Spin doctors attacking Fahrenheit 9/11

H'wood hot for Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11'

'Also critical was the review in the entertainment industry journal Daily Variety which called the film a "blatant cinematic 2004 campaign pamphlet" and said it "fails to provide any hard facts or make any incriminating connections that a reasonably informed person doesn't already know about."'

(Emphasis added by me)

Let's take apart those two quotes...

"blatant": adj 1: without any attempt at concealment; completely obvious;

So it's obvious stuff that hides nothing.

"cinematic": Duh, it's a movie.

"2004 campaign pamphlet": So apparently this might help a person make a decision come election time... clearly there's nothing wrong with political statements in land of the brave, home of the free, so why should this be an issue? I don't remember cinemas having any responsibility to be non-partisan or pro-administration.

"fails to provide any hard facts or make any incriminating connections that a reasonably informed person doesn't already know about."

So which one is it? As a programmer I immediately noticed this was a boolean truth expression. An "or" expression is true if one of its operands is true. So he is telling the truth if at least one of the following statements is true:

"fails to provide any hard facts": This remains to be seen. If we could see the movie could find out. I'll give Michael Moore the benefit of the doubt, so I'll disagree with this statement until the White House or someone else proves to me that there are no hard facts in the documentary.

"make any incriminating connections that a reasonably informed person doesn't already know about": That could very well be true since he has written quite a bit about these topics in his books, like "Dude, Where's My Country?" (which I'm currently reading). Not only that, most people are not reasonably informed, because the American media does does not talk about these things, hence the usefulness of Moore distributing this information via the cinema, and therefore, this second statement is true because reasonably informed people (like people who read books or access alternative sources of news and information) already know these things. Hence, his statement is true in whole.

I think what he's trying to say is that people who want to be reasonably informed before the 2004 election should see this movie!

Written on May 24, 2004