the instapundit doesnt want to link me

and i consider that the highest form of respect.

right back at ya, big guy.

i have many issues with the instapundit but none of them are personal. which is rare for me because i pretty much take everything personally.

chalk it up as my biggest flaw.

next to my insanely low self esteem.

and overwhelming disdain of actively pursing any normal type of highly-profitable career.

what i dont get about the instapundit is he’s young, hes successful, hes smart as fuck, he’s down-to-earth, he’s popular, a good family man, in-touch, has a great job as a law professor, holds many interests, and has remained on top of the blogosphere for years now

and yet he refuses to link opposing views on matters of politics on a regular basis. for every one link to a so-called liberal, there are 15-16 links to so-called conservatives. the night before michael moore’s movie came out he claimed that listen missy didn’t like Fahrenheit 9/11 despite the fact that she never even mentioned the film and hadnt even seen the damn thing yet. later he noted his error, but kept her objection up there anyway.

what on god’s green earth could he be afraid of by not linking to people who might have a different feeling about moore, people like, i dont know, me?

could Doc Searls be right? that if “any stick you can whup Bush with is a good stick,” and i, could be the best stick so far?

im sure theres better sticks. but i do agree with doc that i, too, am interested in talking across the the divisions that keep us from talking to each other.

so for Indy, and all his readers who might have missed what went down on the busblog in June, a month i battled chronic tendinitis and carpal tunnel, here are some highlights:

6/1: anna kournikova came over right before the laker game

russian girls normally get it wrong and when they do they do it with their arms crossed.

6/1: dear the pope,

four solid reasons why the pope should be in favor of legalizing marijuana. with a suprise quote from Genesis 1:29.

6/2: A Letter From Chad of Chokey Chicken

in which the graduating high school senior puts me on the spot and asks me to list the top ten most underrated bloggers. so i did:

1. flagrant disregard

2. raymi

3. anti

4. t-money

5. sk smith

6. jaylex

7. angelina

8. raspil

9. bunnie

10. zulieka

6/2 yes it’s true i just had breakfast with the mysterious and glamorous zulieka from zulieka dot com at the pantry in downtown la.

of which she wrote on her blog “4.Tony Pierce. Deceptively cute at first glance, he notices and reads through subtle indications like a poker player. He is so, so quick but he pretends he’s just sitting there. He is both street smart and worldly. After all, he works for the XBI. Thank You Tony for the breakfast. You forgot to mention that I had hashbrowns too, with tabasco sauce.”

6/2 when i think of the president of the united states, this is what i see.

i see a fucking retard.

6/4 today is angelina jolie’s twenty ninth birthday

the mexican lady kept the elevator button mashed in as if it would speed things along. now you know why the elevators are always broken i hissed in spanish.

que?

nada.

6/5 why the president is a fucking retard

if you ever go to the special olympics you will see a spirit that is absent from any other sporting activity you’ll ever witness: unconditional love and reward.

even the slowest, most fumbiling child who finishes a race gets a hug. a loving embrace for participating in the event. a symbol and an action that says, you tried and thats all that matters.

you are loved.

the only institution that mimics this behavoir is the united states of america and it’s relationship to the president of the united states, george bush, and the people and things that he supports.

they treat him like the retard that they know he is

6/6 after calling the sitting president a fucking retard id be a fucking asshole if i didn’t celebrate the death of the president who started all this bullshit.

in which i urinated on the grave of ronald reagan; the man who funded osama, delivered weapons of mass destruction to saddam, sat in his little chair for much longer than seven minutes as AIDS hit america, traded arms for hostages, and illegally funded the contras.

my biggest complaint remains that he is called the great communicator when we can only remember three or four things that he said his whole eight years. the easiest being “tear down this wall,” which of course wasnt torn down until after he left office.

6/6 one day i will die

in which you’re instructed how to act properly when it happens.

6/7 Bukowski: Born Into This

a movie review about the documentary of LA’s finest poet/novelist/drunkard

6/7 Howard Owens writes:

that he’s disappointed with me and dumbfounded by my disrespect of the dead president.

and in which i reply with, well, an awful lot of curse words. and a reminder that the man who killed communism forgot about china, who is doing better than ever these days. and is still very much commie.

mr. reagans death should be a bedtime for bullshit, but how can we even get out of this murky morass of mediocrity if you insist on watering down the genepool of eligible candidates by suggesting that theres something about the incumbent thats admirable.

whats admirable is that he gets out of bed in the morning without bumping his head on the nightstand.

howard, this is america the beautiful. the land that i love.

i shouldnt be able to beat the holy fuck out of the commander in chief in scrabble, let alone economics, common sense, or trivial pursuit.

6/10 top ten reasons oj is not guilty

number ten: the columbian necktie

with special guest quotes from mark fuhrman, f. lee bailey, johnny cochran, katie couric and oj simpson as the juice.

