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For the past several weeks, as part of her involvement in SEIU, my mother has been canvassing six days a week in the heart of pro-Bush territory in her home state of Ohio, a task she likens to being in a “secret society.” The Democratic party is in shambles in Ohio, so she has a lot of work cut out for her.

Because canvassing in the suburbs involves a lot of walking, I’ve decided to offer her a political bribe: If Kerry wins in November (and he will need to take Ohio to do it), I will fly my family back to the States for a vacation, so she can play with her grandkids while I give her a well deserved foot massage.

On the other hand, she probably already knows that if Bush wins, I will be a lot less inclined to go back—and may end up staying here for good. Not that I want to put any pressure on her or anything.

For my part, I keep sending money to those awful 527s Bush hates so much. I would like to be able to be more active in the campaign, but the only significant contributions I can really make from Japan are financial ones, it seems. I really wish I could be on the ground over there. I’ve got two really great reasons—one age 4 and the other now at 9 months months—to encourage people to vote for Kerry.

For now, though, it seems my money and my foot-massage bribe will have to do. 

Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo, on the moral cowardice of the president. In a nutshell:

The same sort of moral cowardice that led him to support the Vietnam war but decide it wasn’t for him, run companies into the ground and let others pay the bill, play gutter politics but run for the hills when someone asks him to say it to their face, those are the same qualities that led the president to lie the country into war, fail to prepare for the aftermath and then refuse to take responsibility for any of it when the bill started to come due.

That’s got to be the best single-sentence criticism I’ve ever read. The rest of the Marshall’s post isn’t bad either.

If Kerry wins in November, and this guy isn’t immediately offered his old spot on the Council of Economic Advisers, it will be a tremendous shame.

The Rambo Coalition

Almost a year ago, on the second anniversary of 9/11, I predicted “an ugly, bitter campaign - probably the nastiest of modern American history.” The reasons I gave then still apply. President Bush has no positive achievements to run on. Yet his inner circle cannot afford to see him lose: if he does, the shroud of secrecy will be lifted, and the public will learn the truth about cooked intelligence, profiteering, politicization of homeland security and more.

This pretty much sums up why I think Bush-Cheney 2004 will go as low as it has to in order to win: They’ve got so much more to lose. So very much more.

Read the whole article for more on The Rambo Coalition (of the Unwilling). 

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 opened in our neck of the woods this weekend, so my wife and I went to see it.

Frankly, I’m surprised at all the controversy surrounding this film. It is a typical piece of Moore’s work, essentially the same brand of gonzo-style journalism that he’s been doing since Roger & Me. Personally, I don’t much care for that kind of thing, but I guess the box office figures for this film show that it has its place.

I find it kind of pathetic, really, that Moore drives around the capitol in an ice cream truck reading parts of the Patriot Act over a loudspeaker ("because the members of Congress obviously didn’t read it themselves") or ambushes Congressmen on the sidewalk to ask if they would like to enlist their children to serve in Iraq ("because only one member of Congress has a child in the Armed Forces"). There are ways to make a serious political point, and there are ways to corner someone on tape to get a good gag for your movie. I can’t help but feel that Moore too often chooses the latter when the message he is trying to get across would be better served by the former.

Where the real value of Moore’s film lies, however, is in getting the attention of everyday people, who are often simply ignorant of many of the issues that Moore shines a bright spotlight on in Fahrenheit 9/11. I would venture that the vast majority of the public simply doesn’t have a taste for politics on anything but a superficial level, which is where most people form their opinions about politicians (which is great for Bush, whose strengths lie primarily in his carefully constructed image as a man of character). By revealing some of these truths about Bush, Moore does his part to cure the ignorance of everyday people.

At work this afternoon, for example, I had a lunchtime conversation with an American colleague who mentioned that he had seen the movie and was “shocked and disturbed” by what he had discovered by watching the film. (None of which is at all new to anyone who has been following the political regions of the blogosphere for the past couple years, by the way.) He simply hadn’t given any thought to these issues before—and certainly hadn’t heard much of them in the SCLM. Thanks in part to Moore’s film, we were able to continue with a serious discussion about these issues, one not packaged in Moore’s signature shtick. That alone made the film worthwhile, I think.

Fahrenheit 9/11 may not be worthy of a standing ovation, but it’s worth seeing—even if only because it’s one of the few examples of post-9/11 popular culture that is not a total, stage-managed valentine to the president. 

Recently Zak and his wife welcomed their first child (who, I have just learned, has a name with the initials N and G for the first and middle names, respectively—in a country where “NG” is widely used as shorthand for “No Good") into the world. Congratulations to the Bravermans!

Anyway, not long ago, Zak was commenting on his primary parenting goal, that of not screwing up his kid. This prompted Les of Stupid Evil Bastard to remark in Zak’s comments section that “[Kids] do listen even when it seems like they don’t…”

I’m sure this is true some of the time, but an incident that occurred just today in my family suggests otherwise. To understand it, though, you need to know that my daughter was born in 2000, which means that George Bush has been president for as far back as her memory goes. For as long as she can remember, she has heard her father complain about the president, make exasperated sounds and roll his eyes whenever the president is on TV, and occasionally yell at the screen during the president’s infrequent press conferences. Still, this afternoon when she saw George Bush on the TV news, she said, “Look, it’s Daddy’s friend!”

Well, no, dear, not quite.