When the powers-that-be succeeded in ignoring-and then silencing-the nation's widespread dissent over war, one man stood on an Oscar stage and, in front of a billion people, outed the commander in chief for his fictitious presidency and his fictitious war. Now, just a few months later, those words have remarkably become the accepted truth of the land. "Michael Moore is a comic genius!"
Excerpt:
HiddenMysteries
Yes, Michael Moore is the scourge of Stupid White Men everywhere. He's taken on fat cats, gun nuts, lying politicians. The Guardian describes him as "a wake-up call, a kick in the mental backside." And now he's back-daring to ask the most urgent question of these perilous times:
Michael Moore is on a mission in his new book: Regime Change. The man who slithered into the White House on tracks greased by his daddy's oil buddies is one of many targets in Mike's blistering follow-up to his smash #1 hit Stupid White Men, the biggest-selling nonfiction book of the year. Now no one is safe: corporate barons who have bilked millions out of their employees' lifetime savings, legislators who have stripped away our civil liberties in the name of "homeland security," and even that right-wing brother-in-law of yours (yes, we all have one) who manages, year after year, through his babbling idiocy, to ruin Thanksgiving dinner.
Read what the critics have to say...
-TIME OUT
"Michael Moore is everything the contemporary politician isn't. He is smart, brash, profane, hilarious, beholden to no one, and genuine in his devotion to the country."
-THE DENVER POST
"Decades from now, historians will look back and say Michael Moore captured the zeitgeist."
-SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
"For more than a dozen years Michael Moore has served as the nation's unofficial muckraker laureate, exposing and lampooning the greed, arrogance, and corruption of corporate america and the folly and hypocrisy ofbeltway politics."
-U.S. CATHOLIC
"Michael Moore has actually drawn blood. That's a shock to the conservative system. He may be just the lethal heat-seeking weapon [that liberals] have been looking for. [He] is more funny than angry, more everyman than show-biz. He may be more of a factor in the next election cycle than all the other, more glamorous oscar attendees now lining up at fund-raisers for Howard Dean."
-FRANK RICH, THE NEW YORK TIMES
Pp. 56-57
But the meat of the administration's "evidence" had already begun to turn rancid. During that same first week of February, a British intelligence report leaked to the BBC said there were no links between Saddam and Osama. The two evildoers had tried to form a friendship in the past, but it had turned out like a great episode of Blind Date-they hated each other. According to the report, Bin Laden's "aims are in ideological conflict with present-day Iraq."
On top of this, the al Qaeda poison and explosives factory Bush and his team claimed Saddam was harboring was located in northern Iraq-an area controlled by Kurds and patrolled by U.S. and British warplanes since the early nineties. The north of Iraq was out of Saddam's reach, but within our own. The base actually belonged to Ansar al Isalam, a militant fundamentalist group whose leader has branded Saddam Hussein an "enemy." A tour of the base by a large group of international journalists quickly revealed that no weapons were being manufactured there.
But none of that mattered. The president had said it-it had to be true! Yes, this whopper worked so well that, in the months leading up to the war in Iraq, polls showed that up to half of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein had ties to Osama bin Laden's network. Even before Bush had served up his 2003 State of the Union address, and Powell had presented the Saddam-Osama "evidence" to the U.N., a Knight-Ridder poll found that half of those questioned already incorrectly thought that one or more of the 9/11 hijackers held Iraqi citizenship. Bush didn't even have to say it.
The Bush administration had succeeded in perpetrating one of the biggest lies of all time, confusing Saddam and Osama in the minds of the American public. Once you sell the people on the notion that Saddam had a hand in the mass murder of nearly 3,000 people on American soil, well, even if the bogus weapons of mass destruction whopper didn't hold up, this would be enough to get the flags waving and the troops-a-packin'.
Of course the problem with this whopper-other than it is a cynical, premeditated fabrication-is that Osama bin Laden considers Saddam to be an infidel. Hussein committed the sin of creating a secular Iraq instead of a Muslim state run by fanatical Muslim clerics. Under Saddam, Baghdad had churches, mosques and, yes, even a synagogue. Hussein had persecuted and killed thousands of Shiites in Iraq because of the threat they posed to his secular government.
In fact, the biggest reason Saddam and Osama don't like each other is the same reason the Bushes stopped liking Saddam: the invasion of Kuwait. Bush & Co. was pissed because Saddam was threatening the security of our oil in the Gulf, and Osama was pissed because it brought American troops to Saudi Arabia and the Muslim holy lands. That's bin Laden's biggest problem with us-and it's all because of Saddam!
Saddam and Osama were mortal enemies and they could not put their mutual hatred aside, even to join together to defeat the USA. Man, to not team up when it meant destroying the Great Satan Bush-THAT is a lot of hate!
Hardbound, 6.25x9, 249 pages