BOWLING FOR BALONEY: PART TWO
By Larry Swickard
In part one I began laying out the factual basis for my contention that Hollywood movie maker Michael Moore is a leftist extremist, hypocritical, and his film Bowling For Columbine represents an intentional act of fraud, deceit, and slander committed against gun owners, the N.R.A. and Middle America. If Moore was no more than another uneducated Hollywood liberal (now there is a redundancy), he wouldn't be worth our attention. But this minister of misinformation has developed a well financed penchant for producing fraudulent "documentaries" passed off as factual and accepted as thus by Americans who should know better. To an increasing degree Americans seem to have become intellectually lazy. Many prefer to accept what they see on the silver screen as gospel rather than take the time to read a book and check the facts. Moore has become so prominent that he was a visible celebrity at the recent Democrat Party Convention in Boston (July 2004). Many conservative radio and talk show personalities were also in attendance. They included Sean Hannity, Tony Snow, Christian conservative Richard Land, and many others. I listened to an audio tape in which Moore sneered at them, called them angry conservatives "Who knew their days were numbered" ("The Savage Nation," AM Radio 980 KMBZ, broadcast on Friday July 30, 2004, 8:03 p.m.). Moore offered no clarification concerning his cryptic threat. As Ann Coulter might say, liberals like Moore often call conservatives on the radio and their audiences "angry" because they are jealous. The liberals have the anger part down real well but the male part has proven to be an obstacle.
Bowling For Columbine is not a fraudumentary because I disagree with Moore's political point of view. It is a fraud because the film is based on cleverly devised deceptions. For example Moore wants Americans to believe that purchasing a gun is as easy as buying candy at the drug store. To demonstrate this, Moore targeted a bank in Traverse City, Michigan. The bank offered customers who opened a CD account a bolt action rifle instead of paying interest. In Moore's fraudumentary he deposits $1000 dollars in a CD account, the bank conducts a telephone background check, and then we see Moore emerging from the bank holding a rifle over his head. The entire transaction took about an hour. Jan Jacobson, the bank clerk who set up Moore's account, reveals that the transaction was fiction. Moore's film company worked for a month to stage the scene. The reality is that customers who open a CD account and choose the rifle have to wait a week to a ten day waiting period. Then they must drive to a gun store in another city to pick up the rifle following Federal and State background checks. The bank does not conduct background checks nor does it stock, store, and hand out firearms. Jacobson stated about Moore that "He portrayed us as backwoods hicks" (Laura Ingraham, Shut Up And Sing: How Elites From Hollywood, Politics, And the UN Are Subverting America, Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2003, p-105). Richard Schickel, a prominent film observer and dedicated opponent of private firearm ownership, lamented that Moore's tactics hurt their cause and "gave aid and comfort to the enemy" because he is careless with facts and hysterical in debates. Moore is out for himself (Ingraham, p-106).
Moore also claimed in Bowling that Lockheed-Martin (for whom I worked in Sunnyvale, California) trucked and stored missiles with payloads of "mass destruction" [nuclear warheads] in Littleton, Colorado. Moore speculates in his film that the proximity of the missiles to Columbine High School may have inspired the murderous rampage of Harris and Klebold. The truth is that Lockheed does not manufacture or store missiles with nuclear warheads at Littleton. In reality they manufacture rockets that launch television satellites into orbit (Ingraham, p-106). Keep in mind that Moore's central thesis is that America's "gun-culture" and fascination with the military is what causes violence in America. To reinforce the impression Moore wanted to create, he then turned to the military. Moore's film depicts a B-52 bomber on display at the Air Force Academy in Colorado. According to Moore the plaque in front of the plane proudly proclaims that it and its crew killed Vietnamese on Christmas Eve, 1972. This is another Moore lie. What the plaque really states is "B-52D Stratofortress: 'Diamond Lil.' Dedicated to the men and women of the Strategic Air Command who flew and maintained the B-52D throughout its 26 year history in the Command Aircraft 55-003 with over 15,000 flying hours, is one of two B-52D's credited with a confirmed MIG kill during the Vietnam Conflict. Flying out of U-Tapao Royal Thai Naval Airfield in southeastern Thailand, the crew of 'Diamond Lil' shot down a MIG northeast of Hanoi during 'Linebacker II' action on Christmas Eve, 1972" (Ingraham, pp. 106-107). The plaque simply celebrates that a rather large American bomber was able to shoot down an enemy jet fighter plane, no mean feat. For those who don't remember, MIG's were/are planes built by the former Communist Soviet Union. The Soviets assisted the Communist North Vietnamese in their war of conquest in South Vietnam against the Americans.
