Actually, they want everyone in Washington to see the film–and while many will, it’s a sound bet that Bush won’t, and just as sound that few in Washington would change a bit, unless they felt pressured by a groundswell among their constituents.

Meanwhile, F-9/11 remains at the top of the box office through the early part of the week, losing less of its audience than other films, and now grossing a total $32.3 million through Tuesday. It should be interesting to see how F-9/11 will fare once Spiderman 2 comes out–will it be knocked way down in revenue? Will the increased number of screens prop it up? Or, under the rosiest scenario, will it both benefit from having more screens and catch most of the overflow from sold-out shows of Spiderman 2?

According to PolkOnline.com (“Your guide to Polk County, Florida”), Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” will be coming to that area this Friday, after not being included in the original release. The site reports that F-9/11 grossed $24 million up to Monday, and no wonder–according to the site,

“‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ was released to approximately 868,000 theaters last week; however, this week only 19,000 are carrying the film, according to reports received from Dickinson Inc., Lakeland Square 10 Cinema’s parent company.”

Nearly a million theaters got the film! I didn’t even know there were that many theaters! So Lakeland Square 10 Cinemas in Polk County must have been the only one not showing the film! Taking that number, on can figure that’s about one theater for every 350 Americans, and it means that the per-screen gross up to Monday was just $27 per theater. What a let-down; no wonder 849,000 theaters dropped the movie by this week so only 19,000 are carrying it still.

The “handover of power” in Iraq is not much more than a political illusion. The handover will not give real power to the Iraqi government, it will not be a release of control by the U.S. government, the troops will not be pulled out, and really very little will change other than superficially.

Before leaving, occupation chief Paul Bremer signed more than one hundred edicts controlling everything in Iraq from traffic rules to constitutional amendments. Here are just a few of the facts about the changeover:

• 138,000 U.S. troops will stay in Iraq, in addition to 20,000 non-U.S. foreign troops
• Fourteen U.S. military bases are being constructed, many of them permanent
• The Allawi government will not have the power to change the constitution
• The Allawi government will not have the power to change the laws set down by Bremer, or make laws of their own
• U.S. and Western defense contractors will have complete immunity from Iraqi law
• The U.S. can still ban any political party it wants and prohibit their candidates from running

In short, the handover is one pretty much in name only–our troops will still be there, we will still be hand-picking the leaders and writing the laws, our corporations still running the show.

According to some, this amounts to an occupation power interfering with another country’s sovereignty, which is against international law–but that might be a problem, as we are hearing–only laterally, subtly–that this is not a real handover of power, not real sovereignty. Reports from anonymous senior Bush officials speak of what will happen when Iraq gets “full sovereignty.” Ah, that explains it. What we have now is limited sovereignty, similar to prisoners having “limited” freedom to travel, i.e. from one side of their cell to the other.

And to add insult to injury: billions of dollars of oil revenues from Iraq cannot be accounted for. Apparently, no clear records were kept and we don’t know exactly how much oil was pumped or sold, and there is anywhere from one to four billion dollars missing from the coffers.

Well, that should certainly allay all suspicions around the world that we’re stealing Iraq’s oil.

As I had noted before, the $21.8 million weekend earnings for F-9/11 were estimates only, given before the weekend had even ended, and I was a bit cautious that perhaps the numbers might be higher than what the film would actually gross, though I was optimistic.

Well, I should have listened to my instincts. Fahrenheit 9/11 did not earn $21.8 million, it earned $23.9 million, $2.1 million more than expected.

An update on the Japan release date for Fahrenheit 9/11: they still haven’t set the date, but at least they got a little more specific than just “August” and are now talking about a mid-August release. Well, there’s still time. No update on the Democrats Abroad Japan effort to get a special screening in July.

In the meantime, Rex Reed adds his own two-thumbs-way-up to the long list of ecstatic reviews of the film, while the all the newspapers are taking the industry estimates of F-9/11’s weekend gross as fact (despite the fact that the weekend isn’t over yet) and proclaiming the $21.8 million figure as set. I’m a little worried about this, as it is just an estimate–but not too worried, because the film is more likely to outperform rather than underperform the estimates.

To see exactly how much so, just take a look at some of the photos on Moore’s site of the many screenings of the film across the United States–a few examples shown above, with F-9/11 showing every 45 minutes at one theater (top), and almost every show sold out at another theater (bottom).