6/12 Dear Tony, Can you please explain to me what the fuck is going on with your Lakers?

here i explained why the lakers weren’t going to lose to detroit in the finals, and how it had something to do with the fact that the team resided in california.

6/14 linda was a teenage runaway.

long hair. bare feet. short nails. hot eyes. brown skin. smooth cheeks. wild mind. hard tongue.

somehow bigger than life. somehow from another place entirely. somehow found the best people to migrate with. somehow made everyone better who she mixed in with.

if msg had eyeliner.

6/16 exclusive interview with shaquille o’neal in which he explains why the refs were unfair to the lakers in the finals

q. why do you think its like that?

a. its easy. its psychology. you see a big huge guy. then you see a bigger huger guy. if the bigger guy is standing there getting fouled by a smaller guy it doesnt look like a foul, it looks like the smaller guy is just trying real hard. but indeed it is a foul. its a real foul. if you prick me, dont i bleed?

q. as a matter of fact, ive never seen you bleed shaq.

a. well, i do. i bleed inside. where it counts.

q. thats sad.

a. im bleeding now.

6/16 how to blog, by tony pierce

the most popular blog post i’ve ever written.

6/17 madpony quits blogging, and the busblog got the exclusive interview

kristin: sigh

dumbass_dumberass: should i blame your bf?

kristin: nah

dumbass_dumberass: whats the reason then?

kristin: i’m just tired of it

6/18 danielle is introduced to the blogosphere

whenever im around the office for lunchtime i like to eat with her cuz shes funny, shes smart, shes brutally honest, and there has never been a topic that she wont discuss with me.

and she hates wearing underwear.

youd be surprised how depressing it can be saving the world. so its nice to have a happy girl to have a half sandwich and soup with on a june gloom friday.

she loves anthropologie and fishing. she likes to hike through the palisades and rich guys with loose wallets. she’ll flash you if you dare her so i dont dare her.

6/19 napoleon dynamite movie review

disguised as a review of the mini glutton bowl that took place at the la film fest outside the cinema.

6/20 oj and courtney and everyone but you

on this post you can follow along as i read aloud (via audblog) a poem i had written exactly ten years ago

6/21 dear amazon dot com are you fucking kidding me?

in which i am critical of the amazon associates program and give a screenshot of my quarterly earnings.

6/22 had the monkey dream again this time with a weird ending

a chimp ripped the page out of his old machine pushed his reading glasses up the bride of his nose crossed his legs and inhaled from his cigarette and exhaled out the corner of his mouth. laughed like monkeys do and without looking reached for his bottle of xxx and took a good swig and kept reading his little masterwork.

“what do you see?” an orangutan asked me and held up a white piece of paper that appeared to have a perfectly symmetrical coffee stain on it.

i see a coffee stain.

6/24 dear michael moore,

i seriously dont know why some people dont like you, but i like you.

i sorta love you.

i think your movies are terrific.

but deeper than that, i love how you make people yearn for 100% absolute truth.

people call you a liar in a way that you’d think that everyone else is completely honest.

6/25 dear vice president haliburton

in which we see the latest Dubya re-election commercial which compares democrats like john kerry, howard dean, and michael moore to hitler.

after being completely picked apart by metafilter, slashdot, and the rest of the web, the rnc changed the begining of the original by adding a twenty second disclaimer.

the new version can be seen on georgewbush.com, it’s called “Kerry’s Coalition of the Wild-eyed”

6/28 Fahrenheit 9/11 a sober film review of the week’s most popular documentary.

in which i answer some of jeff jarvis’s and christopher hitchens’s concerns about the movie.

Jarvis says, “The real problem with the film, the really offensive thing about it, is that in Fahrenheit 9/11, we — Americans from the President on down — are portrayed as the bad guys.”

First of all President Bush in this film is portrayed as much more than just a bad guy. He’s being portrayed as a greedy, dumb, slow-witted, poor-talking, “War President”, who doesn’t know how to win any wars, doesn’t know how to treat soldiers, and isn’t loved by his public.

Are you a bad guy if you send troops into a war and then decrease imminent danger” pay (from $225 to $150) and family separation allowance (from $250 to $100)? Are you a bad guy if you oppose the National Guard from receiving access to the Pentagon’s health insurance system, despite knowing that only about one out of every five Guard members has no health insurance?

6/28 the busblog collection of 11 completely random online movie reviews of Fahrenheit 9/11

ok, i was being sarcastic.

they were 11 glowing reviews of the film, expertly edited to give one big nice even more-glowing review.

but to be fair i linked each paragraph to their original column.

and i also linked the rotten tomatoes site for the 130 positive reviews; and, to be fair, the 25 negative ones.

6/29 suddenly the republicans want to listen to clarke?

in which reader john stinson leaves a comment about how richard clarke said that it was his responsibility that the bin laden family were allowed to leave america on 9/13 when no other charter planes were allowed to fly.

so therefore michael moore’s movie had at least one lie in it when it accused clarke’s boss (at the time) president bush, for having the planes jet off before the fbi could interrogate the members of the powerful family who are very close to the bush family.

mr. stinson is greeted with a handful of other clarke quotes to mull over.

