Moore isn't wrong in considering Bush's actions grave sins against the American people. The problem is that instead of marshaling his strength to drive home his genuinely good zingers, he bunny-hops across the landscape of his movie, scoring cheap points wherever he can. He uses his smirky, aw-shucks filmmaking techniques to encourage complacency in his audience even when he thinks he's doing the opposite: To hammer home the point that Bush is a marauding cowboy, Moore gives us a mock-up of the opening credits to "Bonanza," with Bush's face superimposed where Lorne Greene's should be. (The faces of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair round out the fearsome foursome.) The screening audience I saw the movie with giggled appreciatively, delighted to see George W. made to look like a buffoon. Elsewhere, hokey hoedown music plays in the background against images of Bush, who's fond of stomping around in a cowboy hat on his endless Crawford retreats. (Bill Clinton's enemies often used similar "hick" music to paint him as a dumb rube from the South -- but then, the use of country music is the universal signal for "Looky here -- a stupid person!") Moore doesn't realize that in falling back on the cliché of painting the president as a cowboy, he's missing the real phoniness: Bush is a New Haven-born blueblood who affected a Texas demeanor.

Moore uses these and other yuk-yuk tactics to poke impish little holes in the Bush persona. But these minor deflations don't do much to emasculate George W. If anything, they suggest that Moore underestimates him, carelessly characterizing Bush's smug and reckless disregard for the American people as just a slightly rejiggered version of avuncular, Ronald Reagan-style cluelessness.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" opens with wordless, slow-motion, off-the-air footage of Bush preparing to go on-camera for his pre-Iraq War address to the American people. His piggy little eyes shift left and right; he looks creepy and untrustworthy -- not the type of person you'd want leading your country into war. But Moore rarely trusts in the power of images; he has to talk all over them, figuratively if not literally. He also takes inordinate pleasure in presenting us with facile, simplistic conclusions without having connected the dots. For instance, he stresses the strong connection between George H.W. Bush and the Saudi royal family: The senior Bush is an advisor to the Carlyle Group, a large Washington private equity firm with significant holdings in the defense sector, and with members of the bin Laden family among its investors.

At the very least, that's the conflict of interest Moore claims it is. But Moore never fits the info nibblets he comes up with on the Bush-Saudi connection into a coherent whole. Moore says that, in the days immediately following 9/11, when not even celebrities like Ricky Martin were allowed to fly, prominent Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, were secretly hustled out of the United States. He interviews an FBI agent who says that they should have been questioned before they were offered special protection. Here's the problem: As the New York Times reported last Sunday -- ironically, in the piece on the fact checking that Moore claims has gone into the movie -- the FBI did interview and clear members of the bin Laden family and, as the 9/11 commission has reported, the flights did not leave before U.S. airspace was reopened. In "Fahrenheit 9/11" Moore may have been more careful than usual with the facts, but you still can't help wondering how much he tinkered with them to suit his arguments.

"Fahrenheit 9/11"

Directed by Michael Moore

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