Raising temperatures

Excited about “Fahrenheit 9/11”? It’s the Palme d’Or-winning and doubtless soon to be Oscar-winning “documentary” from average blue-collar multi-millionaire Michael Moore. I saw it last weekend with an audience comprised wholly of informed, intelligent sophisticates.

I knew they were informed, intelligent sophisticates because they howled with laughter at every joke about what a bozo George W. Bush is. They split their sides during the patriotic ballad — eagles soaring, etc — composed and sung by John Ashcroft, the famously sinister attorney general.

Mr. Moore reveals — and if you feel knowing the plot would spoil the movie, please skip to the next paragraph — that Mr. Bush is a privileged simpleton under the control of war-crazed Big Oil interests who arranged to have the 2000 election stolen for him. I hadn’t heard that before, had you?

Once Mr. Moore gets past his recounting of the Florida recount, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I agreed with in the movie. For example, he is very hard on the Saudis, and the unique access to the Bush family enjoyed by their oleaginous ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar.

He is also very mocking of the absurdities of post-September 11 airport security, alighting on a poor mom forced to drink a beaker of her own breast milk in front of passengers before boarding to demonstrate the liquid wasn’t incendiary.

As we left, the couple ahead of me said they thought Mr. Bush would have a hard job responding to these shocking revelations. I didn’t like to point out they could have heard about all this stuff years ago just by reading yours truly.

I mentioned the breast-milk incident in a column on Aug. 10, 2002. I called for Prince Bandar to be booted back to Saudi Arabia in November 2002, and I have been urging the dismantling of the kingdom — Washington’s out-of-control Frankensaud monster — for almost three years now, since within a month of September 11.

So in theory I ought to welcome Michael Moore as a comrade-in-arms. But the trouble with “Fahrenheit 9/11” is you don’t come away mad at the Saudis or America’s useless bureaucracy, you come away mad at Mr. Bush — or, if not mad, feeling snobbishly superior to him.

If feeling snobbishly superior to the president isn’t your bag, what’s left is an incoherent bore. Mr. Moore follows his GUT, by which I mean his Grand Universal Theory: Mr. Bush is to blame for everything. Because of Mr. Bush, the Saudis secretly run U.S. policy. Because of Mr. Bush, the Taliban were in bed with Texas energy executives. Because of Mr. Bush, the Taliban got toppled … .

Whoa, hold up a minute, I thought he was all pals with the Taliban. The Saudis certainly were, which is why they opposed the liberation of Afghanistan.

But by now Mr. Moore has moved on to pointing out that Mr. Bush’s Afghan stooge Hamid Karzai used to work for the Texas energy company panting for that big Afghan gas pipeline.

But hang on, I thought the Texan energy guys already had the Taliban in their pockets and were funded by the Saudis … “Connecting the dots” is all very well, but not when you’ve got more dots in your picture than Seurat.

Mr. Bush has always been the issue for Mr. Moore. On September 11 itself, his only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and D.C. instead of Texas or, indeed, my beloved New Hampshire: “They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who did not vote for him. Boston, New York, D.C. and the plane’s destination of California — these were places that voted against Bush.”

The fellows at the controls of those planes were training for September 11 when Bill Clinton was president and Al Gore was ahead in the polls, and they would have still been in the cockpit had Ralph Nader been elected.

Though Mohamed Atta took flying lessons in Florida, he apparently wasn’t as worked up about its notorious hanging chads as Michael Moore. Mr Moore is guilty of what I believe psychologists call “projection”

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