Goldberg and Guthrie

The reaction to this movie on the National Review has been hilarious.

Byron York makes some sort of attempt a point here. Apparently, the success of the movie is not real, because MoveOn has been trying to get its members to go see it.

The evidence for this is pretty solid:

Last week, MoveOn set a goal of persuading 100,000 members to take the pledge to see Fahrenheit 9/11 as early as possible. In fact, according to MoveOn, 116,649 MoveOn members signed up. While that number seems like a relatively small part of the movie's total audience, [MoveOn's Eli] Pariser says MoveOn's influence is far larger than the official number suggests. "When I went to Waterville, Maine and asked how many people from MoveOn were there, probably three-quarters of the people there said yes," Pariser told Variety on Monday.

I mean, when the actual numbers tell us that MoveOn couldn't have contributed that much to the total, but a show of hands in one theatre in Maine suggests differently... well, I'm convinced.

I wonder if we should think of The Passion's success as similarly tainted, given that every evangelical church in the country was likely telling its members they would go to hell if they didn't see it.