Moore starts off on shaky ground, providing a superficial take on the election of 2000. Calling the Supreme Court's decision a gift from Bush's cronies, he ignores the fact that the Court based its decision on the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, taking into account the fact that there were no uniform standards in Florida to discern the intent of the voter on unintelligible paper ballots. Moore also takes a few cheap shots at President Bush, inferring bewilderment from his lack of immediate reaction after the attack on September 11^th and showing the President repeatedly golfing, hunting, or fishing, the kind of activities that every President from the beginning of the Republic has done to relieve the stress of office. The film becomes more convincing when it strips away Bush's common-man persona and illustrates the connections of the Bush family to Texas oil and the influence of Saudi billionaires. While the Bush, Saudi, Oil connection has been well documented in the past, this sequence makes the elitist nature of the current government much more real to a large number of people.

Moore makes us feel the tragedy of 9/11 very deeply by showing a blank screen filled with the sounds of tragedy, leaving the horror to our imagination. After the initial shock of 9/11, awareness opened and people came together, yet, in the words of Tim Robbins, "the media and the government worked overtime to close it and reinforce the usual trance with mindless fear and insatiable material greed". Moore relates how perpetuating the fear of terrorism allowed the government, through the Patriot Act, to trample on civil liberties. Using a loudspeaker, he drives through Washington DC to read provisions of the Act which apparently few legislators read before voting it into law. Moore ratchets up the anti-Bush rhetoric but wisely shows the deeper issues involved in American society, issues that did not begin with and will not end with the removal of President Bush. Showing boarded-up homes and poverty-stricken neighborhoods in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, he dramatizes how the poor and unemployed are used by the system to feed war profits. Moore follows two Marine recruiters as they target young blacks at a shopping mall in a depressed neighborhood, cynically promising them careers in music and sports.

The most powerful sequence deals with Iraq. Here Moore shows scenes of devastation that we have never seen on television, not only the slaughter of innocent Iraqi's but also the severed limbs and torn bodies of U.S. soldiers. Moore questions the reasons we invaded a sovereign country that was no threat to us, providing a moving sequence with a patriotic mother who turned against the war after one of her sons was killed. The mother, Lila Lipscombe, tells Moore how she hung the American flag outside of her home daily and how her daughter served in the Gulf War but now questions our government's veracity in the light of the Iraq War. In the film's emotional highlight, she reads a letter from her son written weeks before his death, criticizing the leadership of President Bush and our reasons for being in Iraq.