6/29 i swear we’ll talk about babes soon begins with our buddy howard owens back again accusing yours truly of hating on bush because for the sole reasons that he’s republican and im a liberal.

to which i explain that in recent history ive voted for just as many dems as repubs. that i like several of the planks of the main parties. and that i dont like bush because he feels it necessary to bullshit me, and my countrymen, who have mastered the art of bullshitting so well that atop my blog theres a clear warning of untruths ahead.

and i hate cuz hes dumb.

and in a brilliant little line, i summed up the irony of the theme of freedom. something that the president constantly claims to be bringing to the people of iraq even though he is against freedoms in the united states like gay marriages, abortions, presidential election recounts, free speech on the radio and tv, and the legalization of drugs that he himself has “experimented” with at great length and knows to be harmless:

freedom is a double edged sore.

but mostly in that line i was saying that when we as a country were at our most free we were also at our most vulnerable

and every once in a while you have to pay the price of so much freedom

but you shouldnt freak out about having to pay that price.

it’s just part of the deal.

and later i ask not to be called a liberal.

not everyone who thinks bush is bad is a liberal.

some people just don’t like being lied to in regards to why this country goes to war.

other people don’t like being lied to about when public people are asked about their private sex life.

me, i couldn’t care less about what you do sexually in the privacy of your oval office, but don’t bullshit me about real matters of life and death.

and don’t call me a liberal.

im an american, i can think for myself.

maybe the blogfather simply just overlooked the busblog. maybe im not interesting enough. maybe i dont write well enough. maybe i dont have enough fresh ideas.

maybe i’ll just have to concentrate harder in july.

buzzmachine + tim blair + welch is back from romania

mr owens wanted me to read

nicholas kristof’s op-ed piece in todays paper of record “Calling Bush A Liar,” so i did.

and howard, i see your kristof (who basically admits that the president exaggerates, stretches the truth, is often confused, and deceived himself.. but didnt flat-out lie), and his 25 inches of “it depends on what your definition of a lie is”,

and i raise you the NY Times ED Board column on 6/17 “The Plain Truth” about the lie that iraq had ties to al qaeda

“the Bush administration convinced a substantial majority of Americans before the war that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to 9/11. And since the invasion, administration officials, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, have continued to declare such a connection. Last September, Mr. Bush had to grudgingly correct Mr. Cheney for going too far in spinning a Hussein-bin Laden conspiracy. But the claim has crept back into view as the president has made the war on terror a centerpiece of his re-election campaign.

On Monday, Mr. Cheney said Mr. Hussein “had long-established ties with Al Qaeda.” Mr. Bush later backed up Mr. Cheney, claiming that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist who may be operating in Baghdad, is “the best evidence” of a Qaeda link. This was particularly astonishing because the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, told the Senate earlier this year that Mr. Zarqawi did not work with the Hussein regime.

and i’ll even throw in another NYT Ed Board column “The Faulty Weapons Estimates” from January that suggests that Bush’s claim that Iraq had wmd including the ability to have nukes “amounted mainly to wishful thinking.”

we could split hairs all day about the difference of a lie and spreading false information, but one thing that i found interesting about F 9/11 is that it had so many things to attack bush about and yet he shied away from the most glaring Bush lie of all: the one he told during the State of the Union Address in ’03 that Saddam was making his nukes from Nigerian uranium even though Joe Wilson and the CIA said that it wasnt true.

but what’s worse is two months after the address, VP Cheney went on Meet the Press and kept the lie going, “He’s had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.

but it didnt end there. once they found out that their “evidence” was not true, they stuck to their guns claiming that they had other intelligence saying that iraq was getting uranium from africa.

finally, six months after he lied on Meet the Press, Cheney returned to admit, “Yeah. I did misspeak… We never had any evidence that he had acquired a nuclear weapon.

i cannot think of a bigger more destructive lie than one that costs a country a billion dollars a day, hundreds of lives, and thousands of casualties.

it baffles me when intelligent people defend such reckless and selfish and murderous behavoir because it may polarize people, because it’s insulting, or because it may “impede understanding,” as Kristof says.

what impedes understanding far quicker are deceptions, exaggerations, misspeaking, and untruths while marching to an unprecidented invasion of a country that posed no threat to this country.

the president sure loves to talk about freedom. good. the truth will set him free to play cowboy on his ranch for good come november. and he can be confused there all he damn well pleases.

and nobody else will die from it.

bob mould + i got a nice postcard from bunnie today + brian made a great photo essay

danielle said lets blow this taco stand

and i said i dont have any more c4. she said no, i mean lets make like a tree and get the fuck outta here. i was all language madame! she was all vous les vous couchez avec moi c’est saw. i was all c’est saw? she was all, can we please have lunch now?