By the way, when you see the “user ratings” for F-9/11 on many movie sites, keep in mind that practically all of the rock-bottom negative ratings are fake–disgruntled conservatives trying to skew the outcome. The ratings, as I mentioned previously, are starkly contrasted between 9s & 10s and 1s & 2s–very few ratings in between. So how can we know that the low ratings are fake and the highs, for the most part, are not? Because they’ve been polling people leaving the theaters in 15 cities and have found that 98% would “highly recommend the film.”

F-9/11 still outgrossed all other films this Saturday, taking in an estimated $7.8 for a Fri-Sat $16 million-plus total. Box Office Mojo projects from this that the Sunday take will be $5.8 million, for a grand weekend total of $21.8 million–which would be greater than the $21.2 million that Bowling for Columbine took in over the course of nine months. Furthermore, F-9/11 still kept way ahead of all other films in per-screen revenue, taking in almost $9,000, more than three times the next-highest grossing film.

For a documentary, the is unheard of.

The reports are starting to come in, not of just liberal throngs at the movie theaters, but of moderates and even Republicans seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 and deciding to switch away from Bush.

Before the movie started, Leslie Hanser prayed.

“I prayed the Lord would open my eyes,” she said.

For months, her son, Joshua, a college student, had been drawing her into political debate. He’d tell her she shouldn’t trust President Bush. He’d tell her the Iraq war was wrong. Hanser, a 41-year-old homemaker, pushed back. She defended the president, supported him fiercely.

But Joshua kept at her, until she prayed for help understanding her son’s fervor.

Emerging from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, her eyes wet, Hanser said she at last understood. “My emotions are just… ” She trailed off, waving her hands to show confusion. “I feel like we haven’t seen the whole truth before.”

And then:

For Richard Hagen, 56, it was the footage from Iraq: The raw cries of bombed civilians, the clenched-teeth agony of wounded American troops. A retired insurance agent from the wealthy River Oaks neighborhood in central Houston, Hagen described himself as a lifelong Republican. But then, standing by his silver Mercedes, he amended that: A former lifelong Republican.

“Seeing (the war) brings it home in a way you don’t get from reading about it,” he said. “I won’t be voting for a Republican presidential candidate this time.”

Mary Butler, too, may not bring herself to punch the ballot for Bush.

She didn’t vote for him in 2000, but Butler, 48, said that until this weekend, she was leaning strongly toward supporting him this year. “In a war situation, I figured it was too hard to switch horses midstream. I thought the country would be too vulnerable,” she said.

Butler, a librarian from suburban St. Louis, said one sentence in Moore’s film made her rethink.

After showing faces of the men and women of America’s military, Moore reminds his audience that they have volunteered to sacrifice their futures for our country. We owe them just one obligation, he says: To send them into harm’s way only when we absolutely must.

That got Butler. She doesn’t feel the war in Iraq fits into that category. And that one sentence — a filmmaker’s accusing voice-over — might cost Bush her vote in the pivotal swing state of Missouri: “This is probably the strongest I’ve ever felt about voting against him,” she said.

Just as the film has been far more successful at the box office than even the optimists predicted, it may well be far more successful at changing hearts and minds than many predicted–certainly more than the few hundred that swayed Florida into Bush’s column in 2000, and perhaps enough to make a big difference this time around. This is, to a large extent, a case of many Americans simply not knowing certain truths, truths hidden by the administration and glossed over or discarded by the media. A lot of people will be leaving the theater in the next several weeks saying, “I didn’t know….”

Though it was expected to open behind the new Wayans Brothers film White Chicks, Fahrenheit 9/11 exceeded all expectations and shot to the top of the box office, bringing in between $8.2 to $8.4 million on its opening day. Moore’s last film, Bowling for Columbine, broke all records for a documentary film by grossing $21.6 million, but Moore’s new film may exceed that amount in its opening weekend alone.

Further, F-9/11 beat out White Chicks despite showing on only 1/3 as many screens.

This article from the San Francisco Chronicle tells of how F-9/11 is selling out shows–sometimes almost selling out morning and late-night shows–around the Bay Area. Some theaters are now setting aside the voluntary R-rating on the film and and letting teens under 17 into the theaters, and in response to the sold out shows, some theaters are adding midnight shows.

The film might also be already changing people’s minds. According to the Chronicle article:

At the Century 14 Downtown theater in Walnut Creek, Matt Henley, a 37-year-old sales representative from Concord, said he was an independent who had not decided how to vote in November. He said, however, that a section of the film showing U.S. troops in Iraq speaking out against the war had a strong effect on him.

