Volt, Down With Tyranny, January 1, 2008
“Letters, we get letters, we get lots and lots of letters,” a chorus used to chirp each week, introducing a segment on Perry Como’s TV show back in the age of dinosaurs. Our friend Volt seems to have that feeling about e-mail, and definitely got (these) two too many.–Ken
It seems that the corporate flacks at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee think that I just fell off of the turnip wagon from Crawford, Texas.
I opened my e-mail on December 30, 2007, and I see a message from Rahm “Lets Purge the Congress of Progressives” Emanuel telling me that he must have $300,000 before January 31, 2008.
Here is his pitch:
Midnight tomorrow may mark the New Year but it also marks a critical deadline for Democrats.
Our FEC reporting deadline is Midnight tomorrow and we only have $77,378 to go to reach our Million Dollar Year-End Challenge.
House Democrats are so committed to making sure we have the resources we need they are TRIPLING every individual’s gifts today.
Contribute TODAY and House Democrats will TRIPLE your gift.
Groups like Freedom’s Watch and Tom DeLay’s new group Coalition for a Conservative Majority have pledged to spend more than $300 million towards attacking our candidates.
That’s $300 million the Republicans will spend to spin their untruths and distortions. We have to be prepared to fight back.
Everything hinges on us having a strong start to 2008 — it can set the stage for everything that happens next November. House Democrats are so committed that they will TRIPLE your contributions before the deadline.
We need your urgent support to reach our goal of ONE MILLION DOLLARS — we are only $77,378 away. Will you help us?
Contribute TODAY and House Democrats will TRIPLE your gift.
Thank you for your continued support.
Best,
Rahm Emanuel
Democratic Caucus ChairP.S. There are just two days left before our critical deadline. We need your support to start the New Year right. Contribute TODAY and House Democrats will TRIPLE your gift.
Subject: Who Do We Vote For This Time Around? A Letter from Michael Moore
Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2008 07:14:51 -0500
Who Do We Vote For This Time Around? A Letter from Michael Moore
January 2, 2008
Friends,
A new year has begun. And before we’ve had a chance to break our New Year’s resolutions, we find ourselves with a little more than 24 hours before the good people of Iowa tell us whom they would like to replace the man who now occupies three countries and a white house.
Twice before, we have begun the process to stop this man, and twice we have failed. Eight years of our lives as Americans will have been lost, the world left in upheaval against us… and yet now, today, we hope against hope that our moment has finally arrived, that the amazingly powerful force of the Republican Party will somehow be halted. But we know that the Democrats are experts at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and if there’s a way to blow this election, they will find it and do it with gusto.
Do you feel the same as me? That the Democratic front-runners are a less-than-stellar group of candidates, and that none of them are the “slam dunk” we wish they were? Of course, there are wonderful things about each of them. Any one of them would be infinitely better than what we have now. Personally, Congressman Kucinich, more than any other candidate, shares the same positions that I have on the issues (although the UFO that picked ME up would only take me as far as Kalamazoo). But let’s not waste time talking about Dennis. Even he is resigned to losing, with statements like the one he made yesterday to his supporters in Iowa to throw their support to Senator Obama as their “second choice.”
So, it’s Hillary, Obama, Edwards — now what do we do?
Two months ago, Rolling Stone magazine asked me to do a cover story where I would ask the hard questions that no one was asking in one-on-one interviews with Senators Clinton, Obama and Edwards. “The Top Democrats Face Off with Michael Moore.” The deal was that all three candidates had to agree to let me interview them or there was no story. Obama and Edwards agreed. Mrs. Clinton said no, and the cover story was thus killed.
Why would the love of my life, Hillary Clinton, not sit down to talk with me? What was she afraid of?
Those of you who are longtime readers of mine may remember that 11 years ago I wrote a chapter (in my first book) entitled, “My Forbidden Love for Hillary.” I was fed up with the treatment she was getting, most of it boringly sexist, and I thought somebody should stand up for her. I later met her and she thanked me for referring to her as “one hot s***kicking feminist babe.” I supported and contributed to her run for the U.S. Senate. I think she is a decent and smart person who loves this country, cares deeply about kids, and has put up with more crap than anyone I know of (other than me) from the Crazy Right. Her inauguration would be a thrilling sight, ending 218 years of white male rule in a country where 51% of its citizens are female and 64% are either female or people of color.
