Saw Michael Moore’s new documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (official site | rotten tomatoes | imdb) last night. It was as I expected: heavily slanted against Bush (of course), a bit sketchy on the linkages & conclusions at times, and a lot to take in all at once, but it’s as advertised: a simmering 2-hour indictment of Bush as puppet, idiot and all-around shitty president.

Don’t worry, he lambastes others as well: the usual suspects (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Ashcroft, etc.), democrats (for not fighting back against the Supreme Court decision to uphold the fake election results, for not trying to stop the war against Iraq, etc.), evil companies (Halliburton, Enron, United Defense, the Carlson Group, etc.) and more.

But most of his vitriol is saved for Bush, and he makes no secret of this. Anyone who asks Michael Moore if his movie is unbiased will get laughed at. He has an agenda here, and well he should. While pushing a man out of the white house may not be the typical role for a documentarian, Moore is saying things that need to be said and showing images that need to be showed. How many people ever saw footage of Bush’s limo being pelted by eggs on inauguration day? How many of us saw the kind of images from Iraq, of dead toddlers and torn limbs and the like, shown on the news? How many of us got to hear angry screeds from soldiers about what a waste the Iraq war is? None of us have even seen pictures of the coffins of American soldiers returning home, as the White House doesn’t want our delicate sensibilities upset by the idea of soldiers being killed (though it should be noted that this policy was established by Bush Sr. during Gulf War I). Moore’s movie shows us things Bush and his handlers don’t want their own public to see. It shows us in such a way that we leave the theatre in mild disbelief, with anger to spare. Hopefully it lasts until November.

The quote that Bush so clumsily tries to get out at the end of the film is, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” If the American voters elect this warmongering idiot again, they’ll truly go down in history as the greatest fools of all.