Unfairenheit 9/11 = Bullshit

I was going to write a review of Fahrenheit 9/11 (which is FORKING AWESOME), but instead I decided to have a little fun with Christopher Hitchens. No homo.

Christopher Hitchens poses for ridonkulous photos like the one above holding a cigarette because he thinks it'll make him look cool. That's really about all you need to know about him. He used to write for The Nation and now he writes for Vanity Fair, but he's probably most famous for going on cable news shows like "Hardball with Chris Matthews" looking like he slept in his suit and arguing with the host and whoever else might be there about anything and everything. In fact, he strikes me as the kind of guy who likes to disagree with shit for the sake of disagreeing with shit, which makes him basically different from myself in that I disagree with everything because everything is wrong. Maybe it's a minor distinction, but I think it's one worth noting.

Anyhoo, it looks like Coffee Breath has decided to take a pretty hardcore neocon stance on the so-called War on Terror. I'm not sure what his deal is as far as that's concerned, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that maybe as a child he was beaten and anally raped by a gang of angry towel heads. Because he seems like too intelligent a guy to have arrived at that stance having actually considered the facts. Obviously this is personal. Which brings me to this little story he's written about Michael Moore's new movie Fahrenheit 9/11 that I'm sure everyone will try to reference in their little posts about Michael Moore and his movie. It's bullshit. I read it and while I won't (and can't) go through it and try to counter each and every one of his points, I will go through and point out the ones that I thought were especially, um, bullshitty.

Let's start with this from the second paragraph:

With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note has been struck. Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl.

Does mentioning Leni Riefenstahl (director of Triumph of the Will) in a discussion of Michael Moore and his films count as far as the whole Godwin's Law thing is concerned? I would say so, especially since he doesn't actually mention how Fahrenheit 9/11 conforms to the the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills of Leni Riefenstahl.

ALSO: Funny, I don't recall her ever winning the Palme d'Or either. And since when did Yellowed Fingertips become a film critic?

Moving on, let's skip a few paragraphs to this part right here:

In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified.

BFD. Here in America we like to consider people innocent until proven guilty. Since when did this become a controversial statement? Prove that fucker guilty and then go after him.

And the "intervention" in Afghanistan was unjustified for lots of reasons.

Then he goes and lists these next 6 points and tries to claim that they're all contradictory:

1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group.

2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment in the United States.

3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests.

4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape.

5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely risible in that its non-army was purely American.

6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine from the fact that this supposedly "antiwar" film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.)

See. I don't even know what else to say. They just aren't. Especially point #4 since that's the one he tends to harp on.  In the movie, it mentions that G-Dubs sent 11,000 troops into Afghanistan after 9/11, which is less than there are cops in Manhattan, supposedly. Um, exsqueeze me, but wasn't the point of sending all those poor hoosiers and negroes into Afghanistan in the first place to find Osama bin Laden and his crew? Because if it was, then obviously we fucked that one up, and I think that was the point he was trying to make.

But that argument only works anyway if you buy the whole argument of Michael Moore as Pacifist to begin with. And, of course, you shouldn't.

Peep game:

I remember asking Moore at Telluride if he was or was not a pacifist. He would not give a straight answer then, and he doesn't now, either.

and

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. (...) Rock the vote, indeed.

So you see, he's basically just trying to label Michael Moore as a pacifist so that he can construct this huge argument against pacifist-ism, or whatever it's called and therefore Moore himself. But he isn't one. And for him to base his whole argument around MM being a pacifist would be like me basing my whole argument on the fact that Nasty Mouth is just angry that he got a really bad knob shine the last time he was in Cambodia. Because I don't know for a fact whether or not that's true. Otherwise I would've used it.

And finally, I especially liked the part where he went so far as to swear on the lives of his children:

[I'm an asshole and] if I write an article and I quote somebody and for space reasons put in an ellipsis like this (…), I swear on my children that I am not leaving out anything that, if quoted in full, would alter the original meaning or its significance. Those who violate this pact with readers or viewers are to be despised.

I might have to consult O-Dub on this one, but swearing on the lives of your children strikes me as weak sauce. For all we know he might not even like his kids. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't like him, assuming they're old enough.

I swear on the lives of Christopher Hitchens' children that I don't work at a White Assholes.