I am depressed. The fate of the world is in the hands of Americans, for better or worse. Normally, I would be very happy that this is the case because (again normally) I believe in the virtue and intelligence of the American People. Today I am not so sure about their intelligence (and not the CIA kind, which is clearly lacking, but that is another story).
I am distressed that a very bright person, someone I respect and have had interesting discussions with, someone who is well versed on politics, and had just seen Michael Moore's propaganda piece, is raving about how wonderful it was. This person "learned so much about the Bush administration's tactics and schemes" that it became clear that Mr. Bush MUST be defeated in November. The points this person found so interesting are mostly the ones that have been exposed as complete lies and distortions by many different sources. It doesn't take much effort at all to find all kinds of sites that debunk everything in the "movie", from "Al Gore wins every recount scenario" to "The Bush family is in bed with the bin Ladens via The Carlye Group" to "Bush escorted the bin Laden family out of the country on 9/11" to "You can usually tell by the color of their skin".
Here is just
one place for debunking the torrent of lies.
The people I have always placed my faith in (the Americans) would completely reject this propaganda stunt without needing to resort to higher brain functions. The accusations made are so outrageous at face value that they do not pass the "laugh out loud" test. The more skeptical among us would post the fact checking results on blogs and other Internet sites. The people would read these fact checking accounts and say "yeah, so what, tell us something we didn't know." They would be smart enough to recognize this as an attack and utterly false. We might have to convince the fringe, aluminum chapeau types, but that would be easy with the wealth of facts available. In order to believe this smear piece would require the viewer to believe in a world where a single family could get anyone they desired elected President of the United States and then proceed to use the power of the office to satisfy their evil natures. You have to believe that the Bush family is all-powerful as well as completely corrupt and evil.
I have seen this waste of celluloid (long live the internet) and my reaction is that I want my 2 hours and overnight bandwidth back. There is nothing there that we haven't seen from the ANSWER/BusHitler lunatics. The problem I have with it is that it moves the arguments and "facts" of the fringe lunatics into the mainstream.
If you can believe that someone getting about one-half of the popular vote in a national election could keep their evil and corrupt nature a complete secret until, by the grace of God, Mr. Moore exposes them, this movie is for you. As is the label
"barking moonbat".
What is most distressing to me is that these lies are completely believed and repeated as fact simply because "it's in the movie, it MUST be true". The average American's reliance on major media and the (misplaced) unconditional trust in media has now reached a point where our republic is threatened. In days past, the major parties would distance themselves from their fringe elements, at least mainstream members of the party with aspirations of higher office. Recently Trent Lott was forced to give up his leadership post because he obliquely praised the 50+-year-old beliefs of a sitting member of the US Senate.
Today, many mainstream Democrats are directly praising this "film" (Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton etc.). What is wrong with these people? Better yet, what is wrong with the people who VOTE for these people?
