Harry's Place

Objectively pro-Bush?

Lately some Harry's Place commenters have insinuated, suggested or flat-out claimed that the authors of this blog have joined the Bush-Cheney campaign.

For example one commenter wrote:

It's depressing too that you are still doing the canvassing for Bush whilst refusing to acknowledge the facts which refute your position entirely.

Another wrote:

...if "Moore is pretty much preaching to the converted" (provided true), then the people who would be most delighted are the Bush supporters... explains this post I suppose?

Now these comments and others like them are easily refuted by typing "Bush" into the search box at the upper left and seeing what we've had to say about him. If it still isn't clear, I fully intend to vote for John Kerry and John Edwards in November, even if Michael Moore thinks I should.

Or do these commenters mean that by criticizing Dubya for certain things but not for others-- and especially by refusing to join Michael Moore's cheering section-- we're objectively pro-Bush?

Swedish blog

Fraternal greetings to a new blog by Frederick from Sweden, Thought at the Meridian, which describes itself as from a centre-left perspective - Libertarian. Egalitarian. Anti-totalitarian.

BNP racists - shock

The BBC are making a huge fuss about their 'secret agent' documentary which 'exposed' racists and violent men within the British National Party.

After the programme was shown last night, BNP leader Nick Griffin was invited on to Newsnight and, at the request of the presenter, made a sort of apology to the Muslim community. It was a ridiculous scene and I wonder if anyone at the BBC stopped to wonder why Griffin agreed to appear on Newsnight?

I find myself in agreement with many of the points made by Tom Utley in the Telegraph today:

My main objection to Mr Gwynne's documentary - apart from the fact that it told us what we already knew - was that it failed to answer the really interesting question about the BNP: why, knowing what we all know about the nastiness of the party, did some 750,000 Britons vote for it in this year's European elections? That is an awful lot of people - although not enough, mercifully, to secure any seats for the BNP in the European Parliament.

That is an attitude typical of the BBC: if only everybody knew the facts, then nobody would vote for an uncivilised, illiberal party - let alone for a party that included among its candidates and activists a fair number of racist thugs.

The truth is, of course, that the BNP are a fascist party who attract the votes of racists and we have known this for years.

We knew it in Burnley when the BNP's shock successes led large sections of the London media and political establishment to convince themselves that this was a misguided protest vote about poor housing etc and had little, if anything, to do with racism. Dream on.

Does it really need to be pointed out that the only real way to deal with the BNP is to tackle the racism that they seek to exploit in the first place and that this requires a long, hard look at those areas who only gain attention through their votes for the BNP?

British politics at the moment is fertile ground for reactionaries of all shades.

The Labour Party, which was once able to organise and unite people in communities where the BNP have gained a foothold, is demoralised, ineffective and lacking in ideas. The Tories are still deep in crisis and lack credibility.

Into the vacuum comes the BNP and the UKIP on the right while to add another element to the carnival of reaction, the neo-Stalinist 'left' seeks to build an electoral presence by attempting to crudely appeal to Muslims by a combination of scarmongering and religious sectarianism - the last thing anyone, especially Muslims, needs now.

Just when 'opinion formers' belatedly start to realise the dangers of a multiculturalist approach which has racialised public policy decision-making and to finally acknowledge the need to bring communities together rather than divide them, the non-Labour 'left' decides to go communalist.

Sure, we are not anywhere near the stage where these groups are likely to make any serious impact in a general election but we are moving towards a time when it is only the electoral system which is keeping the 'fringe elements' out of parliament and never forget that such parties do shape local debates. Read the letters pages of the local press in East Lancashire over the past two years.

Welcome to politics without a democratic left.

Four More Years

So, it's a Labour win in Birmingham and a Lib Dem victory in Leicester.

A more interesting aspect of these two by-elections is how the Tories did and what that means for the future. I'm tempted to agree with the Times journalist who writes

The outcome in both by-elections was a severe blow for the Conservatives and Michael Howard. They were beaten into third place in both seats where they had finished second at the last general election, hardening doubts over their ability to make a serious challenge at next year’s expected general election.

