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Politics : Fahrenheit 9/11: Michael Moore's Masterpiece -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ruffian who wrote (187)	6/23/2004 11:38:32 AM
From: American Spirit	Respond to of 2772

Michael Moore terrorizes the Bushies! The right wing is going all out to stop "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- but it's not working. - - - - - - - - - - - - By John Gorenfeld June 23, 2004 \| They're back! OK, the "vast right-wing conspiracy" Hillary Clinton warned about never really went away. But they've found new purpose in the campaign to stop the distribution of "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's latest documentary. And just as the energetic conservative elves succeeded in making Bill Clinton ever more popular with the American public, so do they seem to be driving up public interest in Moore's film, which is expected to have the biggest opening for a documentary film ever, in a scheduled 888 theaters. The convergence between the anti-Clinton and anti-Moore movements is personified by the tireless David Bossie, whose Citizens United made headlines savaging the president in the late 1990s. It's been a big week for Bossie and Citizens United. First they were busy producing anti-Clinton ads to run during the former president's star turn Sunday night on "60 Minutes," while Bossie was scurrying to cable studios to denounce the memoir "My Life" and promote his new book, "Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11." Then Bossie scheduled a Wednesday press event in front of the Federal Election Commission, where he will demand that the commission take some sort of unspecified action to regulate the screening of "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- presumably because of the anti-Bush documentary's power to influence the coming presidential election. "Documents will be hand delivered to several government agencies immediately following the media briefing," the group's press release soberly states. Anyone still wondering whether "Fahrenheit 9/11" has the far right squirming about the documentary's possible effect on the November presidential election? Over the past week, attacks on the film reached fever pitch. They involved right-wing-conspiracy veterans like Bossie, but also some relative newcomers. (And Moore felt obliged to hire a war room led by Democratic political consultants Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani.) So far the campaign doesn't seem to have hurt Moore. The real question is whether "Fahrenheit 911" can be anywhere as entertaining as the sometimes surreal campaign to derail it. The Moore bashers include former California assemblyman Howard Kaloogian, whose Move America Forward launched a letter-writing campaign last week against a select number of theaters that planned to show "Fahrenheit." Kaloogian was part of a cabal that takes credit for recalling Gov. Gray Davis. Now they've set their sights on Moore. "We've sent out probably well over 200,000 e-mails," says Melanie Morgan, a talk radio host, of the MAF campaign. With no small dose of glee, Morgan says of the cinemas targeted by MAF's letter-writing campaign: "We've been causing them an enormous amount of aggravation." Such aggravation is hard to measure. No theaters have canceled showings of "Fahrenheit" at this point. And the MAF group doesn't seem to have had the most useful intelligence in its campaign. A lowly theater payroll employee inexplicably listed on MAF's e-mail list of "leading movie executives" is confused about how he became a central front in the War on Moore (he did not wish to be identified). As he sat in his office Friday, messages pinged into his in box. Dryly, he read aloud his favorites: "'I will never see a movie again' ... 'I will not support a business that aids a piece of crap sub-human like Moore in spreading his anti-american bullshit ...'" More important, though, after the grass-roots political group MoveOn launched a counteroffensive, letters of support for the film's release began outpacing negative letters (according to an unscientific survey of five theater owners) at roughly 3-to-1. Jennifer Caleshu of the Little Theatre, in Rochester, N.Y., says she's received on the order of 3,000 e-mails. For every letter accusing her of soothing terrorists by showing the film, she says, seven are encouraging. Caleshu says that to every negative e-mail she's received she replies by quoting the First Amendment. "I've gotten some real personal hate mail back about that," she says.