite his 2003 statement that: 'I couldn't justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime'?
Moore takes licence, but his film is no match for the most fallacious polemic of the past decade: the weapons of mass destruction lie used by Bush, Howard and Tony Blair to justify the invasion of Iraq and the consequent death toll of tens of thousands of men, women and children.
Bush's moment of truth came when he sat reading My Pet Goat to schoolchildren while the twin towers burned. Where was the maturity, intelligence and action to be expected of the most powerful human being on the planet in such a moment of peril? What do his defenders make of the gormless failure of the Commander-in-Chief to take immediate command in the crisis? "


By Bob Brown