Harry Adds: Here is the detailed vote from Leicester South:

Parmjit Singh Gill (LibDem) 10,274 (34.94%)
Sir Peter Soulsby (Lab) 8,620 (29.31%)
Chris Heaton-Harris (Con) 5,796 (19.71%)
Yvonne Ridley (Respect) 3,724 (12.66%)

and Birmingham Hodge Hill:

Byrne (Lab) 7,451 (36.45%)
Davies (LibDem) 6,991 (34.20%)
Eyre (Con) 3,543 (17.33%)
John Rees (Respect) 1,282 (6.27%)
James Starkey (NF) 805 (3.94%)

Arthur "Killer" Kane dies

Many of you will have heard the sad news of Arthur "Killer" Kane's death. Kane played bass for the legendary New York Dolls, a band which lasted only a couple of years, and produced one good album, and - when the few years of fame and the drugs which came with them had taken their toll - one bad one. Kane is the fourth band member to die: he is survived by the near-skeletal lead singer David Johansen, and Sylvain Sylvian, who now resembles Joe Pesci with a perm.

Place the Dolls in a continuum which stretches from The Rolling Stones, then Bowie and the rest of Glam on the one hand, and Patti Smith and Iggy Pop on the other, and follow that line through to US and UK Punk. The Dolls were the crucial turning point which made Punk possible. They impressed Malcom McLaren so much, he claimed to have been their UK Manager. They had a profound influence on the Sex Pistols, who slagged them off in one of their lyrics.

Their performance was anarchic and loud. They looked like navvies dressed as girls. But the lyrics contained a particular gentleness and beauty. And above all, they revelled in a showmanship that was present in early Punk, but which had been forgotten by some of their more puritan musical descendants.

The New York Dolls reformed at the instigation of Morrissey - who had been the self proclamed founder of the UK New York Dolls fan club in the 1970s - with a drummer borrowed from the Libertines, for a series of gigs this year in the US and the UK. They were there first gigs for almost 3 decades. It was a relief to see that they could still make the same heartstopping sound.

Half way through June's Royal Festival Hall gig, Johansen introduced the band. Pointing to the bass player he said "Ladies and Gentlemen: this is Arthur "Killer" Kane - can you believe it?" Looking into the eyes of the stooped, balding Mormon in his mid fifties, you could see that he could hardly believe it himself.

(Arthur Kane is second from left)

There's a nice statement on Morrissey's site:

I am personally very grateful to Arthur for his essential contribution to the Dolls and their music. He has left us with some great musical memories – especially “Private World” and “It’s Too Late”. He was a very gentle soul and I know he lived for many years with the hope of a Dolls reunion. When this happened – at the Royal Festival Hall in June – I know Arthur was thrilled to be back with David and Sylvain playing the music of the Dolls to such enthusiastic crowds over two nights. I will always remember the look of bashful happiness on Arthur’s face as people in the audience constantly called out his name. He was finally back where he belonged.

UPDATE:

Nice obit in the Torygraph (of all places)

"Fahrenheit" reaching the converted

Anyone hoping that "Fahrenheit 9/11" could actually help determine the outcome of this year's Presidential election should probably sober up.

According to Sharon Waxman of The New York Times, the 50 top-grossing US theatres showing Michael Moore's Bush-bashing blockbuster are concentrated in "urban, traditionally Democratic strongholds, including Manhattan, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Bay Area, Chicago and Boston."

In other words, Moore is pretty much preaching to the converted, although "'Fahrenheit' did sell out some movie houses in Republican-leaning states and military towns, including Fayetteville, N.C., and Oklahoma City."

Waxman measures those results against a movie aimed at what she considers the other side of the cultural divide: Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ."

The highest grossing theaters for "Passion" were typically more suburban and far more widely dispersed, from Texas and New Mexico to Ohio, Florida and Orange County, Calif.

(You can see the geographical distribution of the top-grossing theatres here.)

Of course, as Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan prove, it's possible to see and detest both films. Just as I'm sure there are people who saw and actually liked them both.

Bliar's useless opponents

In the New Statesman, Nick Cohen's take on the Butler report and the fall-out from it:

If the premiership of Tony Blair survives, and it remains open to question if he will be make it to the next election, he will be able to thank his opponents in part. They were determined to prove that he was a liar rather than a blunderer. They were determined to prove that he had forced the intelligence services to deceive the public when in truth the intelligence services had deceived themselves.

They set the bar impossibly high and were dazed when they cracked their skulls on it.

(You have to pay to read New Statesman articles but sometimes it seems the toll barrier is down - give it a try)

She Made You a Moron

He hasn't convinced me to become a monarchist but there's some high-quality writing on new blog on the street God Save the Queen.