And yet, I am sad to say, nothing has disappointed me more than the disastrous, premeditated vote by Senator Hillary Clinton to send us to war in Iraq. I’m not only talking about her first vote that gave Mr. Bush his “authorization” to invade — I’m talking about every single OTHER vote she then cast for the next four years, backing and funding Bush’s illegal war, and doing so with verve. She never met a request from the White House for war authorization that she didn’t like. Unlike the Kerrys and the Bidens who initially voted for authorization but later came to realize the folly of their decision, Mrs. Clinton continued to cast numerous votes for the war until last March — four long years of pro-war votes, even after 70% of the American public had turned against the war. She has steadfastly refused to say that she was wrong about any of this, and she will not apologize for her culpability in America’s worst-ever foreign policy disaster. All she can bring herself to say is that she was “misled” by “faulty intelligence.”
Let’s assume that’s true. Do you want a President who is so easily misled? I wasn’t “misled,” and millions of others who took to the streets in February of 2003 weren’t “misled” either. It was simply amazing that we knew the war was wrong when none of us had been briefed by the CIA, none of us were national security experts, and none of us had gone on a weapons inspection tour of Iraq. And yet… we knew we were being lied to! Let me ask those of you reading this letter: Were YOU “misled” — or did you figure it out sometime between October of 2002 and March of 2007 that George W. Bush was up to something rotten? Twenty-three other senators were smart enough to figure it out and vote against the war from the get-go. Why wasn’t Senator Clinton?
I have a theory: Hillary knows the sexist country we still live in and that one of the reasons the public, in the past, would never consider a woman as president is because she would also be commander in chief. The majority of Americans were concerned that a woman would not be as likely to go to war as a man (horror of horrors!). So, in order to placate that mindset, perhaps she believed she had to be as “tough” as a man, she had to be willing to push The Button if necessary, and give the generals whatever they wanted. If this is, in fact, what has motivated her pro-war votes, then this would truly make her a scary first-term president. If the U.S. is faced with some unforeseen threat in her first years, she knows that in order to get re-elected she’d better be ready to go all Maggie Thatcher on whoever sneezes in our direction. Do we want to risk this, hoping the world makes it in one piece to her second term?
I have not even touched on her other numerous — and horrendous — votes in the Senate, especially those that have made the middle class suffer even more (she voted for Bush’s first bankruptcy bill, and she is now the leading recipient of payoff money — I mean campaign contributions — from the health care industry). I know a lot of you want to see her elected, and there is a very good chance that will happen. There will be plenty of time to vote for her in the general election if all the pollsters are correct. But in the primaries and caucuses, isn’t this the time to vote for the person who most reflects the values and politics you hold dear? Can you, in good conscience, vote for someone who so energetically voted over and over and over again for the war in Iraq? Please give this serious consideration.
Now, on to the two candidates who did agree to do the interview with me…
Barack Obama is a good and inspiring man. What a breath of fresh air! There’s no doubting his sincerity or his commitment to trying to straighten things out in this country. But who is he? I mean, other than a guy who gives a great speech? How much do any of us really know about him? I know he was against the war. How do I know that? He gave a speech before the war started. But since he joined the senate, he has voted for the funds for the war, while at the same time saying we should get out. He says he’s for the little guy, but then he votes for a corporate-backed bill to make it harder for the little guy to file a class action suit when his kid swallows lead paint from a Chinese-made toy. In fact, Obama doesn’t think Wall Street is a bad place. He wants the insurance companies to help us develop a new health care plan — the same companies who have created the mess in the first place. He’s such a feel-good kinda guy, I get the sense that, if elected, the Republicans will eat him for breakfast. He won’t even have time to make a good speech about it.
But this may be a bit harsh. Senator Obama has a big heart, and that heart is in the right place. Is he electable? Will more than 50% of America vote for him? We’d like to believe they would. We’d like to believe America has changed, wouldn’t we? Obama lets us feel better about ourselves — and as we look out the window at the guy snowplowing his driveway across the street, we want to believe he’s changed, too. But are we dreaming?
