The Bush camp, with a little help
from the "Soo-preme"
Court, stole the 2000 presidential elections, at
least according to Moore. The documentarian backs
up this accusation with some pretty persuasive data
in a bizarre game of connect the dots meets six
degrees of separation, starting at the political
desk of the Fox News Channel, run by Bush's first
cousin, John Ellis, who made the decision to report
Bush had won Florida a call that did not come from
the news media polling group Voter News Service.
After pointing out that Bush was on vacation 42
percent of the time during his first eight months
in office, Moore introduces some never-before-seen
footage of the President visiting a Florida classroom
on the morning of September 11, 2001, where after
being informed the nation was under attack, he continued
to read My Pet Goat for seven minutes. The film
openly accuses Bush of ignoring terrorism warnings
prior to the events of 9/11 and using the American
public's fear of more terrorist attacks to secure
support for the war in Iraq. But what possible motive
could Bush have for pinning the tail on Saddam Hussein
and a country that at that point had never attacked
or threatened to attack the United States? The film
suggests it was to protect Saudi Arabia and the
bin Laden family, who Moore claims once invested
millions in Dubya's flailing Texan companies in
the late 1980s in order gain access to his father,
then U.S. president. Without missing a beat, Moore
briefly touches on the war on terror in Afghanistan
and Bush's promise to the nation to "smoke"
Osama bin Laden out of his hole, but it is his Iraq
portion of the film that is perhaps the meatiest,
with its insightful interviews with U.S. soldiers
and footage of suffering civilians usually relegated
to the Al-Jazeera network.