I particularly enjoyed enjoyed this account of academic writing by numbers

While doing my post-graduate studies I was invited at very short notice to a conference on the sociology of education - a field which is perhaps even more awash in Theory than the humanities, though mostly of the Vulgar Marxist kind rather than postmodernist. I compromised by writing a paper which could perfectly well be taken as both Gramsci and Foucault, with the obligatory dash of Habermas. It was pure drivel - I had no intention of wasting my time on it - just three thousand words of more-or-less random buzzword-association liberally salted with The Big Names.

You can probably guess the rest.

I never expected it to be accepted, but it was. My presentation, and the Q&A; that followed it, was as well received as any other at the conference.

That sort of thing reminds me of an Adam Smith quote I first read here and which seems to have lost none of its sting two hundred and fifty years after it was first made. According to Smith some universities he had knowledge of were

"sanctuaries in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices found shelter and protection after they had been hunted out of every corner of the world"

Exploded systems - what a great phrase. And what a fine image it conjures up. When I first saw it written down I imagined the great big hot air balloon of postmodernism bursting open and plummeting to earth at breakneck speed...

Get the drinks in

Ever felt like buying Christopher Hitchens a drink after reading one of his demolitions of Stopperish nonsense?

Now you can.

Even better, all the money raised via the Buy Christopher Hitchens a Drink Campaign will be donated to the comrades at the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

The Heart of the Matter

There is a forest load of opinion on the Butler report in the papers and I am sure we can live without links to it all. Jonathan Freedland's conclusion to his long piece in the Guardian seems to sum up the situation pretty well.

When he had finished, Butler's audience, like a school speech day dismissed by a kindly headmaster, wondered what to make of it all. It was confusing: some thought the headline was "Blair slammed", others said it was "Whitewash II". It might take a while to sink in that Lord Butler had done neither. He did not play the assassin. Instead he handed the PM a bulletproof vest, and the public a set of live bullets. That at least will ensure fair play - and what could be more British than that?

Leaving aside the point that by the public Freedland is really talking about the media, surely this is right. Those who believe the war was based on a big lie will continue to do so and those who don't think that Blair lied will feel vindicated by Butler. No-one is going to change their mind as a result of this report and probably they never were.

As any parent who arrives at a closed fairground with his kids has to explain, there is also a big difference between lying and presenting information that you have received in good faith and which later turns out to be inaccurate. Blair's defence has consistently been that he had to make a judgement call based on the intelligence he received and that defence still stands up.

Therefore Freedland is, I think, unfair with this observation:

Perhaps most woundingly, Butler concluded that when the PM suddenly started focusing on Iraq in early 2002 the shift was not based on a change in intelligence - despite Blair's constant references to the material crossing his desk. Rather, the relevant circumstances seem to have been a change of heart in Washington: Butler even cited George Bush's "axis of evil" speech. Yet even here the former cabinet secretary gave the PM a let-out: 9/11 had changed the global climate, making proliferation of WMD a more pressing concern.

A let-out? Can one really suggest that after 9/11 the 'global climate' had not changed? If we are examining Blair's judgement call on Iraq surely the fact that a fanatical international terrorist organisation had murdered 3,000 civilians in New York City and declaring that it intended to do the same many times over, was a pretty major factor in an evaluation of the international security situation?

Nonetheless we are surely close to the heart of the matter here. So why the universal pretence that Blair decided to go to war with Iraq? Is there anyone who seriously believes that the British Prime Minister made that call? Don't we all, pro or anti-war, accept that the US administration decided to go to war (for a variety of reasons) and was looking for allies?

We can surely all understand why the British government and the Prime Minister are reluctant to state plainly that the decisions were made in Washington but why, in the never-ending debate about the war, should anyone else pretend that it was otherwise?

The real question on Blair's judgement was and still is this - given that the US had decided to invade Iraq and remove its fascist dictator and try to replace him with some sort of democratic system, should Britain have supported the effort and tried to influence it, opposed it in the manner of France or remained awkwardly neutral on the matter?

Again, no public enquiry is going to change anyones mind on that central question and Blair's position on that call was clear from his words yesterday:

I can honestly say I have never had to make a harder judgement. But in the end, my judgement was that after September 11th, we could no longer run the risk; that instead of waiting for the potential threat of terrorism and WMD to come together, we had to get out and get after it. One part was removing the training ground of Al Qaida in Afghanistan. The other was taking a stand on WMD; and the place to take that stand was Iraq, whose regime was the only one ever to have used WMD and was subject to 12 years of UN Resolutions and weapons inspections that turned out to be unsatisfactory.

I am proud of this country and the part it played and especially our magnificent armed forces, in removing two vile dictatorships and giving people oppressed, almost enslaved, the prospect of democracy and liberty.