And then there’s John Edwards.
It’s hard to get past the hair, isn’t it? But once you do — and recently I have chosen to try — you find a man who is out to take on the wealthy and powerful who have made life so miserable for so many. A candidate who says things like this: “I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy.” Whoa. We haven’t heard anyone talk like that in a while, at least not anyone who is near the top of the polls. I suspect this is why Edwards is doing so well in Iowa, even though he has nowhere near the stash of cash the other two have. He won’t take the big checks from the corporate PACs, and he is alone among the top three candidates in agreeing to limit his spending and be publicly funded. He has said, point-blank, that he’s going after the drug companies and the oil companies and anyone else who is messing with the American worker. The media clearly find him to be a threat, probably because he will go after their monopolistic power, too. This is Roosevelt/Truman kind of talk. That’s why it’s resonating with people in Iowa, even though he doesn’t get the attention Obama and Hillary get — and that lack of coverage may cost him the first place spot tomorrow night. After all, he is one of those white guys who’s been running things for far too long.
And he voted for the war. But unlike Senator Clinton, he has stated quite forcefully that he was wrong. And he has remorse. Should he be forgiven? Did he learn his lesson? Like Hillary and Obama, he refused to promise in a September debate that there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq by the end of his first term in 2013. But this week in Iowa, he changed his mind. He went further than Clinton and Obama and said he’d have all the troops home in less than a year.
Edwards is the only one of the three front-runners who has a universal health care plan that will lead to the single-payer kind all other civilized countries have. His plan doesn’t go as fast as I would like, but he is the only one who has correctly pointed out that the health insurance companies are the enemy and should not have a seat at the table.
I am not endorsing anyone at this point. This is simply how I feel in the first week of the process to replace George W. Bush. For months I’ve been wanting to ask the question, “Where are you, Al Gore?” You can only polish that Oscar for so long. And the Nobel was decided by Scandinavians! I don’t blame you for not wanting to enter the viper pit again after you already won. But getting us to change out our incandescent light bulbs for some irritating fluorescent ones isn’t going to save the world. All it’s going to do is make us more agitated and jumpy and feeling like once we get home we haven’t really left the office.
On second thought, would you even be willing to utter the words, “I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy?” ‘Cause the candidate who understands that, and who sees it as the root of all evil — including the root of global warming — is the President who may lead us to a place of sanity, justice and peace.
Yours,
Michael Moore (not an Iowa voter, but appreciative of any state that has a town named after a sofa)
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
Comment by VTindependent — January 2, 2008 @ 8:13 pm
That little defeatist rant by MM is’nt going to deter Me from voting for the frontrunner and voting against every incumbant in office from the state house and senate right down to the dogcatcher.
The way to keep the knives out of your back is to never show them the same back twice,
the lobbyist do not have an inexhaustable supply of money or vacation giveaways so lets break them with our votes.
Just get out and vote!
Comment by Rainlander — January 2, 2008 @ 10:10 pm
Every time I hear “the front runner”, or even more anti-democratic, “our front runner”, all I can think of is “Ditto Heads”. So BC has a bunch (one dozen?) of Ditto Heads. Big Effing Deal.
And now he is coming unhinged about Robert Parry, because Parry has the agll to call it like he sees it. He was, according to BC, the most important web site writer on the Internet–until he did not swoon in praise of “our front runner”.
After tonight, there is a good chance that there might be another “front runner”. And BC has already begun to attack (the quote at the beginning by Michael Moore about Obama being Mr. Nice) the candidate closest to tipping over the Clinton juggernaut. So much for the cartooon of Cliton with a knife in his back that says “Dems”. BC is ready to attack what may be “the new frontrunner” (and I don’t say “our” because I do not assume that just Dems read the treehouse; I am not a Dem, but I vote Dem most of the time) if Hillary is threatened.
And that was not a defeatist rant by MM, it was a commentary. The ONLY web site that I have read (and I read many) that is insisting that we have to support Hillary because she “is the front runner” in the treehouse. Maybe Hillary’s too.
