Of course the narrative Moore constructs in "Fahrenheit 9/11" does have political consequences, and for better or worse the vast majority of those who see the film will be predisposed to agree with his interpretation of events. (We do not live in a time when pop culture is likely to change anybody's mind.) Drawing on hardball journalism, painstaking searches of archival footage, Python-style absurdism and his own sad-sack Chaplin persona (although there's less of that here than in other films), Moore slowly, sometimes agonizingly, builds his story about this administration, the corporate elite that supports it and the war that has served both their causes.

Moore's case against the Bushies and their Saudi allies -- much of it drawn from the work of journalist Craig Unger -- is largely circumstantial. Some of its particulars may not be true or fair, and very little of it approaches a legal standard of evidence. On the other hand, Moore never suggests anything patently outrageous (there's no "Bush planned 9/11," no blogosphere theories that the Pentagon crash was staged), yet the picture that emerges here, at minimum, is of a government engaged in a systematic campaign to bewilder and mislead its own public, and dedicated to a messy military adventure whose costs and aims have never been made clear.

Moore's individual factoid nuggets can be gasp-inducing (was George W. Bush's early career really funded by the bin Laden family?) and his side trip to his Michigan hometown to examine the Iraq war's effects there is genuinely heartbreaking. But "Fahrenheit 9/11" is more like a drug experience than a political documentary. It's a mind-bending, half-digested mass of video clips, interviews, statistics, rampant speculation and the cheap gags Moore has never been able to resist, from a random shot of Katherine Harris simpering like an ogre to a largely pointless scene in which Moore drives around Capitol Hill in a Mr. Frostie truck reading the USA PATRIOT Act through the loudspeaker.

Maybe that's appropriate, because Moore is trying to convince us that the Bush administration has been able to cloud our minds with hoodoo, and almost literally alter the nature of reality. As you watch the stunning events of the last four years unfold, from the snafu of Florida 2000 to the demonstrations that nearly shut down Washington on Inauguration Day (now all but forgotten) to the horrors of 9/11, the Afghan war and haunting encounters with terrified soldiers in Iraq, it seems that he must be right. How else could all this have really happened?

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