Here’s more from a Weekly Standard article (found in Mike’s profile, the Source Of Many Good Things):
CONSIDERING THAT I’m writing this from inside the bunker of what many regard as the Alliance of Neocon Warmongers, it bears mentioning that Michael Moore and I have one surprising trait in common: We both believe that the war in Iraq was ill-advised, ill-planned, and ill-executed, an apparent failure bordering on unmitigated disaster, that was never in our best national interest. ... And I make the disclosure now so that readers will not be confused. I do not trash Fahrenheit 9/11 because it’s a piece of antiwar propaganda. I trash Fahrenheit 9/11 because it’s an offal-laden piece of junk.
It is proof, as if we need more, that Moore doesn’t make art, he makes fudge. Since fact-checking his work has become a near full-time cottage industry, it is worth remembering that in his debut film Roger & Me, his indictment of heartless General Motors, he was caught fudging evictions, showing people getting bounced onto the street who’d never been GM workers. In 2002’s antigun screed, Bowling for Columbine, he fudged his tear-jerking closer. While hectoring Alzheimer’s-ravaged NRA mascot Charlton Heston, he related the heart-tugging tale of a mother whose 6-year-old son, largely unsupervised because of oppressive welfare-to-work laws, found a gun in her house and killed one of his classmates. Moore failed to mention that the family member Mom entrusted him to was running a crackhouse out of her home, that the gun had been left on a mattress, and that she’d admitted beating another son while sitting on him after duct-taping his hands, feet, and mouth. Not exactly a model of responsible parenting, gun ownership, or filmmaking.
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Moore ... implied that Bush was out of touch with the common folk, since on September 10, 2001, he "went to sleep that night in a bed made with fine French linens." (The next day’s terror victims doubtless slept on burlap.)
The intro credits are accompanied by creepy acoustic guitar runs -- third-world atrocity music -- which play under a montage of our leaders/war criminals sinisterly readying themselves for television appearances. There’s Dick Cheney getting his rake-over fluffed. There’s Tom Ridge diabolically laughing. There’s Paul Wolfowitz smoothing a cowlick with spittle. They smile. They have make-up applied before going on TV. Bastards!
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The insinuation is that Bush had to keep us scared, with color-coded alerts and a citizen-terrorizing Patriot Act, to distract the country from his tangle of conflicts of interests and to build sentiment for invading Iraq. Moore mentions that the Taliban visited Texas while Bush was governor, over a possible pipeline deal with Unocal. But Moore doesn’t say that they never actually met with Bush or that the deal went bust in 1998 and had been supported by the Clinton administration.
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At their own request, the bin Laden family was quickly shuttled away after 9/11, back to Saudi Arabia. Moore finds it suspicious, as well he should. Who would be stupid enough to let that happen, without working them over for a good couple of weeks? Actually, according to a May interview he gave to The Hill, it was Richard Clarke, Bush’s former counterterrorism adviser and the new patron saint of Bush-bashers. Moore makes use of him in the film, though he manages not to mention Clarke’s role in the departure of the bin Ladens.
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When Moore takes us to Iraq, on the eve of war, he shows placid scenes of an untroubled land on the brink of imperial annihilation. With all the leisurely strolling and kite-flying, it is unclear if Iraqis are living under a murderous dictatorship or in a Valtrex commercial. In Moore’s telling of the invasion, the shock-and-awe is less high-value-target/smart-bombing, more Dresden/Hiroshima. According to the footage that ensues, our pilots seem to have hit nothing but women and children. If Moore’s documentarian gig were to fall through, he could easily seek employment as an Al Jazeera cameraman.
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Which is not to say Iraq is in the same class [as WWII]. And it is why real questions should be continuously asked, and skepticism applied. The kind of skepticism that forces leaders to account for whether they’ve taken the right course of action. Not the crank, grab bag of stitched-together conspiracies that encourages Moore’s political opponents to be reflexively dismissive -- and causes the leftish reviewer sitting next to me to say, "He infuriates me because he makes my arguments badly."
There is plenty of grist for skeptics of the war to argue that the chances of a shiny, happy democracy’s flowering in Iraq reside somewhere between slim and nil. But those are still better odds than the ones on Moore’s someday making an intellectually honest film.
If the definition of documentary is, "making inflammatory accusations while omitting the already-discovered facts which nullify those accusations," then Moore is a documentarian. Otherwise he’s just a liar.
