Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [1]
Over the next few minutes, off air, I just stood there and glared at him as other reporters asked me questions. Hemmer went over to be interviewed by some blogger. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked back up to him and said, with Dirty Harry calm, “That is absolutely the most despicable thing ever said to me on live television.”
He told me not to interrupt him and to wait until he was done talking to the blogger. Sure, punk, I can wait.
And then, when I wasn’t looking, he slipped away. But there would be nowhere for him to hide! He took refuge inside the Arkansas delegation—the refuge of all scoundrels!—but I found him, and I got right up in his face.
“You made my death seem acceptable,” I said. “You just told someone it was OK to kill me.”
He tried to back away, but I blocked him in. “I want you to think about your actions if anything ever happens to me. Don’t think my family won’t come after you, because they will.” He mumbled something about his right to ask me anything he wanted, and I decided it wasn’t worth breaking my lifelong record of never striking another human, certainly not some weasel from cable news (Save it for Meet the Press, Mike!). Hemmer broke loose and got away. Within the year he would leave CNN and move to Fox News, where he should have been in the first place.
To be fair to Mr. Hemmer, I was not unaware that my movies had made a lot of people mad. It was not unusual for fans to randomly come up and hug me and say, “I’m so happy you’re still here!” They didn’t mean in the building.
Why was I still alive? For over a year there had been threats, intimidation, harassment, and even assaults in broad daylight. It was the first year of the Iraq War, and I was told by a top security expert (who is often used by the federal government for assassination prevention) that “there is no one in America other than President Bush who is in more danger than you.”
How on earth did this happen? Had I brought this on myself? Of course I did. And I remember the moment it all began.
It was the night of March 23, 2003. Four nights earlier, George W. Bush had invaded Iraq, a sovereign country that not only had not attacked us, but was, in fact, the past recipient of military aid from the United States. This was an illegal, immoral, stupid invasion—but that was not how Americans saw it. Over 70 percent of the public backed the war, including liberals like Al Franken and the twenty-nine Democratic senators who voted for the war authorization act (among them Senators Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, and John Kerry). Other liberal war cheerleaders included New York Times columnist and editor Bill Keller and the editor of the liberal magazine the New Yorker, David Remnick. Even liberals like Nicholas Kristof of the Times hopped on the bandwagon pushing the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Kristof praised Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell for “adroitly” proving that Iraq had WMDs. He wrote this after Powell presented phony evidence to the United Nations. The Times ran many bogus front-page stories about how Saddam Hussein had these weapons of mass destruction. They later apologized for their drumbeating this war into existence. But the damage had been done. The New York Times had given Bush the cover he needed and the ability to claim, heck, if a liberal paper like the Times says so, it must be true!
And now, here it was, the fourth night of a very popular war, and my film, Bowling for Columbine, was up for the Academy Award. I went to the ceremony but was not allowed, along with any of the nominees, to talk to the press while walking down the red carpet into Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre. There was the fear that someone might say something—and in wartime we need everyone behind the war effort and on the same page.
The actress Diane Lane came on to the Oscar stage and read the list of nominees for Best Documentary. The envelope