Just Sayin'

When Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 came out - the supporters of the movie would often start any debate on the movie's merits with the question - "Have you seen the movie?" If you hadn't seen the movie then the argument ran to the idea that you were just being closed minded and trying to talk about something you knew nothing about (because how could you criticize a movie you hadn't seen?).

Now there is a book out called Unfit for Command and the very same people who were supporting Michael Moore are condemning this book almost exclusively without having read it. There is a most certain hypocrisy about this - especially within the media.

F9/11 was supposedly a documentary and most major newspapers gave the movie great play. The book Unfit for Command is a non-fiction best seller but you will not hear much about it in any major newspapers.

A search for Unfit for Command on the Boston Globe yields just three hits from the past 30 days. One is an op-ed piece. The second is the story of how vandals hacked both Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com's web sites to alter the cover of the book to read "Fit for Command". The third was a piece by Michael Kranish that alleged that one of the Swift Boat Vets had changed his story (this piece was hotly refuted by the veteran in question who said Kranish knowingly misquote him).

A search on the Boston Globe web site for mentions of Fahrenheit 9/11 for the past 30 days yielded 29 hits (even though the movie has been out for months and is basically "old news" at this point). Most of the hits include articles where the author uses mention of the movie to get his particular political slant across including thoughts of how "Kerry hopes to capitalize on [the] buzz" surrounding the movie.

The hypocrisy of the Globe is incredible.