http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0614-09.htmTellingly, the differences in these opposing accounts are not a matter of blunt contradiction but of details omitted and included, respectively. The omissions necessary to trump up the "Moore staged it" story become visible in the light cast by the details included in his personal account:
He would've had to open a long-term CD! (...and he did.)
You have to get a background check! (...which he did, on the spot.)
snip
"Even more tellingly, that Forbes piece claimed that "Bowling for Columbine" also perpetrated the following "falsehood:"
"WELFARE: Moore places blame for a shooting by a child in Michigan on the work-to-welfare
program that prevented the boy's mother from spending time with him. ACTUALLY: Moore doesn't mention that mom had sent the boy to live in a house where her brother and a friend kept drugs and guns. "
Anyone who even casually followed Moore's commentary during the 2000 presidential campaign, two years before "Columbine," knows that among the top 5 charges he leveled against the career of Al Gore was Clinton-Gore's championship of welfare "reform," the draconian measures Moore held responsible for forcing that woman to get on a bus to make an 80-mile daily commute to two minimum-wage jobs, thereby also forcing her to leave the son she could no longer care for -- day care or baby-sitters not an option -- in the hands of her brother and in the vicinity of those drugs and guns, as Moore related in painful, vivid detail. Forbes made his point for him..."