“That really hit me,” he said. “That did tilt me toward the Democrats.”

Much of today’s entertainment news was about the film, some of it bad: the film is enjoying only a limited release on 848 screens nationwide (though that might just drive up per-screen revenues), and apparently there was not enough time to strike enough prints–only 700 had been completed in time, and so some theaters will have to wait a day to get prints. Also on the good side is the fact that with high weekend grosses, more theaters are likely to pick it up a week later. One can only hope that the film has legs and can maintain large audiences for more than the opening week–because you know, you can bet your life, that if ticket sales drop soon the right wing will start dancing about, calling the film a dud, a failure, what have you, no matter how many records it breaks for a documentary.

We have also learned the identity of one of Moore’s embedded cameramen, one Urban Hamid, a Swedish-Iraqi journalist studying in the U.S. He’s visited Iraq three times this year, and says, “Every time I go back, it seems it’s gotten worse … When I last went back, people were so tired and exhausted and had lost hope. It’s extremely sad to see.”

On the Internet Movie Database, almost 2500 users have rated the film, and it’s not too hard to see which are conservative and which are liberals or moderates. On a scale of 1 to 10, 65.1% gave it a “9” or “10” rating, and 32.9% rated it as a “1” or “2,” leaving only 2% for the 3-8 ratings. So people probably either love it or hate it–encouraging, since moderates seem to be going along with the “9” or “10” scores. Most likely, however, is that almost all of the 762 rock-bottom “1” votes were made by conservatives trying to trash the film without having seen it.

In the meantime, part IV of the right-wing attack on Moore consists of new filmmakers making anti-Moore documentaries (gee, I wonder who funded those), titled Michael Moore Hates America and Michael and Me. Sounds pretty pathetic, really.

Yet another conservative action groups, this one called “Citizens United,” yet again tried another tack in trying to stifle or stop Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 from being seen. This time, they’re trying to bend election law to their advantage.

They’re claiming that ads for F-9/11 which picture Bush would violate an FEC law that corporations cannot take out political ads 30 days before a convention and 60 days before an election. Fortunately, even if that tactic is successful, it would only limit 9/11 ads after July 31st, more than a month after its general release, and it would only mean that Bush’s image would have to be cut out. It might, however, hurt DVD sales of the film, due out in October.

However, this is yet another example of the right wing going to any and every length imaginable to stop people from seeing this film–and frankly, I believe it is doing not much else than giving the film even more PR and sending even more people to the theaters–not to mention bolstering the morale of liberals, who see all of these attacks as signs of desperation on the right wing. If so many conservative feel they have to work so hard at nearly hopeless attempts to stops a few people from seeing the film, then they are very likely very, very worried about the effect this film could have.

So, what’s next? They going to stand outside theaters like they do at abortion clinics and rant and scream at every patron going in?

F-9/11, as it is now often called, got off to a galloping start, breaking ticket sales records in two New York Theaters where it started showing prior to the main release on Friday to help generate good word of mouth.

In both theaters, it broke box office records, selling more tickets than the opening days for “Men in Black” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

the film opens to wide release in 868 theaters in two days, and seems set to break a lot more records, the first of which would be the highest-grossing documentary film ever.

Fandango reports that advance ticket sales for F-9/11 outstripped not only the current No. 1 film, but also a big summer blockbuster. Moore’s film alone accounted for 48% of all advance ticket sales, followed distantly by Dodgeball (11%) and Spiderman 2 (9%).

Wow.

Rob, an apparent Bushie commenting on a Michael Moore post on this blog, gave me a nice, big easy one right over the plate, and I wanted to share it at more than just the deep-comment level.

His question was, “WHO WOULD A TERRORIST VOTE FOR, BUSH OR KERRY?” The all-caps thing is his, by the way. And he obviously expected me to meekly admit that yes sirree George Bush has them terrorists on the run and they just tremble in their sandals when they hear his name, and would love nothing better than for Kerry to get elected, what was I thinking?

Yeah. Right.

Here’s my reply:

Boy, are you a Kerry supporter or something? Because that question so obviously works against Bush, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Let’s see….

