I should state at first that I have not yet decided whether I will drag myself to the theaters and subject myself to this film. I probably will, for the same reason that I forced myself to sit through "The Passion of the Christ"--just to know the enemy. But I already have a good idea of the film's vices and flaws. I learned these, not primarily by reading the attacks on Moore's film, but by reading its many glowingly positive reviews.

Moore's film, from what I can gather, is composed of three basic elements:

1. Conspiracy theories.

Washington Post columnist William Raspberry lauds the film as "a masterful job of connecting the dots between Saudi money and the business interests of the president and his friends." Other reviewers note that Moore's target is that favorite leftist bogeyman, the "military-industrial complex."

2. Ad-hominem attacks.

Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert says Moore "makes good use of candid footage, including an eerie video showing Bush practicing facial expressions before going live with his address to the nation about 9/11. Apparently Bush and other members of his administration don't know what every TV reporter knows, that a satellite image can be live before they get the cue to start talking. That accounts for the quease-inducing footage of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz wetting his pocket comb in his mouth before slicking back his hair. When that doesn't do it, he spits in his hand and wipes it down. If his mother is alive, I hope for his sake she doesn't see this film. Such scenes are typical of vintage Moore, catching his subjects off guard."

Such scenes are also utterly trivial and are an attempt to substitute ridicule of a man's personal habits for an examination of his ideas.

3. Maudlin appeals to emotion.

The conspicuously fawning Mick LaSalle, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, describes how "As the president talks about the need for war, Moore shows kids playing in Baghdad. Later, he shows a boy lying in the street with his forearm barely attached to his body. On the home front, Moore shows a mother whose son was killed in Iraq, reading her son's final letter--in which he says that he hopes the president isn't re-elected."

But does the grief of a distraught mother actually _prove_ anything? Of course not.

If these are accurate descriptions--and they are all from positive reviews of the film--then this is an utterly _unintellectual_ film, a film with nothing important to say, no serious philosophical or political perspective, nothing to offer for the mind of a critically thinking viewer. (Indeed, its record-breaking crowds seem to be composed mostly of true believers who have brought a tent-revival atmosphere to the screenings, as described in an MSNBC report.)

"Fahrenheit 9/11," in short, is a spiteful product of the intellectual bankruptcy of the contemporary left. Thus, I agree with comments made by James Robbins yesterday at National Review Online :

"Conservatives should not protest this film; that only gives it more notoriety and makes its multimillionaire 'everyman' director even wealthier. I would sooner acknowledge Moore as the intellectual leader of the Left, and this film his (and their) emblematic masterwork. This is the best they have to offer."

But as a said earlier, the most interesting thing about this film is the reaction of its reviewers.

As I surveyed about a dozen major reviews of the film, what struck me first was the degree of lockstep philosophic conformity. Not a single reviewer inclined to the right politically, none supported the war in Iraq (or any part of the War on Terrorism, from what I could tell), and none had anything but the most scathing and dismissive views about President Bush. Every few years, a poll comes out showing that newspaper and television reporters overwhelmingly come from a leftist perspective--much farther to the left than that of their average reader. Among film reviewers, apparently, that pattern is even stronger: the leftist outlook is universal.

This gives a doubly ironic meaning to a tag-line used at the top of some posters for Moore's film: "Controversy--What Controversy?" What controversy, indeed? Nearly everyone tasked by the mainstream media to review this film is an acolyte of Moore's far-left views.

But what is disturbing about the reaction to this film is not this near-universal agreement with Moore's un-intellectual vaporings. The most important common theme of the reviews is not an uncritical acceptance of Moore's slanted facts and weak reasoning: it is an openly expressed contempt for facts and reasoning as such.

Many of the reviewers openly acknowledge that Moore is a "biased" "propagandist" peddling a "hatchet-job"--remember that these are descriptions taken from _positive_ reviews. They conclude, however, that Michael Moore may be a propagandist--but that's OK, because he is _our_ propagandist. He may spread lies, but they are useful lies.

Here is a sampling:

-- Rick Groen, Toronto Globe & Mail: "It's no criticism to say this is manipulative-- all films are, and should be. The problem is that the attempt at manipulation is way too transparent, and thus fails."

-- David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor: "Is the label 'documentary' appropriate for this openly activist movie? Of course it is, unless you cling to some idealized notion of 'objective' film."

-- Washington Post columnist William Raspberry: "Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11'.is an overwrought piece of propaganda--a 110-minute hatchet job that doesn't even bother to pretend to be fair.. But why did the mostly liberal crowd at last week's Washington premiere--people who like to think of themselves as thoughtful and fair-minded--applaud so unrestrainedly? They applauded, I suspect, for much the same reason so many members of the black Christian middle-class applaud the harangues of Black Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan. Some of his facts may be wrong and some of his connections strained, but his _attitude_ is right."

-- J. Hoberman, Village Voice: "But a well-wrought account of the administration's use of absurd terror alerts...dissipates once Moore drops Bush to make fun of an assortment of terrorized Americans, hapless peaceniks, and befuddled state troopers. The flipside to this derision is Moore's sentimentality--most apparent in his willingness to milk the grief of a Flint gold-star mother. And yet, if it registers 1,000 voters or swings 500 votes in Michigan..." (Ellipse in original.)

But perhaps the most inadvertently revealing passage is this one:

-- Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: "Assessing the merits of a political film is a tricky business. Obviously, its quality is partly a function of its power to persuade, but its persuasiveness is in the eye of the beholder. Yet there are other things to consider: The movie's passion. Its serious purpose. Its tone. Its mix of words and images, and the way both linger in the mind. There's the way the movie fashions its arguments, and the cumulative effect the experience provides--what you feel walking out, what you think about the next day. By all these measures, 'Fahrenheit 9/11' is Michael Moore's best film."

Notice what does not make it on to this list of criteria for judging a documentary film: whether it is _true_. Are its facts correct? Are they presented in the proper context? Does it make a coherent argument? Notice what this reviewer cares about instead: that the film _works_, that it has an impact on the political leanings of the audience. That is the common theme of the reviews.

Behind all of these reviews is un-admitted Marxist premise--the root idea that is necessary to justify propaganda. In the ideology of materialist Marxist totalitarianism, it was widely accepted that ideas are just a "superstructure," a "legitimating ideology" whose sole purpose is to advance the power of one group or class over another. The seizure of political power, in this view, is the only truly important goal--and the marshalling of ideas and arguments is to be judged only by how it serves raw power politics.

More than a decade after the nominal fall of Soviet tyranny, that is the ugly totalitarian outlook that leers out at us from the film reviews offered by these mainstream "progressives."