Goofy Article at Salon

Salon has a pretty negative opinion of Michael Moore, one they've had it for a long time. In 1997, they published an article by Daniel Radosh which stated, "For most people on the left, Moore is welcome news. Some of us, however, have had enough." They have taken the occasion off and on since then to take shots at Mr. Moore, and today they take another shot. But unlike some of their earlier efforts which made good cogent points, this one seems a little bizarre.

The story is this. Michael Moore has claimed that soldiers appreciate Fahrenheit 9/11. Bill Warhop, the author of this article, doubted this claim. So he took four soldiers with him to see Fahrenheit 9/11 and recorded their disapproval of it. This, along with the fact that the showing of Fahrenheit 9/11 was empty, proves that Michael Moore is a filthy liar.

Huh?

Well, maybe Mr. Warhop isn't going quite that far. After all he does spend nearly two thirds of his article telling us of the difficult he had to go through just to get four soldiers to go see the movie with him. I mean that's surely the most interesting part of the article, isn't it? The struggles of the reporter to round up people to talk to. Much more interesting than the abbreviated comments of these four soldiers you managed to watch the movie with.

Anyway it turns out the four soldiers didn't like the movie and felt it portrayed the military in a bad light. They make some good points.

"They particularly disliked the scene of a U.S. patrol on Christmas Eve raiding an Iraqi house in search of a male suspect. Marks said, "They just showed the two women crying, 'He's a student.' They don't show you what those soldiers said before that. Maybe this Iraqi guy killed an American soldier, planted a bomb ..."

"We don't know why they're looking at this guy," Garcia complained. "We don't know if maybe they found 10 RPG rounds or 200 pounds of C4. All we get is the family screaming.""

That's a fair complaint; we don't know. Odds are Mr. Moore doesn't know either or he knows that the guy was guilty. One has to assume that if Mr. Moore had known that this guy was totally innocent he would have made that explicit in his narrative. Pity Mr. Warhop didn't spend more time with the story rather than with his difficulty in getting the story.

Incidently, as for the question of whether the Military supports Fahrenheit 9/11, the answer is clearly, we don't have enough information. Mr. Moore has put up letters from soldiers who do support his work, and I'm sure that many exist. On the other hand, I'm sure that there are many who don't like Michael Moore and what he stands for. I don't know if you can really assess how it shakes out based on a handful of letters and four guys Mr. Warhop took to the movies.