Given that Bush’s actions have sent a tidal wave of eager applicants to the doors of al Qaeda (whose ranks swelled to 18,000), that Bush has overseen a dramatic record-breaking surge in terrorist acts around the world, has opened up an entire country for terrorists to swarm to and kill Americans (837 and counting) without having to go far from home, and has gotten terrorists incredibly effective media coverage all over the world…

And on the American front, they get a president who has horribly underfunded local and state efforts to prevent and fight terrorism domestically so that it has become a macabre, ugly joke; who has a history of dropping the ball and ignoring his top intelligence and counter-terrorism officials when they warn of terrorists planning to attack–and they get a president who kindly obliges their wishes to frighten the American people and deprive them of their liberties, whilst making America a pariah around the world, after the entire world had boundless sympathy and friendship for the U.S. after 9/11. A president who takes the greatest advantage of the terrorist attack and pisses it away to the outrage of the world and plays right into the terrorists’ hands.

Not to mention a president who approved of a policy of torture and humiliation which sent millions of Arabs ballistic, unspeakably furious that such a thing could happen even if the president had not known of it directly (as it now seems certain he did). Not to mention a president who is best buds with Saudi Arabia and is willing to cover for them while they remain one of the world’s leading supporters of terrorism–and has abjectly failed to catch the one man held most responsible for 9/11, Osama bin Forgotten-by-Bush.

Al Qaeda is far better off now than it was the day after 9/11. There is no question whatsoever that these guys are hoping, fervently praying with every fiber of their being that Bush gets re-elected. That would be their greatest victory.

And Bush is probably hoping that Osama helps him out by pulling off a terror attack on U.S. soil within a month of the election–that way he could stoke up the people’s fears even more, scare them into voting for him, but best of all for Bush, he could simply ignore Kerry and claim that it was an election between himself and al Qaeda–yes, if al Qaeda attacks, Bush will feel like giving Osama a big wet one right on the lips.

So, thanks Rob, good question.

Moore’s film was recently given an R-rating by the MPAA for “violent and disturbing images and for language.” Moore is fighting this in public, even hiring former New York governor Mario Cuomo to argue for a PG-13.

Frankly, I’m on the fence on this one. Sure, a PG-13 would be better, and as Moore pointed out, kids 16 and under will soon be of an age where these issues will be of great importance–but quite frankly, I do not think that many kids under 17 will be crowding the theaters. The vast majority of the film’s audience, I expect, will be adult viewers.

At least, this generates good coverage for the film, and if the MPAA rating story isn’t good enough, then the conservative organization Move America Forward (they must have liked the name “MoveOn.org” so decided to rip it off) will surely help out. Its head, a guy named Howard Kaloogian (no, I didn’t make that name up) has tried to stir things up.

How? By posting a list of email addresses for movie theaters that will soon be showing Moore’s film and urging right-wingers to “speak up loudly and tell the industry executives that we don’t want this misleading and grotesque movie being shown at our local cinema.”

This is stupid for two reasons: first, the campaign gives no specifics about what people should say, and will really just fall flat as an empty threat. I mean, what will people say? I’m not going to go to see movies at your theater any more? Please. Usually when a movie plays in an area, one theater chain only has it, meaning that no one can simply threaten to go to another theater chain to see the same movie. So are a large number of conservatives going to simply give up seeing movies because the theaters showed one movie they didn’t like? Not gonna happen.

The second reason their move was stupid was that when they listed all the email addresses and other contact information for the movie theaters and chains, they made it accessible to everyone–including liberals, who promptly took up the task of contacting the theaters on the list and cheering them for running the film–and from what it seems, vastly outnumbering the conservatives calling to complain.

Oops.

UPDATE: An alert reader provided a Disinfopedia link which explains a good deal about the true nature of “Move America Forward.” Just under the rather ludicrous claim that they are a “non-partisan” organization, they list their leadership as “Republicans” and “conservatives,” mentioning Republican positions several times, not to mention dropping Reagan’s name 13 times on the “About” page. Not a single liberal mentioned on the list. Big talk about how they attacked the Reagan miniseries and got it off broadcast TV. Yeah, that’s non-partisan.

There was also a bit of a flap about the registered owner of the domain being “Russo Marsh and Rogers,” a political PR firm that has strong ties with the GOP. Immediately after the WHOIS information was exposed by several web sites, the domain registration information was changed to remove any mention of Russo Marsh and Rogers.

I don’t think there’s any secret, though. These are obviously far-right foot-soldiers working for the GOP. So what’s new?