But, unfortunately, many of the rest of us, can THINK for ourselves, find Hillary lacking, in integrity, courage and just plain common sense (the more war votes) and therefore, find many other candidates preferable.
I just sent Kucinich a donation because he is the ONLY Dem who is standing up for our Constitution (although Chris Dodd is also, and therefore my second choice). I am very puzzled by BC’s Hillary love, when if given the choice, I think she’d imprison his weed smoking ass, whereas Kucinich would most likely move to decriminalize soft drugs. BC is puzzled that military families continue to support the murdering Chimp, yet he is doing the same thing, supporting someone who does not represent his values. That is some heavy CONFUSION.
He thinks that the election of Hillary automatically brings Bill the moderate Republican back, but SHE HAS ALREADY RULED THAT OUT. Like Georgie Junior, she wants to prove she can do it all, no matter the results. Like Gore, she will not utilize her best (maybe only) asset if she wins.
So Rainlander (you from Atlanta, ha, ha) if you want to break the lobbyists……..DON’T vote for Hillary. Because she is in their pockets–that’s well known (Wal-Mart board, how much more obvious could it get).
And try something very different…..THINK for yourself.
Comment by VTindependent — January 3, 2008 @ 7:47 pm
And as far as the Iowa Caucus and NH primary go, they are not representative of America at all. Both white, uptight, anal retentive cranky farmer states that should not have the right to influence the election of the next president. Mort Sahl said it better than I could; here are some of his gems:
About his ideology: “I’m not a liberal, I’m a radical!”
About liberals and conservatives: “Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen.”
About politics and evolution: “There were four million people in the American Colonies and we had Jefferson and Franklin. Now we have over 200 million and the two top guys are Clinton and Dole. What can you draw from this? Darwin was wrong!”
About George W. Bush: “He’s the face on the can. But who canned that soup?”
About Richard M. Nixon: “Would you buy a used car from this man?”
About Wernher von Braun: “He aimed for the stars and often hit London.”
About cosmetic surgery: “There’s so much Botox around now that you can’t tell when a Jewish girl is angry!”
About comedy: “It has changed. It isn’t funny anymore!”
On the House Committee on Un-American Activities: “Every time the Russians throw an American in jail, the Committee throws an American in jail to get even.”
To Otto Preminger about his film Exodus: “Otto – let my people go” (reputed – referring to its 220 minute length)
Asked his motto: “If you can’t join them, beat them.”
“If you maintain a consistent political position long enough, you will eventually be accused of treason.” — From the recording Mort Sahl at the hungry i
Comment by VTindependent — January 3, 2008 @ 7:52 pm
I ordered, received and was going to send Bartcop this, but in the time between I received it, and reading a few days of the treehouse, I decided to save my money and I loaned it to my brother (who is anti-Nader because he believes the propaganda). At least my brother worked hard for Ned Lamond in CT. But if BC promised to watch it with an open mind (hard for him, I know) then I will send it to him–he knows how to reach me.
Movies: ‘An Unreasonable Man’: Reappraising Ralph Nader, the activist and the candidate
By A.O. Scott
Friday, February 9, 2007
An Unreasonable Man. Directed by Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan (U.S.)
Early in the documentary “An Unreasonable Man,” it is noted that Ralph Nader is more likely to be remembered for his 2000 presidential campaign than for the decades of advocacy that preceded it. And the movie, an admiring but hardly uncritical portrait of Nader, confirms this suspicion by devoting nearly half of its more than two-hour running time to the 2000 election and its aftermath.
That event seems at once irrelevant and urgent, lost in the mists of pre-9/11 history and painfully topical. Certainly the passage of time has not cooled tempers or settled arguments. And so, much of the second half of “An Unreasonable Man,” directed by Steve Skrovan and Henriette Mantel (a former associate of Nader, she is also interviewed on camera), consists of talking heads talking past one another.
To liberal media critics, Nader is “self- deluded,” “intellectually dishonest,” a “megalomaniac” and worse. His moral vanity, in their view (which is hardly theirs alone), cost Al Gore a decisive margin of victory over George W. Bush.
Spoiling it for the Democrats, Nader’s detractors (among them some former allies) contend, was his intention all along.
