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BigGov · 09-24-2003, 09:56 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by eple
"Boohooo Moore pulled the gun lobby's pants down, man are we pissed now. He wasn't right, you know, look, here's a grammatic error, and here is proof that one of the scenes might have been cut for dramatic effect."

Jesus, some of you need to listen to yourself blabbering. Moore makes his own case most brilliantly, and let me put attention to an important fact he pointed out:

There has been no law suits.

Why? is it because the NRA are too poor to sue? Maybe they have such high standards that they will only sue in extreme cases, even though someone is, as some people here say: blatantly lying to damage them. Or maybe there has been no lawsuits because:

THERE ARE NO EVIDENCE OF LIES, DECEPTION OR OTHERWISE FLAWED ARGUMENTATION IN BFC THAT WOULD COME THROUGH IN COURT.

Now if fox would sue Al Franken for satire, doesen't it seem weird that Moore has, according to some of you, lied outright to the american people and gotten away with it despite powerful corporate enemies.

Sorry guys, telling the same bs 200 times in a row won't make it true.

Ok, now lets go to logic.

For what possible reason does the NRA need to sue?

Has their image been damaged? No. Moore is a blatant liar, there are many documented sources, and their members don't give a fuck either way if they're represented because they're the N-R-FUCK'IN-A. They're massive. One stupid piece of false propaganda isn't going to harm their image. If it somehow did, then maybe they would sue.

Don't believe me?

Quote:

2. NRA and the Reaction To Tragedy. A major theme in Bowling is that NRA is callous toward slayings. In order to make this theme fit the facts, however, Bowling repeatedly distorts the evidence.

A. Columbine Shooting/Denver NRA Meeting. Bowling portrays this with the following sequence:

Weeping children outside Columbine;

Cut to Charlton Heston holding a musket and proclaiming "I have only five words for you: 'from my cold, dead, hands'";

Cut to billboard advertising the meeting, while Moore intones "Just ten days after the Columbine killings, despite the pleas of a community in mourning, Charlton Heston came to Denver and held a large pro-gun rally for the National Rifle Association;"

Cut to Heston (supposedly) continuing speech... "I have a message from the Mayor, Mr. Wellington Webb, the Mayor of Denver. He sent me this; it says 'don't come here. We don't want you here.' I say to the Mayor this is our country, as Americans we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land. Don't come here? We're already here!"

The portrayal is one of an arrogant protest in response to the deaths -- or, as one reviewer put it, "it seemed that Charlton Heston and others rushed to Littleton to hold rallies and demonstrations directly after the tragedy." The portrayal is in fact false.

Fact: The Denver event was not a demonstration relating to Columbine, but an annual meeting (see links below), whose place and date had been fixed years in advance.

Fact: At Denver, the NRA canceled all events (normally several days of committee meetings, sporting events, dinners, and rallies) save the annual members' meeting; that could not be cancelled because corporate law required that it be held. [No way to change location, since you have to give advance notice of that to the members, and there were upwards of 4,000,000 members.]

Fact: Heston's "cold dead hands" speech, which leads off Moore's depiction of the Denver meeting, was not given at Denver after Columbine. It was given a year later in Charlotte, North Carolina, and was his gesture of gratitude upon his being given a handmade musket, at that annual meeting.

Fact: When Bowling continues on to the speech which Heston did give in Denver, it carefully edits it to change its theme.

Moore's fabrication here cannot be described by any polite term. It is a lie, a fraud, and a few other things. Carrying it out required a LOT of editing to mislead the viewer, as I will show below. I transcribed Heston's speech as Moore has it, and compared it to a news agency's transcript, color coding the passages. CLICK HERE for the comparison, with links to the original transcript.

Moore has actually taken audio of seven sentences, from five different parts of the speech, and a section given in a different speech entirely, and spliced them together. Each edit is cleverly covered by inserting a still or video footage for a few seconds.

First, right after the weeping victims, Moore puts on Heston's "I have only five words for you . . . cold dead hands" statement, making it seem directed at them. As noted above, it's actually a thank-you speech given a year later in North Carolina.

Moore then has an interlude -- a visual of a billboard and his narration. This is vital. He can't go directly to Heston's real Denver speech. If he did that, you might ask why Heston in mid-speech changed from a purple tie and lavender shirt to a white shirt and red tie, and the background draperies went from maroon to blue. Moore has to separate the two segments.

Moore's second edit (covered by splicing in a pan shot of the crowd) deletes Heston's announcement that NRA has in fact cancelled most of its meeting:

"As you know, we've cancelled the festivities, the fellowship we normally enjoy at our annual gatherings. This decision has perplexed a few and inconvenienced thousands. As your president, I apologize for that."

Moore then cuts to Heston noting that Denver's mayor asked NRA not to come, and shows Heston replying "I said to the Mayor: As Americans, we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land. Don't come here? We're already here!" as if in defiance.

Actually, Moore put an edit right in the middle of the first sentence, and another at its end! Heston really said (with reference his own WWII vet status) "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."

Moore cuts it after "I said to the Mayor" and attaches a sentence from the end of the next paragraph: "As Americans, we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land." He hides the deletion by cutting to footage of protestors and a photo of the Mayor before going back and showing Heston.

Moore has Heston then triumphantly announce "Don't come here? We're already here!" Actually, that sentence is clipped from a segment five paragraphs farther on in the speech. Again, Moore uses an editing trick to cover the doctoring, switching to a pan shot of the audience as Heston's (edited) voice continues.

What Heston said there was:

"NRA members are in city hall, Fort Carson, NORAD, the Air Force Academy and the Olympic Training Center. And yes, NRA members are surely among the police and fire and SWAT team heroes who risked their lives to rescue the students at Columbine.

Don't come here? We're already here. This community is our 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 right as all 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."

I recently discovered that Moore has set up a new webpage to respond to a chosen few points of criticism, one of which is his, er, creative editing of Heston's speech. Click here for a link to his page, and for my response to his attempted defense of what he did. Basically, Moore contends that he didn't mean for the viewer to get the impression that "cold dead hands" was spoken at Denver -- that just "appears as Heston is being introduced in narration." As for the rest, well, "Far from deliberately editing the film to make Heston look worse, I chose to leave most of this out and not make Heston look as evil as he actually was." Sure. That's why he left out:

"As you know, we've cancelled the festivities, the fellowship we normally enjoy at our annual gatherings."

"So, we have the same right as all 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."

"NRA members are, above all, Americans. That means that whatever our differences, we are respectful of one another and we stand united, especially in adversity."

There, lies, deception, AND flawed arguementation. So why doesn't the NRA sue? Actually, I don't think they really could. You see, the NRA would probably need to show that their organization suffered damages because of BFC, there's a few problems with that however.

On almost internet posting board someone like me will come back with straight facts like this from websites like this: http://www.hardylaw.net/Truth_About_Bowling.html which is very well documented, has many examples, and has side by side examples of many speeches.

Would anyone from the media want to attack the NRA right now with all of this evidence against them? Not unless their editor wants to be drowned in mail from NRA members or people that just plain hate morons that can't tell the truth.

So, I guess I will conceed, the NRA can't sue. Mostly because the NRA is too big and doesn't want to waste a couple million on a lawsuit for which it would have trouble winning because A) Michael Moore is too fucking stupid and too petty to pay attention to and B) The NRA is too huge to be affected by something so blatantly false.

eple, thank you for just proving yourself ignorant of our legal system, and of how BFC is false.