so we cruised over to the new thai place at the strip mall on crescent heights and it was valet only and she doesnt let anyone driver her benz cept me. so we rolled. then we went over to the grove and at lunchtime traffic and parking was a bitch. youd think it was christmas.

then we cruised down beverly and she found some “cute” restaurants, which obviously means the food is great. but we got swooped from our meter parking spot and danielle pounded on her steering wheel cursing the good lord. i was all easy on the blasphemy baby. and she was all, where is your god? where! where!!!!?

and i said hes at kfc whipping up some popcorn chicken and she said fine.

i was all, what are you going to get there.

she said nothing!

i was like, you have to get something, its lunch, we’ve spent a half hour driving. get a salad.

no.

get a ear of corn.

no!

get a thing of mashed potatoes or mac n sleeze.

hell no!

and she didnt. we drove thru, got my deal and she huffed.

i was all, i cant eat this with you sitting there all pissed. lets go to the dog.

so we went to black dog and there she stood in line for another 10 minutes longer than normal and i swore she was either going to throw a chair through the plate glass window or cry.

so when she marched to the car i said lets do a quickie little photo shoot.

and that cured her.

vortexia + tonecluster + the faith fools + danielle’s blog

i swear we’ll talk about babes soon

but first a word from our pal Howard Owens:

I used to say that I couldn’t decide who to vote for. In the last view days, I’ve decided to vote against Michael Moore. Whatever I can do to make MM miserable, that’s how I’ll vote.

Also, Tony writes, “no gary, we’re not mad that he is “liberating” iraq, we’re mad that he took us to iraq under the guise of wmd, not human rights issues.”

No, you’re mad because he’s a Republican liberating Iraq. You’re mad because he doesn’t fit your ideal of a politician liberating Iraq. You’re mad because you don’t like him and he liberated Iraq.

It has nothing to do with WMD, because you never believed it was WMD in the first place, or argued that the WMD wasn’t a good enough reason to go to war, or whatever … you were against the war before the war for whatever reason you could find, and only later latched on to the “Bush Lied” meme, however untruthful that meme actually is.

The left’s agenda has never been about Iraq, pro or con. It’s been about Bush and hating Bush and pushing a liberal/progressive/partisan agenda. If Bush said “I support socialized medicine,” the left would suddenly say socialized medicine is a bad thing.

The right did the same thing to Clinton was president.

Moore is a perfect example of the “hate Bush first” league … invade Afghanistan = bad thing; now, it’s “we didn’t send enough troops to Afghanistan and we didn’t send them quickly enough.”

First, Afghanistan shouldn’t have been invaded, now it’s that it wasn’t invaded properly. It’s called moving the goal posts, and the left does it to Bush on a daily basis, just as the right did it to Clinton for eight years.

a few points howard,

im not a liberal. in the last elections i voted for Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, and Nader. i don’t follow groups, i follow my heart. groups can follow me if they want.

im a born-again who listens to nwa, gwar, and iron maiden. im a blogger and i can pull chicks. im a black man whose favorite record this year is the new loretta lynn (my prayers are with her).

i agree with many planks of the republican platform: less government, personal privacy, self-reliance.

i also agree with many planks of the democratic platform: help the poor, tax the fucking rich, more money for schools than for bombs.

i also agree with many planks of the libertarian platform: individual liberty, personal responsibility; and a foreign policy of non-intervention, peace, and free trade.

i also agree with my hippie friends who think we should legalize weed, socialize meds, abolish the fcc, break the monopoly of ticketmaster, and allow women (and men) to be topless whenever they please. not sure which party is rallying around those things.

and i think the dh is bad for baseball. duh.

i wasn’t in favor of invading afghanistan or iraq. im still not in favor of what we did in iraq or afghanistan, although im less upset about the latter than the former.

one reason im not jumping up and down about kerry is i believe he shares these beliefs but is willing to bend because he is a politician and doesn’t want to be seen as a bleeding heart. its impossible to hope for a leader with a spine AND a brain, so i wont dwell. but sorry to break it to you howard, but i would have been upset if clinton had sent us to war with iraq too. or gore. or hillary. or anybody. especially over wmd.

lots of people have wmd and we don’t invade them. similarily there are lots of murderous tyrants who aren’t sitting on barrels of oil and we don’t “liberate” those people either.

im a pacifist but if Bush said right now that he wanted to “liberate” Saudi Arabia, i would be in favor of it. the victims of 9/11 don’t deserve to die in vain, and america needs to get back into the business of fighting wars against people who started fucked up shit against us.

there is a huge difference my friend between don’t tread on me and don’t think about treading on me.

freedom is a double edged sore.

which brings us to your unfounded question, if bush said he was in favor of free health care, i would vote for him. i fuckin dare him.

