No, really, it is that boring. I can't believe the dude honestly wrote the thing in free hand. If I were one of his fingers i would have lept off his hand and stabbed him in both eyes just so he wouldn't be able to find any more innocent papers and defile them the way he did nearly a thousand other sheets. Does he realize trees died for this thing?

I would threaten to punish him by making him read his own snail-race if I didn't think he'd actually enjoy hearing about himself for 900+ pages.

As for F911...it's got a general release, though it is somewhat small. There's about 800 theaters showing it across the country (vs. a normal broad release of about 2000).

'Documentary?' Even some liberal pundits are admitting 911 is anything but, like Ed Koch at http://jewishworldreview.com/0604/koch1.asp.

I'm sorry! I can't decide which is a bigger waste of money-- Clinton's book or Moore's movie! (Well, technically, one would spend more on the book, but why would anyone spend a cent on either?!) But hey, they're both fiction, so money spent on such laughable entertainment might be worth it! (politics...ruffled feathers... I'm on a roll!)

~L.L.

Moore's F9/11 is an intentional deception. Much like Bowling for Columbine, he's presenting just the events that make his political point. When such events don't exist, he lovingly crafts them out of out-of-context and unrelated video clips.

Moore thinks we're stupid and won't know we're being manipulated. Who knows? Maybe the cynical bastard is right. On the bright side, the people he hopes to affect, swing voters, won't see this movie. Undecided voters in America find politics boring. They would prefer visiting the dentist to watching a "documentary" about politicians.

Fear not, Lorien, anyone in America that wants to see F9/11 will be able to. We don't have the kind of censorship here that Moore is suggesting. Mostly we censor porn and things that seem harmful to children. Political opinions, no matter how deceitful, get a free ride.

"I know you'd hate it, it is pretty biased and it is definitely anti-Bush, but it did make me think." He said, "There were some facts I wasn't aware of that kind of concern me."

"What FACTS would those be?" I queried.

To which he mentioned Moore questioning a particular Republican senator about how he'd feel if it were HIS son going to war. "The guy couldn't come up with an answer," Mr. Friend-of-mine said.

I pointed out that the answer (or lack of) was not in response to the question and that Moore had simply done a crop/edit job on that little bit to make it appear as though the senator were stammering.

Then there's the Saudi Royal family bit, and the bit about how Bush recieved the news...all either totally wrong or severely slanted.

Fine.

Assuming anybody here actually has the patience to destroy countless hours of their life (and likely several brain cells with it) reading "After I signed several documents into law I went to lunch with a good friend of mine..." with no real purpose or point, I'm still not sure they'd get anything out of it. That includes Clinton die-hards.

And what exactly DID Clinton do that Bush wouldn't? Refuse to take custody of OBL? Ignore the first attempting bombing of the WTC? Lob cruise missiles at an asprin factory? Have affairs at work?

I'm sorry. That's not a fair discussion...such a thing could drag on for countless hours of debate and get nowhere.

Bottom line is I honestly tried to give the book a chance but realized that beyond being a $30 cure for insomnia, it wasn't going to do me much good otherwise.

I think it boils down to if you want a drawn out account of his entire life, growing up and where he's been and what he's done and so forth, then it would probably be fine. But I'm not sure he knows the difference between "interesting" and "Information". He gives a lot of the latter, but very little of the former.

If any of you are interested in reading a first-rate memoir, I'd highly recommend Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life. I read it based on an OSC recommendation, and I wasn't disappointed in the least. It's one of my all-time favorite books.

Of the many things I learned about writing by reading Wolff's memoir, perhaps the most important was that of silence. Wolff doesn't tell you the obvious; instead, he allows you to infer it. It gives this already poignant book a haunting feeling that sticks with you throughout. He wouldn't have been able to sustain that mood if he had labored the obvious.

What do you want to bet that the ol' boy didn't bother to cut one word of his immortal, handwritten prose?

Writing interesting stuff is all about going back and cutting out (or rewriting) the boring bits. Not everyone can write. Clinton didn't get where he got by being a great writer, it probably isn't fair to expect him to be even slightly good at writing. This is why it is much better (and more or less customary) for Ex-Presidents to simply write down everything they remember and then hire a competent writer to give it a halfway decent shape.

Clinton, ever the optimist, decided that his hand-written brilliance would need no such help. So he ended up with memoirs that don't have a half decent shape (or any shape, from the comments I've heard--I'll leave sidebars about decency to your imaginations).

"For a book promoted so heavily, it sure doesn't seem like anybody's buying."

Granted, this is in Houston, TX, but even still, I'm not giving the man a plug nickel, especially after the bad reviews and word of mouth the book has gotten.