In the wake of the election, many students around campus are wondering, "what happened?" or "How on Earth did Bush win?!" This is a very good example of the mindset of 18- to 22-year-old American University students who live in Washington, D.C. What is not being noticed by this demographic is that John Kerry had to fight a huge uphill battle to win the White House this year. For starters, it is hard to beat an incumbent no matter how unpopular he is, and it is really hard to beat an incumbent during war. Now, I do realize that the war on terror is a much different kind of war than past ones, considering our enemy is extremely ghostlike, it does not come from a land with borders, and the battle is waged through intelligence and military raids. Nonetheless, it is extremely hard to defeat a sitting president when we have troops abroad fighting an evil enemy.
President Bush had several other factors on his side as well. He is personally popular, he raised millions more dollars than his opponent, and he did not have to face a challenger in the primaries. All of these things gave Bush a very strong advantage. Bush also had something else going for him. This may shock a lot of people, but one of Bush's secret weapons was Michael Moore. Yes, the Michael Moore that makes vicious and fictitious movies that rip America, our democracy/government, its way of life, and yes, the same Michael Moore who specifically targeted Bush in his latest movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11."
How could this be? How did Moore help Bush? Here is the answer. If someone has actually paid the slightest bit attention to world events in the past three years by either reading the paper, watching the news or just living outside of a cave, he or she knows that Moore can make up anything he wants about Bush, fabricate or exaggerate any fact about his administration, or lie about American foreign policy in any one of his "documentaries," and has the competence to know his work is 99 percent false.
Let's find an example. Toward the beginning of Moore's latest movie, he suggested that Bush gave an order to round up close relatives of Osama bin Laden's family who took residence in the United States and fly them out of the country before planes were allowed back in the air, and without sufficiently questioning them on their association or relationship with bin Laden himself. Here is the truth. A guy by the name of Richard Clarke, who was the anti-terror czar at the time and who has worked for both Republican and Democratic presidents, specifically gave an order to have distant members of bin Laden's family flown out of the country for fear of their safety. What Moore leaves out is that first, they had to wait until planes were allowed back in the air; second, they were actually interrogated by the FBI once they got to Boston and before they were allowed to leave the country; and third, these family members have publicly denounced bin Laden as a terrorist and many that were flown out had either never met bin Laden, or haven't spoken to him since the late 70's or early 80's.
Several other facts that were left out of that story are that Bush later fired Clarke and then Clarke went on to write an anti-Bush book to make the president look bad. To top it all off, when asked today if Clarke defended his decision to fly them out of the country, Clarke said that he was absolutely correct in doing so and that he would still do the same thing today. In the movie, Moore would have you believe that when we were attacked on 9/11 and while the WTC was falling, Bush hopped in a plane, flew around the country picking up bin Laden himself, a few top aides, close friends and associates, and took them to complete sanctuary just to protect them. To make his story credible, Moore interviewed a man to back him up. Who was he? A guy by the name of Craig Unger who is an author of an anti-Bush book titled "House of Bush, House of Saud." What's his credibility? He hates Bush. Wow Michael Moore, you really fooled me there. And that is just one example of how one small part of that movie can be completely debunked.
Moore also flirted the idea that Gore really won Florida in the 2000 election by cutting and pasting a headline from an editorial and making it appear to be the front page of a newspaper on the movie screen. He suggested that the coalition fighting in Iraq is no good because it doesn't include the corrupt governments of France and Germany, which just happened to be inheriting billions of dollars from the United Nations' Oil for Food program (perhaps the biggest scam in world history), aimed at feeding innocent civilians in Iraq who were being starved by brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Moore would probably refer to him as the democratically elected president of Iraq, but I won't give that much credit in this editorial. The truth is that America is in Iraq alongside Great Britain, Australia, Poland, Italy, South Korea, Japan and many others, yet Moore would have you believe America has a unilateralist policy. He claims Bush is a warmonger, but it was Bush himself who addressed the United Nations six full months before the invasion seeking a diplomatic solution, and was successful in getting two new resolutions passed by the Security Council that the United Nations later decided not to enforce (way to do your job, United Nations).
My roommate's 17-year-old brother came to visit last week, and he said to me "John, why did you vote for Bush? Didn't you see 'Fahrenheit 9/11'?" I first began to laugh but on the inside I felt really bad for him. I don't want young people going into politics today, to show that they'll just believe anything that is told to them. I am very offended by Moore, but not because I am a Republican or because I am a Bush supporter. If there are just a few things I stand for, they are the ability to exercise your right to free speech and to voice your opinions if you are in the minority. I think it is patriotic to question the president and all the government's actions. If we do not express discontent when we are unhappy, than America is not a healthy democracy. If Moore wants to say, "We need Bush out of office!" or "Bush is terrible, vote for John Kerry," that is fine by me. I will sleep better knowing that Americans care about the election and have the guts to voice their opinion.
However, when Michael Moore went on a speaking tour of Europe to rile up anti-Bush sentiment and said that the American people "are possibly the dumbest people on the planet," I take offense to that. This man went to Europe to make fun of Americans by calling us the dumbest people on earth and then he goes around calling himself a patriot! Does that make sense to anyone else?!
Mr. Moore is also someone who takes advantage of our troops. He will film a tragic story about a brave young soldier who died in Afghanistan or Iraq and show how upset their family is, just so he can push his own political agenda. He is the one laughing all the way to the bank because his movie is making him millions of dollars at our troops' expense. This is a man who says he is poor, poor, poor, yet he'll use a soldier's sad story to help fund his multimillion-dollar homes off Lake Michigan, or multimillion-dollar apartment in New York City. To me, he just takes advantage of our troops for fame and fortune. Not exactly something a real patriot would do.
When "Fahrenheit 9/11" came out, groups in the Middle East linked to Hezbollah, an anti-Israeli and anti-American terrorist group in Iran, loved it and decided to distribute it to as many anti-American groups and organizations as possible. Now what does that say about Michael Moore, when international terrorists who hate Americans love his film and distribute it to more anti-Americans? In 2002 there was a terrorist attack in Bali just off the northern coast of Australia that killed about 200 innocent people. The man who was convicted of this bombing had his lawyer quote Michael Moore's book "Stupid White Men" as part of the defense's closing argument! He once said that President Bush is a liar and that "there is no terrorist threat." What educated person can say in a post Sept. 11 world, that there is no terrorist threat? Did Mr. Moore sleep through 9/11?
My final point is that although no national Democrats are exactly attached to the hip with Moore, they do not do a good job separating themselves from his stupid rhetoric. In turn Moore is not gaining any votes for his candidate; he is losing votes by firing up the conservative base. So as someone who would just like to give some advice to the opposing side, I would just like to say that the Democrats should do everything in the power to get Moore to shut up! His work and messages only backfire because he just does not know how to go about spreading his message. So whoever will be elected DNC chair, or whoever the next national democratic leader is, tell Michael Moore to keep his overweight, anti-American, racist mouth shut, because he does not help the party. It may be hard to do, but good luck.
John Stapleton is a senior in the School of Public Affairs.