perfect example: someone asked me today what i would do if i found out i had cancer. among other things i said i would quit my stupid job. and then we realized i wouldn’t be able to because then i would have to fight cancer without any health care! even terminal im chained to my cubicle.

my kingdom for an accountant.

i don’t have problems with bush because he’s a republican. i have problems with him because he’s a moron, a liar, a failure, why we hate fratboys, and because he’s Not a republican. less government doesn’t mean more FCC. less government doesn’t mean coming out against gay marriages from the executive branch. less government doesn’t mean giving less money to soldiers as they’re in the middle of a hopeless “war.”

not everyone who thinks bush is bad is a liberal.

some people just don’t like being lied to in regards to why this country goes to war.

other people don’t like being lied to about when public people are asked about their private sex life.

me, i couldn’t care less about what you do sexually in the privacy of your oval office, but don’t bullshit me about real matters of life and death.

and don’t call me a liberal.

im an american, i can think for myself.

the edge of alliance + after the debauchery + the other white meat

suddenly the republicans want to listen to clarke?

Sure he’s a Jabba-sized oaf, but give him his due. He knows how to play the left’s paranoia like a fiddle, and he does.

Moore film deception item #1.

http://www.hillnews.com/news/052604/clarke.aspx

More to follow…not that anyone on these forums care.

Stinson

Dear Stinson,

If you want us to listen to Richard Clarke about 9/11, the Iraq War, and Bush, etc. then please tell us what else you would like us to pay attention to.

this?

“Your government failed you � and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn’t matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask � for your understanding and for your forgiveness.” – to the 9/11 commission on 3/24/04

or this

“If Condi Rice had been doing her job and holding those daily meetings the way Sandy Berger did, if she had a hands-on attitude to being national security adviser when she had information that there was a threat against the United States … [the information] would have been shaken out in the summer of 2001,” – on Larry King

or this:

“I tried to explain (to Rice): ‘This office is new, you’re right. It’s post-Cold War security, not focused just on nation-state threats. The boundaries between domestic and foreign have blurred. Threats to the U.S. now are not Soviet ballistic missiles carrying bombs, they’re terrorists carrying bombs. Besides, the law that established the NSC in 1947 said it should concern itself with domestic security threats, too.’ I did not succeed entirely in making the case.” – from his book Against All Enemies

this, perhaps:

“We did exactly what al Qaeda said we would do — invade and occupy an oil-rich Arab country that wasn’t threatening us in any way,” – Keynote speech on 6/26/04

or perhaps this:

“I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11,” – 60 Minutes

personally i was willing to discount his book and his complaints about the president, but if the repubs are suddenly saying that he’s not crazy then i will reconsider.

kitty bukkake + redacted + mc brown

chad from chokey chicken

pleaded with me not to write about politics this morning and i will do my best. this is just a fascinating time in world and national politics. to me whats so interesting is…

ok focus… no politics.

hot chick called me yesterday. last night to be specific. you know youre in a slump when they call you, and no matter what you cant get them to come over.

so yap yap yap they call and the good thing is i can get my dishes done while i talk on the phone. but during the middle, near the end, heck, even in the beginning, im trying to close the sale, trying to get them over, trying to find a rendevous spot. anything. its been weeks, america. weeks.

so i hung up and watched my girl kirsten dunst on letterman and i turned up the sonny rollins and just watched kirsten on tivo slow-mo like a perv. watching the way her mouth moves when she talks. watching the way her hands move super slow as she gestures.

and the phone rang again, and it was clipper girls cousin. she was crying.

my experience is you cant get a crying girl into a naked girl within an hour. and as it was 1am, and my bedtime is 2am i figured either i could be a friend or i could be a dick.

so i laid in my bed and i listened to her cry over her stupid man troubles and at 2ish she sniffled her last sniffle and asked if she could come over and spend the night with me.

and for some reason i was really pissed off because at the begining of the conversation i was all, why dont you come over and we can talk about this face to face, you know, holding hands and stuff.

and she was all, no. she could tell that there was something in the works.

but now that it was 2, and she was done being sad, she wanted someone to hold all night, and someone to be held by, from, however you put it.

and the highschool boy nerdy fuckup too-nice friend-only tony who had been burned once too many times said fuck that shit. and the bachelorpad always-be-closing-horny-as-fuck tony was all, sure she’ll be here at 2:30a, bang till 3a and get four and a half hours sleep.

but then the logical part of me said, if youre in a slump, aint no way that girl is gonna come right over and be in the mood for your dumb ass. say no, say no.

and i dont know if ive ever shown you a picture, but this girl is hot. rocket hot. more than one time ive heard tires screech to a stop when we walked down the street and it wasnt because they eyed the author of the world famous busblog.

and like a dope i said, sure come on over. and kiddingly i said, but dont try anything fishy.

and she came over at 2:30, and she told me what a great friend i was.

and we slept with the window open

and at 2:35 she was snoring

and it was funny, the slump had not ended.

and i fell asleep laughing a dopey happy laugh.

