Originally Posted by hammer4all

I'm sorry, but the lack of direct quotes in your essay doesn't help its credibility. For all your average reader knows, you could be making one straw man argument after another and from the looks of it, that's exactly what you're doing.

Originally Posted by tspikes51

Sure, why not, I'll provide DIRECT QUOTES. I AM WATCHING THE MOVIE AND TAKING EXACT QUOTES FROM MOORE'S MOUTH HERE.

In the order in which they are presented:
1) (Referring to the Florida scenario) "And that her state (Florida) has hired a company (showing a shot of a sign reading 'Data Base Technologies') that's gonna knock voters off the rolls who aren't likely to vote for you. You can usually tell 'em by the color of their skin (showing a shot of black people)."

2) "In his first eight months in office before September 11th, George W. Bush was on vacation, according to the Washington Post, 42 percent of the time.

3) "Yes, it helps to be the President's son, especially when you're being investigated by the Security Exchange Comission. In 1990, when Mr. Bush was director of Harken Energy, he recieved this memo from company lawyers, warning directors not to sell stock if they had unfavorable information about the company. One week later, he sold 848,000 dollars worth of Harken stock. Two months later, Harken announced losses of over 23 million dollars."

4) "He [Bush] supported closing veteran hospitals. He tried to double the prescription drug cost for veterans."

5) "In the days following September 11th all commercial and private airline traffic was grounded... Not even Ricky Martin was allowed to fly. But really, who wanted to fly? No one, except the bin Ladens... It turns out that the White House approved planes to pick up the bin Ladens and numerous other Saudis. At least six private jets, and nearly 2 dozen commercial planes carried the Saudis and the bin Ladens out of the US after September 13th. In all, 142 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family, were allowed to leave the country."

He sure did make those claims. The movie had not been released on video, and the movie wasn't in a theater in my area at the time I wrote it. I took notes when we watched a Chinese bootleg copy in class, and didn't have time to take quotes. As I said, I didn't care whether he was more right or more wrong. I just wanted to find the truth. Any more Moore disciples wanna try???

Oh, and by the way, did I ever say that everything in the movie was false or that nobody should watch it??? Read again. I say quite the opposite.

Originally Posted by hammer4all

You are missing the whole point. Innocent people were purged because their names were the same as those of felons on the list. The fact that 49% of felons were black makes it a race issue because innocent blacks with the same name would be disproportionately purged. A good overview Florida’s 2000 purge lists can be found here:

Originally Posted by hammer4all

Moore merely cites a statistic given by the Washington Post. Shouldn't you be criticizing them for publishing this statistic and not Moore?

Originally Posted by hammer4all

The important thing is he got his facts right. You can rationalize and debate Bush's reasoning ad infinitum, but it won't get you anywhere. Moore provides extensive sourcing for this claim on his web site allowing people to decide for themselves.