Michael Moore: Retarded Gasbag Or Republican Plant?

Those seem to me to be about the only two options, based on his pre-election love note to "[his] friends on the left":

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?

There's a reason the "#1 Liberal" meme got started: because National Journal included Kerry's truncated voting record in the most recent calendar year---when he was running for president and missing 2/3 of Senate votes---in its ideological gradation survey. Kerry's career rating is something lower than the #10 liberal among active senators. And that statistic doesn't even begin to take into account the rightward shift in American politics over the last 20 years, which have moved the "liberal position" on any given issue precipitously to the right in the same timeframe, essentially, as Kerry's senate career. He's slightly more liberal than Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and demonstrably less so than any previous Democratic candidate for president this century (although I guess he's more progressive on social issues than was William Jennings Bryan).

Moore is apparently so mendacious that he'll even sign onto Republican agitprops if it advances his private agenda of reshaping the Democratic party in his image---which would render it a pretty fucking ugly party.

Scrolling down to Moore's note to George W. Bush, Moore yet again makes me feel sympathy for Bush:

There he was, OBL, all tan and rested and on videotape (hey, did you get the feeling that he had a bootleg of my movie? Are there DVD players in those caves in Afghanistan?)

The most recent attacks on Moore---including accusations of treason---unfairly, I think, hold him culpable for Osama bin Laden's obvious familiarity with Fahrenheit 9/11. But Moore makes it impossible to sustain any defense of him; here he is, all 7000 pounds of him, rolling around in orgasmic glee because Osama bin Laden endorsed his criticism of the Bush administration.

The Republicans who want to hang John Kerry for treason are on the other side in this war. So is Michael Moore.