Well, given that the Red Sox are unbearbale at the moment, Iactually had nothing better to do than to read some of the reviews your cut-and-paste commentator referreed to. My conclusion: Irfan Khawaja's essay is the shoddy work. I guess his main point is that people had good and bad things to say about the movie.

Check out the Washington Post review. I don't think it's the most inspiring piece of journalism out there, but it's hardly "schizophrenic ambivalence". Try reading it:

Post

And Paul Krugman's aritlce is legitimately good. Your essayists characterization of his review is bunk! His review talks about the flaws in Moor'es movie, but his main point is that the media haven't been doing their job (i.e., why did we have to wait for Moore to tell us this stuff?

Try reading it:

Post

This Irfan Khawaja guy wrote an awful essay taking little snippetts from decent or good bits of journalism and making it look like they are all hypocritical and flawed. Read the actual reviews and see what you think.

Bad post! Bad, bad post!!!

That second link should obviously read "Times" but I got a little excited there at the end . . .

Richard, have you watched the movie yourself? I'd prefer to hear your thoughts than those from critics.

Mike F., here's what e-thePeople had to say about F9-11: "Fahrenheit 911: Persuasive or Manipulative?" It's actually better (I'm partial of course) than a lot of other stuff I've read out there.

The Post snippet you included uses the phrase "doesn't even pretend to be fair." Well, there you go — the open and obvious bias in the film should take it squarely out of the way of criticism that it "misleads." See our rare point of agreement in the Media Bias commentary below.

So it's unapologetically partisan. As I see it, that's a good thing. We also agreed that adversary presentation is a valuable way to get at truth. We've demonstrated that for months with our arguments, but we finally said it below. Hence another virtue of Fahrenheit 9/11 — some accessible pop-culture counteroutlet emerges to compete with the entire AM radio band.

The hip position among liberals is to regard Moore as a "guilty pleasure" — to qualify every review of it with obvious concessions about its bias and silliness. So do the conservatives have the same "ambivalence," as you say, about Limbaugh? Hopefully they do. But I don't hear the talking heads on Fox or CNN calling him a crackpot all that often.

Just to participate in the ambivalence, I thought certain side-plots in the movie — e.g., stealing the election, flying bin Ladens out of the country during the plane-grounding period, the Afghan pipeline, the idyll of Saddamized (pun intended) Iraq — were bogus.

But until I walked into the theater and watched that movie, I had not been confronted with a single image of what our beloved "shock and awe" did to Iraqi civilians and children — except for what I saw in my occasional (and no doubt government-surveilled) perusal of english.aljazeera.com.

Our media made the war look like a combination fireworks display and leisurely cross-country drive. The networks and papers should be ashamed of themselves for that, and Moore gets big points in my book, notwithstanding his excesses, for trying to show a mainstream American audience that people actually got hurt amidst all the flag-waving.

A couple of comments. First, to Mike F., I started to watch the movie, but stopped after about 15 minutes after too many glaring errors and unswallowable lies. There were too many distortions and glaring factual errors in the things that I do know about that I don't trust him to tell me about things I don't know about. While I've heard a great deal about the recruiting techniques and the civilian casualties, I have no reason to believe he doesn't distort them as much as the election coverage, Saudi connection, pipeline deal, etc.

I may try to skip ahead and see those parts, to understand what the fuss is about, but I don't really see the point.

Second, I thought the review I linked to was relevant because it said well something that I've noticed. Mike F., Brad A., Julia – everyone who wants me to see the movie admits that it's blatant propaganda and is misleading, but they still say I should see it because it's too important to ignore. Whether that was the full point of every review that was linked to is not the point. The point is that I've heard it enough (from reviewers and friends) to want to call it out. "My-propaganda-good-their-propaganda-bad".

Third, Brad, yes, it may not "pretend to be fair" if you know enough to make that judgment. But it does call itself a documentary. As far as the media, they also haven't shown the grislier parts of Saddam's regime including the mass graves and the torture videos (and neither did Moore from what I've heard of kite-flying idyllic portrayal of pre-war Iraq). Or the more recent beheading videos. So while they may not have shown the full horror of war, they also have not shown the full horror of what we overthrew and what we are now fighting against. Both are important to make a full judgment about the war.