Others, of course, are far from proud of our role in Iraq and would be happier if we had been attacking the US at the United Nations and if Blair had been on the platform in Hyde Park with Harold Pinter and George Galloway and denouncing "American aggression".

In our own small ways we all made our own individual calls on the decision. We could oppose the war on the streets, support it or remain awkwardly neutral (although few chose the latter option).

Like Bush and Blair we made our choices for a variety of reasons and based on the information that was avaliable to us.

Some of us looked to the Iraqi and Kurdish left, or what remained of it after decades or murderous oppression.

At the time I pointed out the words of Dr Barham Salih in a speech to the Socialist International meeting in Rome and so, if we are examining the judgement calls made before the war, I present his appeal again. It was, after all, part of our 'intelligence'

For Iraqis, our D-Day is at hand. As we watch the military preparations and the game of cat and mouse which the dishonest dictatorship in Baghdad is playing with the UN inspectors, we sense, and we hope, that deliverance is near. The anticipation and nervousness that must have been felt in Rome nearly 60 years ago is today palpable in Iraq, both in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Free Iraq that was liberated in 1991, and in the areas still under the control of the Ba'athist regime.

My Iraqi compatriots, of all backgrounds and religions, Shi'a Arab, Sunni Arab, Turkomen or Assyrian, Muslims, Christians or Yezidis have been united by what they have endured at the hands of the Baath dictatorship. The overthrow of a racist regime that used chemical weapons against the Kurds and that wasted a nation's natural resources on war rather than schools, the reform of colonialism's most disastrous legacy, the state of Iraq - these are goals worthy of the support of every Social Democrat.

Johann on the Maze

Johann on the Moral Maze discussing the 'religious hatred' legislation.

Anti-gay marriage amendment rejected

The constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in the US went down to an inglorious defeat in the Senate today, by a vote of 48 to 50. The Bush administration couldn't even muster a majority, let alone the two-thirds needed. (Had it passed, it still would have required a two-thirds vote of the House of Representatives and the approval of three-fourths of the state legislatures.)

Surely the Bush people expected the defeat, although not such a decisive one. The Bushies will try to use it as a cultural "wedge" issue in the election campaign, but I suspect anyone who strongly supported the amendment would have been unlikely to vote for John Kerry anyway.

What the Butler saw

449. In general, we found that the original intelligence material was correctly reported in JIC assessments. An exception was the '45 minute' report. But this sort of example was rare in the several hundred JIC assessments we read on Iraq. In general, we also found that the reliability of the original intelligence reports was fairly represented by the use of accompanying qualifications. We should record in particular that we have found no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence.

Emphasis NOT added.

The Butler Report

So that's that then. After 4 enquiries, we can finally put to bed any notion that the government lied to take us to war.

Can't we?

Update: No we can't, apparently...

Context

If you didn't see Stop the War Coalition leader Lindsey German, the Ann Widdecombe of the left, on Newsnight explaining why religious support for rape and the oppression of women and homosexuals has to be "put in context" you can still catch it on the BBC website (click on latest programme and the item is around the 20 minute mark).

In answer to a question by Pater Tatchell she also explains why defending socialists, democrats and trade unionists in Zimbawbe is "not a priority".

If you don't have broadband I wouldn't waste too much time on it - her performance doesn't contain much that differs from her abysmal piece in the Guardian yesterday (see Miss Shiboleth).

Mea culpa?

Should I have been more skeptical of the now-discredited report of the antisemitic attack on a young French woman on a train, and her claim that other passengers failed to intervene?

In my defense, the story was reported by generally-reliable media. And the French police and government took it seriously at first. In addition, considering the recent increase of antisemitic activity in France, it was not exactly beyond the realm of possibility.

Still-- because the story seemed plausible according to my world view-- perhaps I gave it more credence than I should have.

Last year, in another online forum, I criticized The Guardian for publishing an article-- based on a misconstrued report-- that Paul Wolfowitz had admitted that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. (He did no such thing, and The Guardian printed a correction.)

At the time I wrote, "The problem in this case was that a report which should have set off everyone's bullshit detector managed to slip through. And I have to conclude that the main reason it did slip through is that at some level the writer and editors wanted it to be true."

I don't think I wanted the story about the attack in France to be true. But maybe-- because it appeared to lend credibility to a disturbing phenomenon which I believe deserves more attention-- I lowered my intellectual defenses.

The sad result of the whole affair is that many people are now likely to doubt even the most credible reports of French antisemitism.

Miss Shibboleth.

