unfair, impolite, unsubtle, unwise, obnoxious, tendentious, and maddeningly self-contradictory

In Critical Reception: The Meaning of 'Fahrenheit 9-11', Irfan Khawaja writes,

Moore’s film, we’re told, is unfair, impolite, unsubtle, unwise, obnoxious, tendentious, and maddeningly self-contradictory — all [A.O.] Scott’s terms, not mine. And yet, Scott insists, Moore is a "credit to the republic" for having made the film despite this. It seems not to have occurred to Scott that once you concede that crap like Fahrenheit 9/11 is a "credit to the republic," you’ve already conceded that the republic is itself a piece of crap — at which point it seems futile to insist that the film is but "a partisan rallying cry, an angry polemic, a muckraking inquisition into the use and abuse of power."

When you boil down the posturing of the Moore-boosting genre, you find at last a very strange and hypocritical exercise in special pleading and excuse-making. What Moore’s quasi-defenders are telling us is that an illogical, dishonest and tendentious film offers an inarticulate indictment of an evil Administration. The trouble is, if we take this morally confused verdict at face value, we reach not an indictment but an equivalence — not the intended conclusion that Moore’s film is "worth seeing and debating" but the rather different conclusion that Michael Moore is morally on par with George Bush, and that his film has all of the moral credibility of an ad for the Bush campaign. Is that really where these people want to go?

via Will Wilkinson.