chokey chicken + the perils of living in 3d + zulieka

the busblog collection of 11 completely random online movie reviews of Fahrenheit 9/11

“It is a punishing, brilliantly executed indictment.” – Films In Review

“Indeed, the film’s long opening movement, which segues from the stolen election of 2000 and Bush’s 2001 summer vacation through the events of 9-11 and the cowboy invasion of Afghanistan to dwell on the oil politics uniting the Bushies with the Saudis, is the strongest filmmaking of Moore’s career.” – Village Voice

“… his film grows steadily darker, and Moore largely disappears from it, as he focuses on people such as Lila Lipscomb, from Moore’s hometown of Flint, Mich.; she reads a letter from her son, written days before he was killed in Iraq. It urges his family to work for Bush’s defeat.” – Roger Ebert

“Disagree with Moore’s politics, if you must. Disagree with his filmmaking methods, if you wish. Nonetheless, ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ � rushed into theaters after its surprise grand-prize win at last month’s Cannes International Film Festival � is an often powerful film, and the most focused work of the director’s career. It’s got a bit of his trademark humor and a few of his microphone-shoving stunts, but its real story is in Lipscomb’s eyes.” – Seattle Times

“For the most part, he lets his subjects speak for themselves, whether it’s National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice testifying before the 9/11 commission, Secretary of State Colin Powell reaching to connect the supposed dots between Al Qaeda and Iraq, or the president addressing a group of his supporters as ‘the haves and have mores.'” – Reel.com

“Most people reading this already know whether they’re going or not. The question is whether “Fahrenheit 9/11” will be worth the trip. In many ways this is Moore’s best film; he exercises restraint that has been notably lacking in such documentaries as “Roger & Me,” “The Big One” and the Oscar-winning “Bowling for Columbine.” In those movies, Moore affected the persona of a rumpled Everyman bravely confronting malign corporate and cultural forces; he also never missed a chance to be seen on camera, usually in a self-serving pose of righteous indignation. (Who can forget how courageously he placed the photograph of a gun violence victim in Charlton Heston’s driveway?)” – Washington Post

“Moore is something new in American film, an uncompromising provocateur. Film for him is a personal medium, as personal as his anger at corporate greed, government duplicity and economic inequity. More than anyone, he’s broadened the art of documentary, adding impassioned, essayistic advocacy to its repertoire of styles. He is an indispensable treasure, and his imperfections are part of the reason, because they mark him as real.” – Houston Chronicle

“Moore is a provocateur, a blowhard, an entertainer. But he is also a patriot. As a director he has consistently advocated not merely for the rights of a citizen, but perhaps one of the chief and founding obligations of being a citizen: to make government accountable to its people.” – Denver Post

“Assessing the merits of a political film is a tricky business. Obviously, its quality is partly a function of its power to persuade, but its persuasiveness is in the eye of the beholder. Yet there are other things to consider: The movie’s passion. Its serious purpose. Its tone. Its mix of words and images, and the way both linger in the mind. There’s the way the movie fashions its arguments, and the cumulative effect the experience provides — what you feel walking out, what you think about the next day.

By all these measures, ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ is Michael Moore’s best film. “Certainly, it’s a career landmark, the film that signals his transition from political entertainer to political thinker, from propagandist to idiosyncratic journalist, from colorful gadfly to patriot. If “Bowling for Columbine” was a step, this is a leap, in which Moore vaults past Will Rogers into some territory all his own. In the 90-year history of the American feature film, there has never been a popular election-year documentary like this one.” – SF Chronicle

“A passionate, clearly articulated, if sloppily structured indictment of the president, his ties to the bin Laden family, his relentless push for war in Iraq and, as portrayed by Moore, an ineptitude bordering on the criminal.” – Newsday

“(It’s) a compelling, persuasive film, at odds with the White House effort to present Bush as a strong leader. He comes across as a shallow, inarticulate man, simplistic in speech and inauthentic in manner. If the film is not quite as electrifying as Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine,” that may be because Moore has toned down his usual exuberance and was sobered by attacks on the factual accuracy of elements of “Columbine”; playing with larger stakes, he is more cautious here, and we get an op-ed piece, not a stand-up routine. But he remains one of the most valuable figures on the political landscape, a populist rabble-rouser, humorous and effective; the outrage and incredulity in his film are an exhilarating response to Bush’s determined repetition of the same stubborn sound bites.” – Roger Ebert

“Like him or not, once you see it, you�ll have to admit that the guy has balls.” – Stefan Halley

130 positive reviews of Fahrenheit 9/11 + 25 negative reviews + courtesy rotten tomatoes

Fahrenheit 9/11

starring George Bush, George HW Bush, Lila Lipscomb, and Bandar Bush

narrated by Michael Moore

it takes a lot to make me cry.

when the Cubs broke my heart last October and didn’t make the world series, i cried for about 30 seconds.

when i broke up with my true love and moved out three years ago, i cried for about 5 seconds.

on Sunday morning, in a sold-out cinema in century city, i cried probably 6-7 times during one of the most powerful films i’ve ever seen.

but what makes Michael Moore so talented is I also laughed about a dozen times. loudly. along with everyone else in the crowd.

i thought i knew everything about the war in iraq and the reason why we went there. i thought i knew everything about the florida elections, about the links of the bush family and the bin ladins.

but this movie showed me that i only knew what the so called Liberal Media was interested in broadcasting, and covering, and commenting on.

michael moore is being called lots of names from all sides of the political spectrum, some negative. the judges at Cannes called him a genius, and i would have to agree.