This charge is disputed by members of his campaign staff, who also repeat his central claim that the Republicans and the Democrats are basically a two- headed corporate oligarchy, rather than genuinely distinct political forces.
The argument goes in circles, and while it makes for interesting, vexing viewing, it also throws the film somewhat off balance. The family quarrel on the American left that Nader’s candidacy continues to provoke threatens to overshadow the larger debates that his earlier career as a consumer advocate placed at the center of American civic life. These have to do with the power of corporations, the regulatory authority of government and the limits of the free market — issues that have hardly faded.
In promotional materials, “An Unreasonable Man” has the ungainly tagline “Ralph Nader: How Do You Define a Legacy?” — a question that Nader insists does not concern him in the least. While giving him and his supporters ample time to justify his run for the presidency, the filmmakers also seek to balance the historical ledger. Alongside those 97,000 contentious Florida votes, they suggest, must be reckoned the hundreds of thousands of lives saved by improvements in automobile safety, environmental protections and safeguards on consumer products, causes Nader and his colleagues championed for years.
His impact on these areas of modern life is the focus of the movie’s riveting first hour, which is as much the biography of a movement as the story of a single man. Not that there is much of a distinction: From the mid-1960s on, Nader’s cause was his life. His exposé of the “designed-in” dangers of the Chevrolet Corvair and later in “Unsafe at Any Speed” were followed by congressional hearings that brought both fame and influence. Money from a settlement with General Motors became the seed for future advocacy and activism.
Nader attracted a cadre of young idealists whose approach to politics was both a product of the times and a departure from it. The point, as they saw it, was not to overthrow the system, but rather to bring it into line with its stated principles.
For a while, especially during the Carter administration, Nader’s commitment to using the legal system and the apparatus of government to check the influence of corporations brought him into alliance with the Democratic Party. His subsequent entry into electoral politics is presented in the movie, persuasively enough, as a result of the fraying of this concord. Some degree of disappointment was probably inevitable. For better or for worse, the engine of democracy is compromise, and Nader is uncompromising to the very core of his being.
And “An Unreasonable Man,” a conventional collage of archival clips and retrospective interviews, works hard to do him justice. Its ideological leanings are evident and unsurprising, but more screen time for Nader’s pre-2000 (or pre-post-2000) adversaries would have made a richer film.
As it is, the filmmakers and their interlocutors make much of Nader’s popularity with the American public in the 1970s, but seem unable to acknowledge that, in the next decade, much of that same public embraced Ronald Reagan, whose ascendancy is treated, with wearying predictability, as the result of elite conspiracy and public delusion.
The standoff over the 2000 presidential election is handled with a better feel for unresolved tensions and contradictions. To these must be added a curious and telling footnote. “An Unreasonable Man” was shown at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, alongside another documentary featuring Gore, Davis Guggenheim’s “Inconvenient Truth.” That movie, now contending for an Academy Award, is almost entirely about the challenges of the future. This one, for all its invocations of the progressive spirit, concerns itself mainly with the battles of the past.
Comment by VTindependent — January 3, 2008 @ 7:56 pm
I got rid of the DCCC by sending back their postage-paid envelopes with messages like: “When you prove that you can stand up to Bush and the GOP, I’ll send you my money. Start by replacing Pelosi and Reid. Until that time, I need my money for liquor to wash from my mind the memory of what spineless jellyfish the Democrats have become.”
They haven’t bothered me in some time now.
Comment by RS Janes — January 4, 2008 @ 8:00 am
RS Janes:
I do the same thing, to the Dems and Rangel, all of the Dems that send beg letters. There are only a few I’d contribute to, like Dennis Kucinich ($25 recently) and Dodd, Sanders (I-VT), Feingold. That’s all.
Comment by VTindependent — January 4, 2008 @ 7:21 pm
I’ll contribute to individual candidates now and then, but not to DLC Rahm’s DCCC scam — I read they were denying money in 2006 to Dems who were *too much* against the war or the corprocracy. (Some of them won anyway, ha, ha.) Too bad Howard Dean, as Dem chairman, can’t just fire him. Or can he?
Comment by RS Janes — January 5, 2008 @ 8:43 am