I just got off the phone with the people at Gaga-Humax, the Japan distributor for Fahrenheit 9/11 (Japanese title: “華氏911”). They say that while they have not decided on an exact date, the film will be released in Japan sometime during August. Their office (03-3589-7416) says that a specific release date will be decided sometime in the next week or two. When I learn of it, and which theaters it will show at in Tokyo, I will let you know.

Either someone took over the Fox News editorial room at gunpoint and forced them to print this, or Fox News may have just run one of its only non-partisan stories on a political topic in God-knows-how-long–but either way, the Fox review of Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 is positively glowing. An excerpt:

But once “F9/11” gets to audiences beyond screenings, it won’t be dependent on celebrities for approbation. It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.

Or there’s a third possibility, I suppose: that Moore’s film is really so fantastically good that even partisan Republicans can’t help but love it.

Except Bill O’Reilly, of course. But then O’Reilly is an idiot, even by Republican standards.

In April, the Bush administration reported good news: terrorist attacks around the globe were at their lowest in 34 years, and gave itself an “A” grade, attributing this to “unprecedented U.S. collaboration with foreign partners.”

Great news! We’re winning the War on Terror™!

Except for the fact that it’s a lie!

Actually, they omitted a great deal of data that was pretty glaring–like all terrorist attacks in the last 50 days of the year (leaving out a major attack in Turkey and bombings at a bank and two synagogues), and all terrorist attacks in Russia carried out by the Chechens (13 attacks killing 244 people).

When asked why they failed to include any data after November 11, 2003 in the report–which was labeled as for the whole year of 2003–they claimed there was no time, as they had to submit the report by April 29, 2004. Essentially, that means that it takes them 170 days to get around to reading the damned newspaper.

The fact of the matter is, instead of terrorism falling to record lows, terrorism instead had risen more than 35% in the highest levels of terror activity in 20 years.

This is not just a “clerical error,” as the administration is so laughably trying to sell to the public, but an outright, deliberate lie to avoid admitting abject failure during an election year. Bush is not winning the War on Terror™, he is losing it badly. He ignited terrorist activity in the Middle East with his Iraq invasion and sent floods of eager volunteers to the doors of al Qaeda, while at home he devastated our freedoms while at the same time underfunded local security, improving not at all our ability to stop terrorism within our borders.

Well, I don’t have to host the non-streaming version of the Fahrenheit 9/11 trailer any more–Apple has a full-sized, non-streaming QuickTime version up. It’s a good trailer–who’s music is that at the start, by the way? Phillip Glass? (The film’s original music was composed by Jeff Gibbs, who also did the music for Moore’s Columbine flick, by the way.)

This paper reports on how the new Fahrenheit 9/11 web site melted down due to a blizzard of requests for the trailer–they had to take it down for a while. The QuickTime version of the trailer on that site is now hosted by Apple, meaning that it also is the non-streaming size. Apple to the rescue….

The New York Times is just now reporting that the independent Canadian Lions Gate Films has won the distribution rights for Moore’s film, and that a release date of June 25 has been set. The film will be released on “about 1,000 theaters” in the U.S. Showtime, which caught the ditched Reagan miniseries, will show the film on pay cable.

If you go to Michael Moore’s site, you’ll see the initial flash screen confirms this, though there are as yet no details on the main page.

For those of us in Japan, I have found no release date for this country, though films quite often are delayed by a month or so; smaller films like those Moore makes are often delayed by several months or even more than a year, but this film is time-based enough that we will hopefully see it before November.

So far Moore’s new film is getting outstanding reviews, after receiving a 20-minute standing ovation at Cannes–the longest a film has ever received there, according to some. All the comments I have found of people who saw the film are positive, even from critics of Moore.

TIME Magazine’s positive though not ecstatic review says: “…Moore is such a clever assembler of huge accusations and minor peccadillos (as with a shot of Wolfowitz sticking his pocket comb in his mouth and sucking on it to slick down his hair before a TV interview) that the film should engage audiences of all political persuasions,” and concludes, “In sum, it’s an appalling, enthralling primer of what Moore sees as the Bush Administration’s crimes and misdemeanors.”

From the short but enthusiastic review from A. O. Scott from The New York Times:

Its bill of particulars against Mr. Bush can be found in a number of recently published books, and it is unapologetically polemical. It is also the best film Mr. Moore has made so far, a powerful and passionate expression of outraged patriotism, leavened with humor and freighted with sorrow. Yes, I said patriotism, though there will inevitably be those, pointing to the film’s enthusiastic reception in France, who will insist that it is the opposite. They should (unlike Disney’s board of directors) see it first. …

“Fahrenheit 9/11,” his most disciplined and powerful movie to date, suggests that he is also, arguably, a great filmmaker. Using interviews and archival video clips (including a tape made by the staff at the Florida elementary school Mr. Bush was visiting on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001), he has assembled a moving and invigorating documentary. Is it partisan? Of course. But there are not many important films that haven’t been.

