I don't think a lengthy discussion of Fahrenheit 9/11 is in order. Instead, I'll point out some problems with Moore's arguments:

According to a transcript of the film, Moore takes issue with the so-called Saudi flights, in which several prominent Saudi businessmen and members of the Bin Laden family were quickly shuttled out of the United States. Moore suggests in the film, as well as in his book, Dude, Where's My Country?, that the Saudis contacted their friends the Bushes for help on getting out of the country. A strange request, yes, and I certainly don't believe Prince Bandar's explanation that "his majesty felt it was not fair for those innocent people to be subjected to any harm." Nevertheless, Moore's claims about the Saudi flights are not wholly consistent with fact.

Craig Unger, author of House of Bush, House of Saud, when asked, "Did the authorities do anything when the bin Ladens tried to leave the country?" replies, "No, they were identified at the airport, they looked at their passports, and they were identified."

The bipartisan 9/11 Comission's Staff Statement #10 reports different events:

No commercial planes, including chartered flights, were permitted to fly into, out of, or within the United States until September 13, 2001. After the airspace reopened, six chartered flights with 142 people, mostly Saudi Arabian nationals, departed from the United States between September 14 and 24. One flight, the so-called Bin Ladin flight, departed the United States on September 20 with 26 passengers, most of them relatives of Usama Bin Ladin. We have found no credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi Arabian nationals departed the United States before the reopening of national airspace.

The Saudi flights were screened by law enforcement officials, primarily the FBI, to ensure that people on these flights did not pose a threat to national security, and that nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the country. Thirty of the 142 people on these flights were interviewed by the FBI, including 22 of the 26 people (23 passengers and 3 private security guards) on the Bin Ladin flight. Many were asked detailed questions. None of the passengers stated that they had any recent contact with Usama Bin Ladin or knew anything about terrorist activity.

The FBI checked a variety of databases for information on the Bin Ladin flight passengers and searched the aircraft. It is unclear whether the TIPOFF terrorist watchlist was checked. At our request, the Terrorist Screening Center has rechecked the names of individuals on the flight manifests of these six Saudi flights against the current TIPOFF watchlist. There are no matches.

The FBI has concluded that nobody was allowed to depart on these six flights who the FBI wanted to interview in connection with the 9/11 attacks, or who the FBI later concluded had any involvement in those attacks. To date, we have uncovered no evidence to contradict this conclusion.

The 9/11 Commission has provided a very different timeline of events. The Saudi flights and the Bin Laden did not occur simultaenously, and indeed, not immediately. The Bin Laden flight did not even occur until September 20. And, contrary to what Moore and Cloonan say, the 9/11 Commission indicates that the Saudis and Bin Ladens were interrogated on their way out.

The second problem with Moore's arguments comes when he tries to get members of Congress to enlist their family members in the Army to support the war in Iraq. Michelle called this ridiculous, asking how many people out of 535 households would statistically be going to Iraq. Using the number of households from the 2000 Census -- 104,705,000 -- and the number of soldiers in Iraq -- 140,000 -- I determined that 0.715 households out of every 535 households has a family member in Iraq. The Congress's one person with a family-member in Iraq is representative of everyone else. Nevertheless, as Scott pointed out, Moore's argument is symbolic: the nation's leaders can afford to send their children to college instead of sending them to possibly die for their country, and as he later points out, the military is seen as a career option for more low-income families than for more high-income families. There are no data to support this finding, however, other than the anecdotal evidence provided by Moore.