While you may be surprised that I agree with much of what you are saying here, I don't think that Chomsky and Said are fully censored from the media because they are intellectual threats. Chomsky and the late Said, while they are great intellectual threats in their own right, I think that their extreme intellectualism makes them inaccessible to the vast majority who are pop culture mush brains. My point is that they don't need to censor people like Chomsky as long as the media and pop culture and dumbing people down enough so that they wouldn't understand a word that Chomsky is talking about anyway. Further, I respect Moore for the same reasons why he is not someone I look to for information. Moore is great for explaining the political mess of the world to a general dumbed down population that doesn't have the attention span for Chomsky and Said.

That said, while I agree that Moore's analysis is pretty shallow, I do believe that he raises some very important questions that the average movie going population would not be thinking about. I especially enjoyed the parts where he talked about the culture of fear and that it is not necessarily gun control that is the problem, but the perpetual fear that the average American is filled with as a result of all the sensory material that passes through his/her brain everyday. I also thought he explained, quite well, what could happen when a single mother is forced to labour an obsene amount of hours a week and thereby has no time to nurture her child. The result was the child who brought that gun to school and shot his classmate.

Just some thoughts.

>> - That's your opinion. Moore has an academy award,
>>widespread crticial acclaim, awards from every major film
>>festival and the highest grossing doc of all time to prove
>>otherwise.
>>
>>You don't get all of that from a really bad film.
>>
>
>Critical acclaim? Nobody can reasonably assert that there is
>any 'criticism' that exists in a serious manner in the US
>Newsmedia. Dont simply dismiss this as chomskean ranting, I
>am serious. The critical acclaim of the US Newsmedia is as
>cheap and easy to secure as a Haliburton oil deal.
>
>
>> - He never tried to answer why it happened, he didn't have
>>an answer. The whole point of the film was there is no clear
>>answer and it's probably a whole range of issues that he
>>addressed in the film. Gus Van Sant came to the same
>>conclusion in his new film about it, Elephant, there is no
>>straight answer for an insane act like that.
>>
>
>I wasn't speaking about Moore attempting some convoluted
>psychobabble about the Columbine killers (which he did
>actually, when he talked about the munitions plant employees
>and how 'daddy goes to work and builds missiles, how is this
>any different' *cringe*). The entire topic of the columbine
>killings seemed ancillary to the greater issue of gun
>violence, to me.
>
>However what I was talking about was his treatment of the
>Foreign Policy retrospective, the links between availability
>and death, the implication of the U.S. on a global scale
>(apart from the Canada part, which got a double *CRINGE* for
>its cornball portrayal). He should have ATTEMPTED to connect
>the dots, because his incoherent thesis was weak and it
>proved him to be impotent in his capabilities.
>
>
>>Explain that one again. Republicans let a bad film win the
>>academy award so that Democracts would look bad? Exactly how
>>did Bush and Cheney infiltrate the academy awards to pull
>>this one off? And since so many people obviously love the
>>movie, more than any other documentary ever made, how is it
>>making anyone look bad?
>
>Its making them look bad because the Right Wing tends to
>seek critical proofs whereas the left tends to waffle and
>strike a moral pose. The reason it is damaging, and I have
>explained it thoroughly above so I wont get way into it
>again, is because it gives the Right the freedom to claim
>that there is a *critical reproach* in this 'democracy'. But
>they only allowed it because it was so poorly done and
>unconvincing. They dont speak about Chomsky or Said on the
>news because that is a REAL threat to the minds of those
>watching and learning, but they can speak about Moore until
>the cows come home because he sucks and he typefies
>everything that is wrong with the leftwing today.