There were only four other people in the theater at the seven o’clock show, so this picture was obviously being held over endlessly on principle, not because of the big box office.

It was not easy for me to drag myself there.  The theater owner who puts up the weekly rant is a former client of mine from back when I was in the movie distribution business. Now he is a mouthpiece, interviewed on radio talk shows, for the East Bay far left. I have been so taken aback by some of his recent marquee verbiage that I simply stopped patronizing his theaters.  But nobody else was showing the Moore film any more.

The other reason it took me so long to get there was Michael Moore himself.  I met this character when he was a slim young wide-eyed hippie shopping around a spoof called Roger and Me at the Telluride, Colo., Film Festival.  I think I made him the first offer he ever had, but of course I couldn’t compete with Miramax, and the rest is history.  Including the Roger and Me t-shirt I tossed after seeing Moore’s distorted view of America and its individual rights in Bowling for Columbine.  His fawning over all those clueless Canadians was really irritating, and his tormenting of frail, elderly Charlton Heston was distasteful.

But the final clincher that drove me to the theater was also personal.  My new neighbor, a nurse originally from Montana, has a son serving in the Army in Iraq.  She had seen it and came away deeply moved by the suffering of the lady from Flint, Michigan (Moore’s home town), whose son is killed in Iraq in the course of the movie.  She recommended the movie, and said that it made her doubt the president.  So Moore’s message worked on her all right.  If this courageous woman could take it, I must too.

We are actually very fortunate in this presidential election cycle to have such a wide range of informative materials to choose from.  National Public Radio dismisses all the books and documentary films that supplement the nightly news as “pamphleteering.” But we have just seen Dan Rather crumble, and I think a deeper examination of the motives and facts is in order. 

It is possible to compare Moore and O’Neill, even though their means of expression are different.  Moore, a well-established Hollywood presence known for upsetting fixed notions, set out with the stated purpose of making a movie that would prevent G.W. Bush from being re-elected.  His awards and his multi-million dollar earnings testify to the success of his brand of snide humor combined with exploitation of personal tragedy to deliver his message of contempt.

Even my neighbor was won over by the reality of Mrs. Lipscomb’s loss of her son.  How many parents did Moore have to interview to find one whose son would die?  There have been so few deaths in this war that he must have devoted most of his production budget to this task—unless her blaming of Bush for her family’s tragedy was reverse-engineered, considering that she identifies herself at the outset as a conservative Democrat.

In a movie, about which I know a thing or two, it is much easier to distort the truth than in a book.  Let me give an example from Moore’s staging of his anti-Bush message: the footage of the (Democratic) Congressional Black Caucus members’ plaintive calls for yet another recount in the 2000 Florida election due to “disenfranchisement” of Black voters.

As they stand up one after another reading their sad letters claiming their constituents’ votes were stolen, not one of them has the required Senator’s signature on the letter to make it acceptable as a legitimate complaint requiring Congressional action. Moore not only fails to show anyone asking why no senator would sign, but in the midst of the parade he shows Rep. Barbara Lee making an impassioned plea for Florida as well.  Her 9th Congressional District is in Oakland, California, not Florida.

Why is Lee shown at all?  Her only claim to fame is that she voted against defending the nation after three thousand people died on U.S. soil on 9-11 and the economy of the world was disrupted for two years.  Barbara Lee’s legitimacy in this debate is questionable given the voter fraud that takes place in her District, and about which she has not uttered a sound.

An example: in the last primary, my lifelong Republican father’s permanent absentee ballot arrived in time, but put him in the wrong party.  I did not notice this until Election Day, as I planned to drop it off for him when I went to my polling place.  I ended up spending a large part of the day standing at the county registrar’s office in a long line of people who were engaged in the same endeavor of getting their loved ones’ Republican status restored.

I am happy to say that my efforts ensured that my father was not permanently disenfranchised.  No thanks to Barbara Lee.  My former client’s and Michael Moore’s legitimizing of her shows how far off the truth their characterizations are.

The O’Neill-Corsi book is nowhere near so entertaining as the Moore movie, but the underlying passion makes it a real “page-turner” despite the constant repetition of the theme.  I can’t question the information in it, because it is all records of personal experiences of some 200 men who served with John F. Kerry in Vietnam.

Unlike Michael Moore’s newfound passion against Bush, O’Neill’s opposition to Kerry has a longstanding history going back to 1971, when Kerry as chief spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) was achieving international notoriety by maligning the U.S. war effort, charging his superior officers with mismanagement and his comrades-at-arms with atrocities.

O’Neill has the credential of having succeeded Kerry as commander of his Swift Boat in Vietnam after the decorated Kerry went home following a truncated tour of duty of only four months.  Feeling his own and his shipmates’ honor impugned by Kerry’s accusations, O’Neill debated Kerry on television in 1971, and has continued to call him on the carpet for misrepresentations of his own heroism and the “war crimes” of others.

These are far more serious and better-documented charges than Moore’s complaints about the coziness of the Bush family with the Saudis, or the so-called disenfranchisement of Black Florida Democrats.  Perhaps worst among them is the assertion that Kerry won his Silver Star by shooting a lone, fleeing, wounded Vietnamese in the back, not by heroically routing a “numerically superior force in the face of intense fire,” as his own write-up to get the medal states.

The men who question Kerry’s self-promotions were there, and they let it go for a long time, so one wonders why they are only in 2004 coming out to call him a liar. Are they just shills for the Bush administration?  Are they paid to slander an established 20-year senator and Vietnam War hero?  Are they, like Michael Moore, making millions of dollars by accusing Kerry of self-aggrandizement and bad judgment?

The answer appears to be no to all of the above questions.  Their motivation appears to be saving the honor of themselves and the U.S. military at a time when we are once again a nation at war.  And once again there are people, as there will be in any war involving the free-speaking U.S.A., like the young John Kerry of VVAW days who are seeking to make us pull out and pull off of our stated objectives of stopping the terrorists who have attacked us on our own soil, and helping the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to establish more democratic systems of government after their terrorist leadership has been removed.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have left their mostly modest post-Vietnam lives to jump into a contentious battle over the quality of leadership for America’s future.  They are bringing their personal experience to show that John Kerry does not have the quality needed to support the U.S. Military.  In fairness to our military families, it still remains to be seen if George W. Bush does.

Permit me another personal aside here.  I must confess that I do have a historic beef with Michael Moore.  He was one of the wealthiest registered Green Party members in the nation when I was running for what would be the highest level office ever won by a Green.  But after we asked repeatedly for a contribution, I was finally told that he was known for not putting his money where his mouth is.

Not a penny from Michael Moore.  Not even an acknowledgment of our request.  In Fahrenheit 9-11 (a title he stole from Ray Bradbury’s classic sci-fi novel and movie Fahrenheit 451), Moore never brings up the 90,000-plus votes that Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, received in Florida, ensuring that Democrat Al Gore would not get its electoral votes. I wonder if mllionaire Moore gave Nader any money.

So thanks again to all the U.S. military who have fought and are fighting to keep Americans like Michael Moore free to spout their stuff and get rich doing it.