Farenheight 9/11 is a tightly woven amalgam of mostly public footage of all the major players of the Bush Administration and family laid out in a compelling and convincing way that raise several disturbing points.

I went into the film cynical of Moore, and yet hopeful. I read a few negative criticisms regarding this movie as penned by the seething Christopher Hitchens, and the logical Jeff Jarvis. I thought about the things that they had written as I watched and I saw things like the Secret Service questioning Moore across the street from the Saudi Embassy (pictured) and I thought, “how is this a Michael Moore lie? Those guys really are protecting the Saudi Embassy from being filmed. White House secret service guys! Moore might have a point that we have an extremely cozy relationship with the House of Saud. Maybe too cozy.”

I saw two very young US soldiers talk about how they pump music through the tank and everyone can listen to it together as they shoot people. As they battle. As they do what must be incredibly tough work in liberating Iraq. One guy talked about how he likes to listen to the Bloodhound Gang’s “Fire Water Burn” (one of my favorite songs) as he does his job.

And then I saw another young soldier talk about how a little bit of your soul gets torn out every time you kill another human being. And I thought, Moore is showing us both sides of being a soldier: how you have to deal with the gruesome by blocking it out with music, and how sometimes you cant block it out.

incredibly powerful, and done with the light touch that Jarvis claims to be missing from Moore’s more recent docs.

Hitchens claims that Moore wants it both ways in the film. “(Moore says that) either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all- the latter was Moore’s view as late as 2002- or we sent too few.”

But I didn’t see that. I saw that Moore felt that we sent too few troops in too late. The film shows quite clearly that we waited a full two months to send ground troops into Afghanistan to find or kill Osama. And when we sent those men and women in there were more cops in Manhattan than soldiers in Aghanistan. I don’t see the contradiction.

Jarvis says, “The real problem with the film, the really offensive thing about it, is that in Fahrenheit 9/11, we — Americans from the President on down — are portrayed as the bad guys.”

First of all President Bush in this film is portrayed as much more than just a bad guy. He’s being portrayed as a greedy, dumb, slow-witted, poor-talking, “War President”, who doesn’t know how to win any wars, doesn’t know how to treat soldiers, and isn’t loved by his public.

Are you a bad guy if you send troops into a war and then decrease imminent danger” pay (from $225 to $150) and family separation allowance (from $250 to $100)? Are you a bad guy if you oppose the National Guard from receiving access to the Pentagon’s health insurance system, despite knowing that only about one out of every five Guard members has no health insurance?

I know President Bush was probably taught by his father not to raise taxes, but is the best way to pay for war to cut the benefits of those who are fighting the war and to cut benefits to veterans? Sorry Jeff, but most of us would consider Bush a bad guy for doing those things.

He’s also a dumb guy. The seven minutes that he spent with the kids at that school after knowing that the second plane had hit the twin towers were outrageous.

Here’s what a real leader would do and say, “Kids, I hate to do this to you, but this is the beginning of the school year. I am going to leave a little early today if you will excuse me. But I promise you that I will be back before this school year is over. And when I return I will come back and spend twice as much time with you as I had planned for today, is that a deal?”

Instead he just sat there with the weirdest looks on his face reading a kiddie book about a goat, waiting to be told what to do, knowing that hundreds had died and more were hurt and might die.

Again, sorry bro, but it was pretty easy to paint the prez out as being piss poor under pressure and not very much of a leader, especially since he knew upon arriving at the school that one plane had already crashed into the first tower.

The American people are not portrayed as being “bad”. The people didn’t vote for Bush, they pelted his limo with eggs on his inaugural. They held up signs that said “God Save Us”. A mother cried when her son died. How is that bad? A woman cried when her husband died and wailed that she was now all alone. Neither of those women are bad guys.

The only bad guy American I could imagine that Jarvis is talking about is the bubblegum-chomping Britney Spears who took an un-Dixie Chicks stand by saying that she believed in the President and everything that he said about the war.

Again, here’s both sides being represented. Protesters with their signs and Britney with her flag-waving loyalty to the president. Of course in context of the film she is made to look ignorant and childish, but lots of America were ignorant to a lot of the the details that were brought up in this documentary.

Which is why some of us stood up and cheered at the end.

