Katha Pollitt 1, Intellectual Honesty 0

Katha's latest column in The Nation is just about the most infuriating piece of excuse-making for Michael Moore's lies that I've yet come across. Let's parse (or "fisk" as the kids are calling it) the following money quotes:

The odd thing is, I found the movie immensely cheering and energizing, even though I don't agree with its main thesis, drawn from Unger, that Bush's oil-business interests, particularly his close financial and personal connections with the Saudis, drove his post-9/11 decisions to go easy on Saudi Arabia and invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

Got it, I think. The conspiracy theory underlying the film---without which it's just a collection of moving and still pictures---couldn't be more wrong, yet the film overall is "cheering."

I think President Gore might well have invaded Afghanistan too--although, who knows, maybe the Republicans would have thwarted him out of spite. I also think that key promoters of the war in Iraq--Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld--were motivated by a sincere, if deranged, belief that overthrowing Saddam would usher in US- and Israel-friendly capitalist democracies all over the Middle East. They had, after all, been pushing for regime change for years.

Okay, so the Dem policy on Afghanistan might have been precisely the same as Bush's. I think that means Katha should be asking for about 40% of the cost of her ticket back, since her concession invalidates just about that proportion of the movie. The other 60% gets refunded because the Iraq war, as Katha correctly points out, wasn't about oil/the Carlyle Group/Halliburton/Saudi influence over the government after all.

Like all Moore's movies, Fahrenheit 9/11 is somewhat muddled and self-contradictory. Just as Bowling for Columbine excoriated the NRA while arguing that guns don't kill people, Americans kill people, Fahrenheit 9/11 simultaneously argues that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are wrong and unnecessary and that we need to send more troops; that the Bush Administration does too much and too little to protect the country from another terrorist attack; that Bush is an idiot and a lightweight and that he is a master of calculation.

Let's take someone who's been in a sensory deprivation chamber for the last 4 years and ask him the following question. Was the above passage written as part of an endorsement of F9/11, or as part of a denouncement? And in the free-association segment of our questionnaire, what other qualities would you associate with a documentary film that is "somewhat muddled and self-contradictory"?