MICHAEL MOORE AND THE FREAK FEST

Yesterday I went to Jim Hightower’s Rolling Thunder Down Home Democracy Tour. It was really just a liberal freak fest, a collection of pro-choice, anti-Bush, earthy-crunchy, campaign finance reform, anti-Israeli special interest groups. Oh, and Michael Moore, too.

There was a center stage where one liberal group after another got up to yell about George Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton. Yep, Halliburton is still the star chamber organization of choice for these people and they’re not going to take it anymore!

Some dude early on made a crack about Jehovah Witnesses that would have had the ACLU out in fleet force if a Conservative had said it. This guy, whose name I didn’t catch, said pretty soon in New Hampshire we would have so many candidates knocking on our doors,

“You’ll open it and it will be a Jehovah's Witness and you’ll say, "Come on in!’ because you’ll be so happy it’s not a candidate”

Whatever, just thought it was kind of funny.

But the keynote speaker was Michael Moore, filling in for Jim Hightower, who couldn’t make it due to a death in the family. Michael’s whole schpeel was that the majority of Americans are just like him and all of the other morons there yesterday (I was there…does that make me a moron?).

Moore was in fine form. As many of you know, his “documentary” Bowling for Columbine, is full of inaccuracies, some of the most common involve mixing two separate instances into one to make this combined action seem terrible. And darned if he didn’t do that again. To liberals, John Ashcroft is the devil. So, in putting Mr. Ashcroft down, Michael Moore said,

“Before being sworn in as Attorney General by Clarence Thomas, he smeared himself with Crisco in some kind of fundamentalist rite”.

This brought howls of laughter and knowing nods from the troops - too bad it isn’t true. Mr. Ashcroft will have himself anointed the night before taking an oath of office, I’m sure in an effort to start his job off as close to Christ as possible in an effort to do his will. It’s no stranger than we Catholics having ashes rubbed on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday. In is autobiography, John Ashcroft said that the night before he took is Senate seat for the first time he wanted to do this but had no oil except for Crisco. His father, a pastor, said the type of oil was not important and they could still anoint his forehead. It was not before he took the oath of office to be Attorney General, but why start letting the truth get in the way now?

He also said the Democrats are having such a hard time because their candidates are such wimps; the Democrats have nothing to stand up for. The Republicans, on the other hand,

“..are up at the crack of dawn saying, ‘What group are we going to screw today?’”

Oh, sure, they’re the party of equality and niceness.

A final quote from Michael Moore:

“Who took the fun out of fundamentalism?”

We know who put the mental in it, Mike.

BTW, I have two pages full of pictures from the Freak Fest if you would like to check them out.