I was thinking it was probably time to change the main topic of discussion here but then today Socialist Workers Party leader Lindsey German has a piece in the Guardian defending her organisation's alliance with Islamic fundamentalists.

Norm has already taken a look in particular at German's notion that the holocaust was an exercise in 'scapegoating'.

Norm makes some other important points and it is well worth reading his post in full.

What I want to highlight is the dishonesty and demagoguery running through German's article. Lets take a look:

Unfortunately, however, those liberals who backed the war against Iraq seem to regard any alliance with the Muslim community as a pact with the devil.

So it is only liberals who backed the war against Iraq who have a problem with alliances with reactionary Islamists? The truth, as German will be well aware, is that a great many others, including many from the anti-war movement and many socialists who would baulk at being described as a liberal have also objected to the SWP's alliance with conservative clerics. I doubt many of those will be impressed by her attempt to link a defence of gay and women's rights with being pro-war.

And do those critics, whether pro or anti-warregard any alliance with the Muslim community as a pact with the devil? Hardly. The SWP aren't in an alliance with the Muslim community. They are in alliance with the British section of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

Charges of anti-semitism, support for terrorism, homophobia and sexism abound, as in the attacks on Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Muslim Association of Britain in recent days.

I'll merely note here that she doesn't actually deny any of those charges or challenge any of those 'attacks'. Perhaps because, as any reader of this site over the past week will be aware, those charges are based on direct quotes from al-Qaradawi. Nor is there any longer, any attempt to deny MAB's reactionary political character - the fact that MAB invited the Brotherhood's leading light to the UK has merely confirmed their politics beyond any doubt.

Those of us who have long supported women's and gay liberation have now picked up some unlikely supporters. Papers like the Sun, itself no stranger to sexist and homophobic rants, have developed a belated concern for the rights of Muslim women and gays.

A rather weak attempting at smear by association. A vain effort to deflect the very real criticisms the SWP have received from the left by linking them with the hypocrisy of the tabloid press. Again, note there is no attempt to actually deal with the charges of homophobia or misogyny that have been laid at the door of German's religious allies.

For any socialist, the defence of sexual equality and freedom must be unconditional. But we cannot, in the process, join in the attacks on those very Muslims who are at the sharp end of racist attacks and Islamophobia in Britain.

An astonishing phrase that really doesn't need any further comment other than to wonder what the word unconditional means?

Everyone should oppose homophobia and attacks on women from whichever source. But such views are far from being held by all Muslims, nor are they unique to Muslims.

Indeed and who has ever suggested otherwise? So, given we all know there is a plurality of opinion within the Muslim community why choose the very organisation that actually is associated with reactionary views to form an alliance with?

Fundamentalists of most religions hold such views - but where is the uproar when fundamentalist Baptist preachers from the US visit our shores?

Again a totally spurious argument. It is hard to imagine a noted homophobic and sexist religious bigot from the deep south of the USA turning up in London and being welcomed by Ken Livingstone and the SWP.

It is also absurd to insinuate that homophobic attacks or wife-beating are exclusively Muslim problems.

It certainly is. Which must be why no-one has suggested that. But as German proves throughout this article points no-one has ever made are much easier to deal with then real criticisms.

Of course, some Muslims - and non-Muslims - hold views on some social issues that are more conservative than those of the socialist and liberal left. But that should not be a barrier to collaboration over common concerns. Would a campaign for gay rights, for example, insist that all those who took part share the same view of the war in Iraq? That would be a road to the fragmentation of any progressive movement seeking to reach out beyond the traditional left.

Well I am pretty sure that a campaign for gay rights would make sure that those organisations it jointly organised protests with actually shared their common concerns.

The E in the organisation RESPECT, stands for Equality - would it be too much to expect that RESPECT's leaders checked out that their allies actually shared that common concern?

And of course the leaders of Britain's peace movement jointly organised protests with the followers of a cleric who blesses suicide bombings and supporters of Hamas who have consistently opposed the common concern most of us have for peace in the Middle East.

Nothing new in that criticism of course but I am still waiting for German and her friends to actually get around to answering it rather than respond to arguments that have never been made.

Dead Man Walking

It looks increasingly likely another miscarriage of justice will be revealed on Friday when Judgment is handed down in another murder Appeal.

