What’s Going On?

In what must have been a surreal moment, Jay Leno got Michael Moore to stand up and lead the audience in singing “America the Beautiful:”
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We know what Michael Moore, the intellectual leader of the Democratic Party, thinks about America. It isn’t beautiful. But when Leno asked him to sing the song, Moore stood up and pretended to be a patriot. What Moore really thinks is better exemplified by this photo, of a Cuban family watching his contemptible propaganda film, Fahrenheit 9/11:
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Moore’s movie has been heavily promoted by Fidel Castro; it has played to packed movie theatres all over Cuba, and now has been broadcast in prime time on Cuba’s state-owned television network. Castro has endorsed Fahrenheit 9/11, and he recently drew laughs by quoting Moore’s book Stupid White Men in a speech.
Michael Moore is not in the least disturbed by Fidel Castro’s use of his book and movie to attack America. The truth is that Moore hates America just as much as Castro does, and generally shares Castro’s political views. For the same reason, Moore didn’t mind when Hezbollah got involved in promoting his movie in Lebanon. His view of this country is more or less the same as Hezbollah’s.
What is interesting to me is that Moore, notwithstanding his virulent and often-expressed hatred for the United States, was willing to submerge his actual views and pretend to be patriotic for the benefit of a television audience.
Something similar, if generally less dramatic, is going on throughout the Democratic Party. Today, John Kerry and John Edwards embarked on a cross-country tour called “Believe In America.” When did Democrats start believing in America? They’ve spent the last thirty years telling us we need to be more like Sweden, or France, or Japan, or Nicaragua, or whatever.
And the Democrats’ convention was like an American Legion rally–veterans everywhere. Since when do the Democrats like soldiers? Bill Clinton once wrote, “I loathe the military,” a sentiment that was undoubtedly shared by a huge majority of the Democratic delegates, many of whom got into politics via the anti-war movement.
As, of course, John Kerry did. Kerry didn’t become famous, or initiate his political career, on the basis of his Vietnam service; his ticket to the top was his fame as a leader of the anti-war movement who had denounced his fellow soldiers as war criminals. Kerry’s claim to moderation in those years is based on the fact that he voted against a plan to assassinate pro-war members of the U.S. Senate.
So what’s going on? The delegates to the Democratic convention adopted a platform that few if any of them believe in, which acknowledges the danger of terrorism and pledges to stay the course in Iraq. It would be nice to think that the Democrats have undergone a transformation. But we know that isn’t true; a survey indicated that three-fourths of the delegates advocate immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the opposite of the platform they voted for. And this year there was not even a debate, let alone a fight, about the platform.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Democrats are so desperate for power that they have no compunction about misrepresenting themselves to the American people. This isn’t shocking in itself, of course, but how painful must it be for Michael Moore to sing “America the Beautiful” on television? How hard must it be for Democratic delegates to pay tribute after tribute to a U.S. military toward which they have demonstrated nothing but suspicion and hostility for decades?
At some point, one has to wonder what is left of leftism, if leftists not only refrain from expressing their true opinions, but join with apparent enthusiasm in celebrating views that until now, they have considered anathema.

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