With tears in our eyes.

Because we finally got to see a different angle at the story that the Liberal Media hasnt shown us. One not of bad guys and good guys, but of mixed signals and mixed messages that were finally being irorned out and presented in a tight little film that it is impossible to view and not be impressed by the storytelling and the compelling nature of all the little details and how they add up to one thing.

And that one thing, in this blogger’s opinion is not that Michael Moore is a big fat liar.

The one thing that this blogger concluded was that i was glad that i lived in a country where a guy like Moore could expose the President of the United States in such a damning damning nearly unrefutable way, and not get his head chopped off.

Deeper still, this is a documentary about living in the Information Age. Nearly all of the footage is from press conferences, or meetings that C-Span covered, or from photos that anyone could order from Wire Images, or facts that could be checked on the Internet.

One document that was not currently in the public record although it was at one point declassified (and then leaked to Moore once it became classified) played an ominious tone in the film and Moore played it like a fiddle,. It was in regards to James Bath, a friend of President Bush’s in the National Guard, who eventually was hired by GWH Bush in 1976 to create offshore companies to move CIA funds and aircraft between Texas and Saudi Arabia.

Somehow this didn’t prove as powerful to this observer as the testimony from Condi Rice’s lips and General Powell’s lips in 2001 that Saddam no longer had the capability to have or manufacture weapons of mass destruction.

So no, Jeff, the conclusions that I made at the end of this film isn’t that Moore is a liar, its that the government *gasp* doesn’t always know whats going on, and sometimes they tell us things that they think are true and theyre wrong, and sometimes they tell us things that they know not to be true, but sometimes they are doing business with people and then covering up those relationships in ways like blacking out their names on documents or shuttling them away on airplanes.

The images that remain with me are ones that any documentarian could have found and that was of the american mother and the iraqi mother crying over the death of their sons over a war that didn’t need to be faught, but was faught, and is still being faught under the lie, yes, lie, that Iraq and Saddam had something to do with 9/11 and future terrorism to the land of the free.

Faherinheight 9/11 receives five stars, the busblog’s highest rating.

Most movie reviewers also highly recommend this fantastic film.

doc searls + sk smith + george must go

dear vice president haliburton,

i totally understand why you would tell leahy to fuck off on the senate floor yesterday. i mean, calling you out and asking you how much money you’re making via haliburton over this iraq war is totally unprofessional, and generally not cool.

even if youre making millions.

which you probably are.

stud.

but dude, the new campaign ad… (click the green button that says “watch” or click this direct link)

as the kids say, wtf?

are you serious with your intention of comparing kerry, gore, and michael moore to hitler?

is that all you brainiacs have over there at 1600?

i dont know about you, but i sorta like the riled up Al.

and is it a good idea to show not one, but two clips of the guy who got more popular votes than your guy did?

more questions:

is it really bad for Howard Dean to say that he wants his country back?

do you really want to show Michael Moore’s speech where he says, “we live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons,” reminding people that the fat bastard might actually be right, and reminding them that it was a speech that he gave as he was winning an Oscar for best documentary, which he will probably win again with his movie about your administration?

is Gephart wrong when he says “this president is a miserable failure”, or are you suggesting that because he’s pointing he’s Hitleresque?

did Hitler really say that God told him to take on al-Queda? or are you guys being funny over there?

are you serious in showing the funniest thing that Kerry has ever said, “he will lay off your camel, tax your shovel, kick your ass, and tell you there is no promised land”?

and is it necessary to bleep ass?

mr. vice president, this commercial is the nicest gift youve ever given the democrats, and trust me, youve given them many gifts.

please re-consider showing this on your dime.

so that the dems can show this on theirs.

but i must say that you did the right thing by not letting the president speak at all.

its your only hope.

xoxoxoxo

tony

metafilter’s thread + bluecad + watch jeff jarvis on aaron brown tonight attempt to diss michael moore

this week in rock in la

tonight

dramarama, key club

eek-a-mouse, hollywood park

auf der maur, troubador

bang tango, paladino’s

sluts of trust, spaceland

saturday 6/26

ghostface killah + pharcyde, house of blues

teena marie + rick james + morris day & the time, universal

nikki nova, improv

no doubt + blink 182, hyundai pavilion

lloyd cole, mccabes

lee rocker, cozy’s

sunday 6/27

psoma, troubador

the alarm, key club (late show)

ottmar liebert, key club

monday 6/28

ll cool j, house of blues

twista, key club

tuesday 6/29

THE C – TROUBADOR

wednesday 6/30

glen phillips, largo

thursday 7/1

d-12 world, house of blues

everlast, conga room

concrete blonde, amoeba (free)

simon & garfunkel + everly bros, hollywood bowl

fishbone, santa monica pier

friday 7/2

mix master mike, key club

skinny puppy, henry fonda

richard thompson, house of blues

dramarama, house of blues

random complaints + 3rd leg + instapundit