Sion Jenkins was convicted of murdering his step-daughter Billie-Jo in 1998. His lawyer said today in the Court of Appeal that his name could be added to the

“lamentably long litany of innocent people condemned to serve life imprisonment on the strength of flawed scientific evidence”

as concessions made by scientists during the fresh Appeal showed that

“no single strand of the prosecution’s scientific case as presented to the jury remains unbroken”

For Jenkins' sake, as well as that of Sally Clark and Angela Cannings and all the other convicted "child-murderers" who won on Appeal I'm glad the death penalty is long gone in this country.

Livingstone keeps digging

From This Is London:

Ken Livingstone has created a fresh round of controversy over controversial Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi by inviting him back to Britain.

And in angry defiance he rounded on opposition leader Michael Howard and the press claiming they have helped stoke up the alarm over the cleric's London talks with Britain's Muslim community.
...
Ignorance and political point-scoring have fuelled the damning "hysteria", Mr Livingstone insisted.

(Via Mick Hartley.)

"Fahrenheit 9/11" and me

I suspect most Harry's Place readers have heard or read about "Fahrenhiet 9/11" in doses far larger than most doctors would recommend. But I dragged myself out to see it over the weekend, and feel a nagging obligation to say something about it here-- no matter how unoriginal.

I thought it had some very powerful individual moments. But the narrative it pretends to construct from those (and other) moments is an utter, self-contradictory fraud. In this regard the movie has been thoroughly deconstructed and debunked elsewhere (here, for example).

I doubt Michael Moore is a Harry's Place reader (unless he comments under the name "Benjamin"), but I'll credit him for addressing some of the same issues I've discussed here in the past year or so. These include:

--The overly-friendly relationship between the Bush administration and the rulers of Saudi Arabia. (This may be starting to change.)

--The redaction of 28 pages relating to certain Saudis in a Senate Intelligence committee report.

--The inequality of military service in the US. (See The New Republic, though, for a good discussion of Moore's sophistry on the issue.)

--The eagerness of some US corporations to cash in on the new Iraq.

However I don't think these and the other issues the film raises (some fairly, some deceptively) fit together in the sinister way Moore-- with his clever use of vocal inflection and background music-- would like us to believe.

Some other points:

--Extreme prolonged closeups can make anyone look foolish and/or snaky (especially if they're having makeup applied, which we get to see a lot of).

--The seven minutes during which Bush sat listening to the kids read after hearing that the second plane had hit the World Trade Center are pretty creepy. He appears to be in a state of mild shock, as if waiting for someone to tell him what to do. At least it undercuts the wild theories that he had advance knowledge.

--The "shiny happy people" scenes of Baghdad before the US invasion are execrable, probably the worst thing in the movie. You'd never guess from Moore's carefully-selected film clips that (according to polls) a majority of Iraqis feel they are better off now than they were under Saddam, and are optimistic about the future.

One scene-- of then-Governor Bush, in white tie, telling a roomful of wealthy campaign donors, "This is an impressive crowd. The haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base"-- is almost worth the price of admission. The scenes of the economic devastation of large parts of Flint (which we also saw in "Roger and Me") are a powerful contrast. If Moore had made a movie based on these scenes, rather than on 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps I would have joined in the applause at the end.

Update: I shouldn't have assumed Bush's "I call you my base" joke was at a campaign fundraising event. In fact it was at a charity event which Al Gore also attended. Scroll down to Deceit 5. Thanks to commenter Scott.

The Punk and the Modfather

Pete Townshend has responded in his online diary to Michael Moore's account of the reasons for not using the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" at the end of Fahrenheit 9/11. I can only find an account of Moore's original statement here. Moore's explanation for the slapback is that "he is not a fan of Michael Moore's and in fact supports the war and supports Tony Blair and doesn't want the song used in any way that would make Blair look bad."

Townshend's reason's for saying "no" are essentially that
- that the use would effectively misinterpret or at least oversimplify the subtle message of the song; and
- he regarded Columbine as a "bullying" film and Moore's subsequent conduct as that of a bully.

I have nothing against Michael Moore personally, and I know Roger Daltrey is a friend and fan of his, but I greatly resent being bullied and slurred by him in interviews just because he didn’t get what he wanted from me. It seems to me that this aspect of his nature is not unlike that of the powerful and wilful man at the centre of his new documentary. I wish him all the best with the movie, which I know is popular, and which I still haven’t seen. But he’ll have to work very, very hard to convince me that a man with a camera is going to change the world more effectively than a man with a guitar.

Moore is of course a comedian, and his statements and documentaries should be judged principally by those standards. Comedians are allowed to play Munchausen from time to time. However, given that inaccuracy has been the key charge against Moore, he should be more careful: at least when his targets are not public figures, but simply people who stand in his way.