Backstage w/Supak: organic, progressive, environmentalist

Lying sons of bitches can't even quote a movie right

The right wing in this country is getting crazier by the minute. The talking heads are starting to sound like the guy last week at the Kerry fundraiser in front of the Disney Hall, who screamed fuck you at the top of his lungs in my face. Now I've done that to people before, and I know for a fact that that only happens when you're really exasperated and completely out of other things to say. So, when Dick Cheney can't even argue that he's not benefitting from Halliburton, or that Halliburton hasn't benefitted from his position running the government, he goes off.

But now they're out there trying to poke holes in the facts behind Michael Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. And, as Moore puts it on his site in this series of rebuttals, the people, most notably Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, who want to poke these factual holes in the movie can only do so if they misquote the movie.

Maybe they are just so hooked on the Bush Brainwashing program that they can't see that, as the St. Petersberg Times reported on June 9, even though the movie never claims that filghts with Saudis were zipping around picking up Saudi passengers before the grounding of all flights were lifted, at least one such flight did take place.

So people like Isikoff are saying that the movie claims there were flights before the grounding was lifted, which it does not. But, in fact, there was at least one private flight, from Tampa to Kentucky, that flew with the permission of someone high up, while other flights were still grounded.

Here's the relevant paragraph from the Moore site:

(Note: The St. Petersberg Times article to which Unger refers also states, "The 9/11 Commission, which has said the flights out of the United States were handled appropriately by the FBI, appears concerned with the handling of the Tampa flight... Most of the aircraft allowed to fly in U.S. airspace on Sept. 13 were empty airliners being ferried from the airports where they made quick landings on Sept. 11. The reopening of the airspace included paid charter flights, but not private, nonrevenue flights." Jean Heller, TIA now verifies flight of Saudis; The government has long denied that two days after the 9/11 attacks, the three were allowed to fly. St. Petersburg Times, June 9, 2004.)