Dude, Where's My Country? by Michael Moore (New York: Warner Books, 2003), $24.95 (hardback; a paperback edition is also available), 249 pages.

The category of anti-Bush books is growing fast as we gear up for high-intensity election action this November. In one corner: incumbent president George W. Bush. In the other corner: looks like John Kerry, but we'd rather have someone else. Michael Moore wrote his book before the primaries, and thus his two picks were Howard Dean (like everyone else) and Dennis Kucinich (like everyone else who was sniffing paint thinner). The only other candidate Moore endorses is Gen. Wesley Clark; Kerry doesn't merit a mention, ostensibly because he came out of nowhere. No one expected Kerry to be the favorite -- but that's an entry for another day.

Moore's book, like his films, is full of demagoguery and appeals to "think of the children." At its best, Moore's work is finely crafted cuisine. At its worst, it's like a jelly-filled donut: it's terrible for you, but it's so good! Works of Moore's that resemble chapter 5 of this book get preachy and irritating. When I watched his film Bowling for Columbine, I knew I was being manipulated, but I was being manipulated so well! Moore succeeds where his Republican alter-ego Ann Coulter fails: in artistic flair.

Is it fair to compare Moore to Ann Coulter? Ten gazillion websites devote themselves to debunking the "facts" inserted in her books Slander and Treason. These debunkings, though, were always journalistic in nature: Coulter misused quotes to make us believe one source said one thing, when in fact he didn't. Or Coulter uses sources that mislead, have been proven wrong, or contain patently false information. I found a website devoted to debunking Michael Moore, but some of the critiques were not journalistic, but partisan and misinformed. In explicating the "Wonderful World" montage from Bowling for Columbine, the critic takes issue with Moore's assertion that the U.S. installed the Shah of Iran:

Mossadeq had no right or public mandate to overthrow Iran's legal ruler, nor did he have any right or public mandate to even be Prime Minister, let alone implement his radical Soviet-style reforms. The Churchill and Eisenhower administrations assisted the Shah's return from exile, and return to the throne. They did not "install" him, they returned him to the position he had legally held since 1941.

Does this mean it is the United States' business to return deposed dictators back to power when they are overthrown? Recall that the U.S. aided a minority coup in Venezuela in 2002. In that instance, we assisted in the overthrow of the popularly elected president by a small, unpopular minority that was not as left-leaning as the previous president. A few days later, the old president was installed.

In any case, Moore isn't perfect: he misrepresents the reason the Maginot Line failed during World War II. (The Line was not a series of bunkers whose failing was that they were facing the wrong way; it was a series of trenches that spanned almost the length of the French-German border. Where there was no line, there was "unpassable" forest. Unfortunately for the French, the Germans found a way through. They also went through Belgium, bypassing the Line completely.)

Don't be suckered in by Moore's demagoguery. Be suckered in by his facts, many of which are fascinating. He exposes links between the House of Saud and the Bushes (George H.W. Bush even has a nickname for Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia: "Bandar Bush." That implies some closeness, don't you think?). He also exposes the links between Enron, George W. Bush, and the Taliban in the early '90s, right before the Taliban took hard-line control of Afghanistan:

Unocal [the oil company chaired by George W. Bush] would pay off the Taliban to build their pipeline through Afghanistan and into Pakistan. They were then planning to build an extension on that popeline that would run into India and stop at New Delhi. At the same time, Enron was planning to build a pipeline from Dabhol to New Delhi where, of course, it could meet up with the Turkmen pipeline, bringing Unocal and Enron together. (pp. 31-2)

It appears that George W. knew Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron, quite well; his nickname for him was "Kenny Boy." Later, after Enron went bankrupt, Bush acted as though he didn't know who Kenneth Lay was, even though they had had dealings together in the past.

Moore exposes lots of interesting things, like our reasons for going to Iraq. Even though our new reason -- once we couldn't find WMDs -- was to "liberate" the people there from Saddam, Moore correctly points out that "the United States never gave a rat's ass about how badly Saddam the Dictator treated his own people. We never care about that stuff. In fact, we like dictators! They help us get what we want and they do a great job of keeping their nations subservient to our galloping global interests." Indeed, the U.S. does love dictators. In the Cold War, it didn't matter how brutally repressive a dictator may have been -- as long as he wasn't a communist, then he was our buddy (this happened quite a bit in Central and South America). It usually took a popular uprising to oust the dictator, although sometimes -- as was the case in Chile -- the dictator came back, with U.S. help. Most importantly, Moore reminds us that we supplied Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war and that if he ever used chemical weapons on his own people, we had supplied them to him.

Sometimes, Moore borders on socialism as he suggests that Americans deserve this thing or that thing, but otherwise, his observations about corporate America are dead on. They have their sticky fingers in both parties, but Bush especially is in the pockets of special and corporate interests. For anyone who wants to know why Bush should be kicked out of office in November, this is a must read.

For anyone who wants to know about Bush and play a great video game, visit The Anti-Bush Game, from the people that brought you The Emo Game.

Update: After writing this entry, I went back to the Internet to see if there were other sites that were critical of Moore's facts. Apparently, the bi-partisan (and to-be-trusted) website Spinsanity takes a beef with at least seventeen instances of inaccuracy or lying on Moore's part. Unlike the previous website listed, Spinsanity does not make partisan politics out of the issue, nor does it dispute facts (despite his being a socialist, Salvador Allende was democratically elected by his people, contrary to what the website would have you believe). Spinsanity focuses (rightly so) on inaccuracies of fact in Moore's book.