The Herald has just now come out with this review, titled “Unexpectedly bold and moving piece of work.

“Fahrenheit 9/11 is a baggy, eccentric, unashamedly partisan animal, which makes its many points with broad strokes and even broader humour.
However, it’s also an audacious, angry, and unexpectedly moving piece of work, the boldness and relevance of which few could deny.

Not that the movie didn’t have its detractors, albeit ones who have not seen and do not care to see the film at all. The vehemently right-wing news rag News Max more than once compared Moore with Adolf Hitler and said he “screeched” at the audience, then hinted in a variety of ways that this was a left-wing conspiracy, whose members are “aligned with America’s enemies”–while managing to sneak in references to Ann Coulter as “brilliant” and Bush as being strong and having “guts.” Now, there’s an objective review!

Well, Fahrenheit 911 opens today at Cannes, and Moore has let a bit of a cat out of the bag: the film is not completely about what he said it would be about. Yes, much of the film deals with Bush’s ties to the Saudis and the bin Laden family, as has long been reported. But at least half the film, Moore says, is about Iraq. With very unexpected footage: “we were able to get film crews embedded with American troops without them knowing that it was Michael Moore.”

This should be interesting, and the timing more than just a little bit spot-on, considering how Iraq is now dragging Bush down more than anything else in his three and a half years. “The film is only partly to do with the Bin Ladens and Bush,” Moore added. “I was able to send three different freelance film crews to Iraq. Soldiers had written to me to express their disillusionment with the war. It’s a case of our own troops not being in support of their commander-in-chief.” Moore has been printing letters from soldiers on his web site since last October.

One should also not miss the New York Times article on Moore and his film, which adds details about the films content, and does a very balanced job reporting on the issues involved and public views on the film.

One columnist points out that Moore is often seen as less than a patriotic American, a theme which is more often implied and hinted at than stated outright, but it does bring up a point that I think a great many people would agree with, but an ideal that is far from universally observed in the U.S. these days: one can be no more patriotic than to point out what is wrong with one’s own country.

Many people have a skewed perspective on patriotism. They think that “my country, right or wrong” means that whatever terrible things happen in their country, or is done by their country worldwide, the patriotic thing to do is to deny they happen, zealously attack anyone pointing out these faults, and wave the flag while singing the national anthem at the top of their lungs. They have mistaken patriotism for idiocy.

Patriotism means that one will do whatever is necessary–sacrifice your life, your fortune, your sacred honor if needed–to ensure that your country is safe, sound and secure. And ignoring, even denying its faults will not accomplish any of those. Protesting what we believe is wrong is not just simply a right, it is a vital mechanism required to keep this country from destroying itself from within.

Some times good countries come under the control of bad people, some times people with base and selfish motives subvert the mechanisms of government. And some times even well-meaning leaders and administrators do things that are wrong despite their good intentions. Were we never to criticize these things, the results would be disastrous. Bad policies would not be reversed. Wrongdoings would not be corrected, and wrongdoers would know that all they have to do is get elected and they could abuse and undermine the system as much as they wanted, without fear of challenge from the people.

No, it’s the ones who are mindlessly and blindly patriotic who are dangerous, those are the ones who the wrongdoers will prevail upon to hide and legitimize their misdeeds. Those are the people who attack the real patriots, who have the courage and will to stand up and criticize their own country, not because they hate it, but because they love it, because they know that however painful it might be, criticizing their own country is sometimes the only way to keep it whole and true.

If a family member became an alcoholic or other kind of drug user, went driving while under the influence and displayed other self-destructive behavior, would the measure of a loyal family member be to quiet their conscience and their criticism, and tell their kin nothing but positive things? Of course not–you would only be helping to destroy them if you did such a thing. A true parent, sibling or child would take that person aside and tell them what was wrong, and would do everything possible to help them make it right.

The same applies to one’s country. Right now, Bush and his people are driving this country into the ground. We do our country no favors if we simply stand by, put our fingers in our ears, and hum the national anthem real loud. Public criticism, at times like these, is the highest and truest form of patriotism.