I saw Bowling for Columbine on DVD last year. I had been in no rush to see it, since most of what I'd heard about it before was that the NRA hated it, gun nuts were furious, Michael Moore was a sloppy fabulist doing a hatchet job on our constitutional right to bear arms, etc., and honestly, I just don't have a strong stake pro or con on the gun issue. But when I saw the movie, that wasn't it at all—it was saying some fairly difficult things about how the culture of violence wasn't reducible to single, simple causes, whether they are the NRA or video games, and Moore was actually saying favorable things about responsible gun ownership. I also half expected to see Moore stick a knife in Charlton Heston's kidney, but again I was disappointed.

Now look at the rhetoric we see directed against Moore for Fahrenheit 9/11. He's an America-hater. He's a Bush-hater. It's a smear job, an innuendo-laden, misleading aggregation of falsehoods. He rants hysterically against his own country and paints George W. Bush as the devil incarnate. That's what I expected. That isn't what I got when I finally saw the movie today.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is an intensely patriotic movie with nary a rant in sight, and the emotion the filmmaker left me with wasn't hatred for Bush, but concern for the ordinary people who were his subject. That's my strongest impression of the movie: it was largely focused on people in the US and Iraq who have to deal with the execution and wrenching consequences of this war. It is an emotional argument, showing us people who have lost children or husbands or wives in the war or the terror attacks, or frantic, grief-stricken old women and children held at gunpoint, but it's a valid point of view, and one that is particularly potent because it has been withheld from us before. Why should people be complaining about this? That innocents will be killed and maimed ought to be a legitimate and important factor in the calculus of going to war. The crime is that it was neglected beforehand, hidden in absurd claims of 'precision' bombing and 'surgical' strikes.

And what about the treatment of Bush and his cronies? Again, it wasn't the demonization I expected. The most memorable images are of Bush and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz doing nothing: they are sitting vacantly, being preened for the cameras. No rubbing their hands together while cackling with malevolent glee, no conspiratorial whispers, no dead babies being filleted for breakfast...just banal mediocrities going about the bidness of making a very, very good living, not really thinking about much of anything, and not really caring much about the painful consequences of their war. Bush comes off as nothing but a superficial tool for his corporate benefactors. Moore is, if anything, charitable to these people.

I've heard a lot of claims lately that the film is inherently dishonest, full of something the right-wing calls "innuendo". That must be a new term for "uncomfortable facts", because that's what I saw here. For example, in the war in Afghanistan, Moore talks about a profitable natural gas pipeline that was going to be built across Afghanistan, to the immense benefit of Halliburton and other well-monied Bush benefactors. Right-wingers gasp, "He's implying that Bush sent the nation into war for this pipeline? How dishonest and simplistic!" But Moore says nothing of the kind. Calling it phony innuendo is an attempt to distract us away from those "uncomfortable facts": yes, there was profit to be made in the war, and plenty of opportunists ready to cash in. And yes, Bush and Cheney practiced a kind of casual corruption, handing out obscenely lucrative contracts to their cronies. The pipeline does not have to be the sole reason we went to war (nor was it, nor does Moore suggest that it was) for the greed we witness in these backroom bargains to be reprehensible.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is a good movie, and the right documentary for our times. It's great journalism of the kind we're so unused to seeing: instead of this mush-mouthed, fake "fair and balanced" nonsense that panders to untenable absurdities by equating them to strong evidence in the name of "equal time", it is a work of advocacy supported by facts. Critics could argue with the interpretation of those facts, but I've seen little of that from them—it's all been vilification and denial.

The outrage over this movie from the right is almost inexplicable. It's simply nothing like the manic botch it has been described as. There is an explanation, of course, and I think I saw it in a comment from Ken MacLeod that "The trouble with liberals...is that they often mistake a fight for an argument, and the right never does." Moore has made an argument, emotional as it is, and he has done so without hatred, without once screaming for the head of George W. Bush on a plate. Moore's critics are seeing an argument forcefully made and projecting onto it their own expectation of the next step, what they would do if they had these kinds of observations about an opponent at their disposal.

MacLeod goes on to cite a relevant article by Alan Wolfe in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics.

Conservatives have absorbed Schmitt's conception of politics much more thoroughly than liberals. Ann H. Coulter, author of books with titles such as Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism and Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, regularly drops hints about how nice it would be if liberals were removed from the earth, like her 2003 speculation about a Democratic ticket that might include Al Gore and then-California Gov. Gray Davis. "Both were veterans, after a fashion, of Vietnam," she wrote, "which would make a Gore-Davis ticket the only compelling argument yet in favor of friendly fire." (Coulter recently displayed her vituperative talents by calling former Sen. Max Cleland, a triple amputee, politically "lucky" for having dropped a grenade on his foot while serving in Vietnam.) Liberals, by contrast, even in their newly discovered aggressively anti-Bush frame of mind, stop well short of Coulter's violent language. Interestingly enough, Schmitt had an explanation for why conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly fight for their ideas with much more aggressive self-certainty than, say, a hopeless liberal like Alan Wolfe.

Schmitt argued that liberals, properly speaking, can never be political. Liberals tend to be optimistic about human nature, whereas "all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil." Liberals believe in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule -- even an ostensibly fair one -- merely represents the victory of one political faction over another. (If that formulation sounds like Stanley Fish when he persistently argues that there is no such thing as principle, that only testifies to the ways in which Schmitt's ideas pervade the contemporary intellectual zeitgeist.) Liberals insist that there exists something called society independent of the state, but Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest its power. Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it.

There's a horrible willful blindness held by conservative extremists that allows them to fiercely condemn even mild opposition by moderates while tolerating and encouraging amazingly deep-seated viciousness by their own. I think it reflects a difference in purpose. The Coulters and Hannitys and O'Reillys are rallying their allies. They have pulled out their crayons and drawn cartoons of liberals, complete with horns and bloody dripping fangs, and wave them before their fellow conservatives and said, "Here is the Other. Aren't they awful? We have to destroy them!" And their fellows agree, the demonic beings in those cartoons sure are evil, and of course what they must do is obey. When they show them to liberals, they get nothing but bafflement: "Are these people nuts? Why are they claiming I hate America and love terrorists?" We find it hard to take them seriously.

Michael Moore has done something that hurts. He has drawn a cartoon to rally the liberals, all right, but dang it, he had to go and make it cut too close to the truth. When conservatives see it, they have to take it seriously. Bush isn't drawn with fangs...merely as a failed businessman who got a lot of helping hands in his career, and is currently repaying his debts from the public till of the country he runs. So now they are struggling frantically to pretend that yes, he did make a movie as over-the-top hysterical as the least of the rantings of a Coulter or a Hannity, so that it's safe to ignore it.

He didn't. They can't.

It's not a tale of evil. It's about incompetence and greed and poor stewardship of the country, about the lower and middle classes struggling to do their best while the wealthy smirk and get wealthier, and the current administration has been caught dead to rights. The reason it is anathema to conservatives is that it is believable. It rings true.

It gets my unreserved recommendation.