Filmmaker Michael Moore in a posting on his website, michaelmoore.com, September 12, 2001:

Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California—these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!

That text soon disappeared from his site, presumably censored or something, and was replaced by another article that included the following analysis:

We have orphaned so many children, tens of thousands around the world, with our taxpayer-funded terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador) that I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised when those orphans grow up and are a little whacked in the head from the horror we have helped cause.

Yet, our recent domestic terrorism bombings have not been conducted by a guy from the desert but rather by our own citizens: a couple of ex-military guys who hated the federal government.

From the first minutes of today's events, I never heard that possibility suggested. Why is that?

Maybe it's because the A-rabs are much better foils. A key ingredient in getting Americans whipped into a frenzy against a new enemy is the all-important race card. It's much easier to get us to hate when the object of our hatred doesn't look like us.

Congressmen and Senators spent the day calling for more money for the military; one Senator on CNN even said he didn't want to hear any more talk about more money for education or health care—we should have only one priority: our self-defense.

Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure when the rest of the world isn't living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes?

In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again. He withdraws from the Kyoto agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists on restarting the arms race—you name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all.

Moore again, in a September 17 posting:

The amazing thing is that you can even still get a Wall Street Journal—anywhere and everywhere. As I write this late Sunday night, the captains of Capitalism are declaring that the stock exchange will re-open on Monday, even if they don't have running water and phones, just to show its enemies that NOTHING can stop the forward accumulation of wealth.

The vast majority of the dead are those who labored to bring them that wealth, and it dishonors them and their families to so callously crank up the greed machine within days of this tragedy. Their bodies—thousands of them—are still buried under the rubble down the street, but, hey, why wait to give them a proper burial—let's get busy making some money! I can only hope that the stench from the rotting corpses of their former employees will haunt them for the rest of the day and remain in their consciences for the days to come...

More thoughts on President Bush from September 19:

I know we are all supposed to be supportive of Mr. Bush, at the moment, but has it dawned on anyone that he is not, in fact, the "president?" I hate to bring up a thorny subject, but this is the man who lost the election. He got the least number of votes between the two major party candidates. His brother oversaw a rigged vote in Florida.

I am so, so sorry to bring this up now, but the tragedy of the past week is EXACTLY the kind of horrible circumstance many Americans feared we'd find ourselves in—A NATIONAL CRISIS UNDER A LEADER WHO IS NOT THERE BY THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE. It is a tribute to the goodwill of the American public that they have rallied behind George W. Bush as best they can, 'cause he and his fake flight jacket is all we got right now in the Oval Office....

We are now driving across Ohio toward West Virginia and Pennsylvania. On the radio, NPR is running a history report on Osama bin Laden. We are told that he comes from a wealthy family and that they are the main builders for the Saudi royal family. They've remodeled palaces and built holy sites. Their construction projects are everywhere. Kathleen turns to me, and with one word sums up the kind of low-life we are talking about here.

"Contractors," she says. "Bin Laden is a contractor." Indeed, it all made sense.

[Ed.: In a September 22 posting, Moore complains that he has been contacted by several news organizations from around the world, but not by any American news outlets. But in his September 19 posting, he says NPR offered to broadcast him reading these letters, which he wrote while driving across the country to New York. Moore's apparent goal was to get onto network television. Any difficulty in doing so can easily be explained by pondering another obtuse posting from October 8, in which he criticizes President Bush for "wander[ing] off to vacation in Omaha" following the attack and "companies like Boeing get[ting] rid of 30,000 people while using the tragedy in New York as their shameful excuse."]

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