David T. Hardy, among others, has completed a total dissection of Moore's film and provides a point by point rebuttal of each of Moore's deceptions. Hardy asserts that Bowling should not have won Hollywood's Academy Award for Best Documentary because it is fiction. Moore used deceptive editing to create scenes that he knew were false. A second thesis running through Moore's film is that the N.R.A. is the cause of a "cult of firearms" that is responsible for violent crime in America and the N.R.A. is callous toward the victims of these crimes. In an attempt to demonstrate this callousness, Moore trains the cameras in his film on high school students weeping outside of Columbine High School. He then cuts to a scene with Charlton Heston, musket raised defiantly over his head, declaring "I have only five words for you: from my cold dead hands." The camera then cuts to a billboard announcing the N.R.A.'s National Convention held at Denver, Colorado that year. While this is occurring Moore, the narrator, states that ten days after the massacre at Columbine Heston and the N.R.A. came to town even though the mayor (Wellington Webb) and the community begged them not to come. Moore attempts to create the impression that the N.R.A. rushed defiantly and callously o Denver in response to the massacre at Columbine High School. Hank Hannegraaf (Bible Answer Man) would call this the skin of the truth stuffed with a lie. In truth the N.R.A. did not rush to Denver in response to what happened at Columbine. The N.R.A. had scheduled its annual meeting in Denver years in advance. The N.R.A. did in fact cancel all events except for the annual member's meeting which by corporate law could not be canceled. It gets even worse. Heston's speech, in which he raised a commemorative musket over his head and gave his "cold dead fingers" speech wasn't even delivered at the Denver Convention. In fact, it was given a year later at the N.R.A. annual Convention held in Charlotte, North Carolina! Heston had been given an antique musket in recognition of his service to the cause of freedom. Moore had simply spliced together parts of different speeches given in two different locations a year apart. Moore's splicing deception included audio from seven different sentences, from five different parts of a speech, and one section from a different speech entirely. He cut and pasted the various words and sentences to invent an entirely new speech, one never given, and then put the words in Heston's mouth. Vladimir Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinskiy, Lenin's first director of the Soviet Secret Police (the Cheka) must be turning over in their graves with jealously at such wonderful technology. Following Moore's counterfeit speech he cuts to pictures of N.R.A. billboards before proceeding to the next portion of Heston's speech. He depicts Heston responding defiantly to mayor of Denver's request that he not come by saying "As Americans, we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land. Don't come here? We're already here!" The reason Moore has to cut to the billboard scenes during the speech is simple. Had he not done so, audiences might have noticed that somehow, in mid-sentence, Heston had magically changed his clothes. During one short speech, Heston somehow went from a lavender shirt and purple tie to a white shirt and red tie. The background drapes also went from maroon to blue. In other words, audiences might have realized that these were really two different speeches given in two different locations. Moore also deleted the portion of Heston's actual Denver speech in which he apologized for the canceling of most of the Convention's planned functions ("Truth About Bowling For Columbine," at
www.hardylaw.net/Truth_About_Bowling, pp. 1-4).
Moore has Heston give a speech at Denver in which he says "I said to the mayor" and then he splices in the words "We're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land" which actually comes from a sentence in another paragraph. What Heston really said was "I said to the mayor, well, my reply to the mayor is, I volunteered for the war they wanted me to attend when I was 18 years old. Since then I've run small errands for my country from Nigeria to Vietnam. I know many of you here in this room could say the same thing." The last part of Moore's pseudo-speech, "Don't come here, we're already here" was actually cut and spliced from a segment five paragraphs later to create more of the fake speech never given by Heston. What he really said was "N.R.A. members are in City Hall, Fort Carson, NORAD, the Air Force Academy, and the Olympic Training Center. And yes, N.R.A. members are surely among the police and fire and SWAT team heroes who risked their lives to rescue students at Columbine. Don't come here? We're already here. This community is hour home. Every community in America is our home. We are a 128 year old fixture of mainstream America. The Second Amendment ethic of lawful, responsible firearm ownership spans the broadest cross section of American life imaginable. So, we have the same rights as wll other citizens to be here. To help shoulder the grief and share our sorrow and to offer our respectful, reassured voice to the national discourse that has erupted around this tragedy" (Hardylaw.net, pp. 4-7). In most professions, such an outright fraud would lead to the dismissal and denouncement of the perpetrator. Remember, Moore has packaged and promoted his film as a factual documentary and Hollywood has honored it as such. Warning, it gets even worse in Part Three.
