Some interesting bits from Michael Moore's interview on Real Time with Bill Maher.

MOORE: What I’m trying to do right now is to tell them, "I want you to come out of the house just this once. And if you do that for me, if you promise here to vote, I will come and clean your dorm room. I will give you clean underwear, Ramen noodles" -- the sustenance of slackers everywhere -- just to get them to come out and vote. And we’ve been giving out a lot of clean underwear here in Minnesota. [laughter]

MAHER: But I understand that in the state of Michigan, your home state, this has gotten you in trouble with the Republican Party. They have threatened to arrest you for giving out clean underwear?

MOORE: Yes. [laughter]

MAHER: Can you – can you tell us what that’s all about, Mike?

MOORE: Well, they filed a criminal complaint, the Republican Party in Michigan, against me. They want me arrested because you’re not supposed to, you know, buy votes. Which I’m not doing. I’m just trying to give slackers a little encouragement.

Here I go again, taking the actual meaning of words and applying them to the given situation. But "buying" usually means exchanging something of value for something else. And if Moore is giving something of value in exchange for a promise of voting, that's buying votes. You can argue that because the value is small, or because the gifts are silly, that it should be overlooked, but it is buying votes.

Again, I don't think Moore should be prosecuted...it would likely backfire. But it simply reinforces my view of him as a jackass. You want to encourage young people to vote? Go for it. Good for you. Fucking encourage them. Don't give them free shit. What in the hell kind of message is that, anyway? Your vote is worth a pair of underwear?

On al Qaeda, and whether we're safer or not:

MOORE: I had an FBI guy tell me – that we interviewed – he said, "This war has become a recruitment film for Al Qaeda." There were just a few hundred Al Qaeda before September 11th. Now that we’re in this war, there are thousands of Al Qaeda. And we are less safe in this world. And Bush has made us less safe. And so, I think that’s really the truth about what’s going on.

Yeah, that's really the truth.

Financial Times, May 25, 2004

The al-Qaeda terrorist network is a "viable and effective" organisation that may be able to call on as many as 18,000 potential operatives worldwide, a UK think-tank said on Tuesday.

...

Basing its assessment on intelligence reports, the IISS's figure of 18,000 potential operatives is calculated by deducting the 2,000 suspects killed or captured since the September 11, 2001 attacks from the estimated 20,000 recruits thought to have passed through al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001.

The current best assessments were that there were about 20,000 al Qaeda members before 2001 (not "hundreds"). And the best estimates we have are that that number has gone down under Bush.

Once again, Moore is full of shit.

Then Maher asks:

MAHER: I’m sure you’ve been asked this before, but tell it to me, your old pal: why don’t you ever run?

MOORE: [laughs] [cheers behind him] I think that’s a bad idea. I think my job is to keep my camera lens trained on those in power, to bring the truth to the American people. We’ve got essentially a form of propaganda that’s been handed out to people on the nightly news now for a year and a half. They’ve gotten a little bit better at it. But, you know, it’s people like me need to create the anti-propaganda. And so that’s my job.

Hmm. Anti-propaganda would probably be objective truth. Moore shows Wolfowitz combing his hair, Ashcroft singing, and kids flying kites in Iraq. And he calls the nightly news propaganda?

Give me a fucking break.