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Monday, November 01, 2004

Michael Moore should stick to movies

Someone on our local listserv posted Michael Moore's latest message, which included the following:
Okay, Kerry isn’t everything you wished he would be. You’re right. He’s not you! Or me. But we’re not on the ballot – Kerry is. Yes, Kerry was wrong to vote for authorization for war in Iraq but he was in step with 70% of the American public who was being lied to by Bush & Co. And once everyone learned the truth, the majority turned against the war. Kerry has had only one position on the war – he believed his president.

President Kerry had better bring the troops home right away. My prediction: Kerry’s roots are anti-war. He has seen the horrors of war and because of that he will avoid war unless it is absolutely necessary. Ask most vets. But don’t ask someone whose only horror was when he arrived too late for a kegger in Alabama.

There’s a reason Bush calls Kerry the Number One Liberal in the Senate – THAT’S BECAUSE HE IS THE NUMBER ONE LIBERAL IN THE SENATE! What more do you want? My friends, this is about as good as it gets when voting for the Democrat. We don’t have the #29 Liberal running or the #14 Liberal or even the #2 Liberal – we got #1! When has that ever happened?

Those of us who may be to the left of the #1 liberal Democrat should remember that this year conservative Democrats have had to make a far greater shift in their position to back Kerry than we have. We’re the ones always being asked to make the huge compromises and to always vote holding our noses. No nose holding this time. This #1 liberal is not the tweedledee to Bush’s tweedledum.
My reaction follows:

Boy, Michael Moore should really stick to making movies. I'm just about reconciled to voting for Kerry when I read this load of tripe. "In step with 70% of the American public." That's Moore's excuse for Kerry's war vote? An impassioned speech, like the ones he gave back in 1971, could have put a serious dent in that 70%. He believed the
president? Please let me continue to believe that Kerry's vote was for political reasons--if he's stupid enough to believe this president, he may be as stupid as this president. (And Moore seems to be suggesting that "believing your president" is by definition something good and honorable and patriotic, when in fact it is precisely the opposite--especially for an opposition senator.) And while many reasonable people believed that Iraq had WMD's after years of being lied to about it, the idea that Iraq was a threat to the US was simply ludicrous. And Kerry knew that. I'm pretty sure he knew about the WMD's being a myth, too. He knew that Bush was going to war if he got the approval of Congress, no matter what, and he still voted for it. Michael Moore is insulting our intelligence by suggesting otherwise. We get enough of that from the Bushies.

And Moore's saying Kerry's the "number one liberal in the senate" sounds just as stupid as when Bush says it. If you carefully pick a few social and environmental votes (leaving Kyoto out, for example) and tally the score, maybe that's what you get. But I saw a great movie this past summer which focused on several shameful episodes in our county's recent history. One was the stolen election, where the number one liberal in the senate joined his 99 white colleagues in ignoring the pleas of disenfranchised black voters in Florida. Another was the Patriot Act, in which the number one liberal in the senate voted with all but one of the rest to take away key parts of our civil liberties, without having even read the bill. And the third was the war in Iraq, to which the number one liberal in the senate gave not only his vote but his endorsement. If you can't count on the number one liberal in the senate to take a stand on these issues, who can you count on?

And whatever happened to the guy who made that great movie?

Bush supporters have been pretending for four years that Bush is a good president. If Kerry supporters are going to do the same thing for President Kerry, we'll be in even sorrier shape four years from now (yes, we'll be better off than we would have been if Bush won, but probably not better off than we are now--and we'll be facing Jeb '08
in the face).

Yes, Kerry looks very good compared to Bush. That's not the proper standard for a president. Vote for Kerry, but hold his feet to the fire, and don't pretend he's a compassionate liberal when he's bombing Fallujah or overthrowing some Latin American government, or lying us into another rotten "free trade" agreement. Our good choices were systematically taken away from us by the two parties (how criminal is it that the Repugs didn't even consider running someone else?), and we're left with the two Skull & Bones candidates: Very bad and much worse. Please, Michael, stop pretending that very bad is good.