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The Palme D'Or

Rich Galen

Friday June 25, 2004

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A couple of years ago the Senior Advisor to the President, Karl Rove gave a speech to the Midwest Leadership Conference of the Republican National Committee in Minneapolis.

In that speech, Mr. Rove suggested that, moving forward, national security would be a major issue in the election of 2004.

He was excoriated by the Democrats and many major newspapers for having "politicized the war on terror."

National Democrats and their allies on the editorial pages of the nation's newspapers were overcome with the political vapors over the impudence of Rove's assertion that the war on terror would be a factor in this November's elections.

Seems laughable today doesn't it? Anyone seriously believing that using the war on terror for political purposes would be seen as doing a bad thing?

The other night Michael Moore's propag-entary, "Fahrenheit 9/11" had its debut in Washington, DC. The movie won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival which is known as the Palme D'Or - the Golden Palm.

Do you think that a film extolling the virtues of those who have gone into harm's way to try and keep terrorism from visiting our shores again would have won a prize at a film festival held in France?

Me neither.

The French would have complained that the title itself, "Fahrenheit 9/11" was yet another example of American conceit. They would have demanded the film be renamed "Celsius 488.33" before it could have been entered in the festival.

The opening in Washington, DC was, of course, widely attended by Democrats here who were thrilled to be seen with Mr. Moore because the movie is so aggressively anti-Bush in the guise of being anti-war.

Not that proof is needed, but this snippet of Moore's conversation with Matt Lauer on the "Today" show was reported in the Washington Post:

"It's not a personal attack on the Bush family?" asked NBC's Matt Lauer last week.
"Oh yeah, it's that. If you'd have asked the question that way," replied Moore.

According to the Washington Post's Mike Allen and Hanna Rosin, "[The] U.S. premiere � brought Moore and his wife, Kathleen Glynn, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, the movie's distributor, and the city's liberal establishment, including a dozen senators and a large contingent from the Congressional Black Caucus."

Former New York Governor, Mario Cuomo has been hired to promote the movie as was Chris Lehane - and advisor to both Al Gore and Wesley Clark.

I'm sorry. Was I absent the day there was generalized outrage about the politicization of the war on terror? Or can it be that those on the Left are getting another pass?

The night after the movie debuted, Thursday night, 10-or-so people gathered at the bar atop the Hotel Washington next to the White House.

They were all veterans of the war that Moore and his allies are sneering at, we had all worked side-by-side with the soldiers and civilians which his movie, according to one of Moore's supporters "makes them look stupid, like these testosterone-enraged mindless killers, like a bunch of barbarians."

As I may have mentioned to you during the Iraq Travelogues - about 7,236 times - Thursday night in Arab cultures is the equivalent of Saturday nights in the West, Friday being the Sabbath. In Baghdad, Thursday night was the night for the civilians to have a few beers or glasses of wine.

Last night would be the last Thursday night in the Eastern time zone that the Coalition Provisional Authority would exist prior to its going out of business next week.

So a few people got together. And had a toast to the work they had done; talked about the work they had left unfinished; and promised, as people always do, to keep in touch with one another.

Not a golden palm, nor a United States Senator in sight. Just some regular Americans who went to Iraq to help make the world a better place.

I was proud to be among them.

On the Secret Decoder Ring Page today: A Mullfoto of me and the Palme D'Or (more-or-less), and a link to the Washington Post article.

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