Right after 9.11.2001, most of the government bureaucracy's talking heads were telling the mesmerized microphones of the Mainstream Media that "our world changed forever." Few to no Americans acted like it. We all went on with our merry lives, and only those families who actually lost someone in the twin towers, or had a relative serving in the ALL VOLUNTEER military (read: those who didn't, in Dick Cheney's words, have "something better to do") really noticed a difference. The truth is, an occasional terror bombing makes headlines, and provides the blogosphere a football to kick around, not to mention those in the immediate vicinity die, but life goes on, and the 300 million minus a few hundred or a few thousand people who are left really do need jobs, medical coverage, and all that mundane stuff our president has been dealing with.

Not much was missed catching this particularly would-be bomber EXCEPT for half a dozen intelligence departments putting two and two together. We all know that government departments operate as they do, almost completely oblivious to whoever may happen to be president, what party he is from, who controls congress, or who is sitting on the Supreme Court. What is needed now is fairly minor: get the names of people who obviously are a real hazard onto lists to be given a thorough body search before letting them on a plane. That would have exposed the detonator on his leg, which would have led to the explosives in his underwear. Our president can handle that. Whether the intelligence community can, we'll find out. Ethnic profiling? Yeah, that would have caught Richard Reid right away.

Well, this movie is certainly making a lot less money than Michael Moore's greatest production, his first, Roger and Me, the one that really spoke for real people. I'm curious about the mention of Che's diaries. Did the movie include the events described in Che's diary of his African experience? It was kept locked up in a vault in Havana for 40 years, and it is easy to see why. Yet somehow it was eventually released, and is available in English translation. It is a fascinating read, for those with no ax to grind. For those who are either convinced Che is a sadist dripping with blood and gore and veins in his teeth, or that he is a working class hero -- the diary debunks both notions. He appears to have been a serious, committed, even humane man, who had rather poor judgment about many things. It is also obvious why communist-led revolution never got much traction in the Congo. I've read a psychological biography of Che, by an Argentine who went back to school mates and neighbors. The comments here don't fit, so I suspect there is some bitter story-telling here. Obama4Life (why would anyone adopt a name like that -- don't we all have our own lives to live? Let Barack Obama live his for himself)... but anyway, the above description of Cuba before the revolution are accurate. Castro was genuinely popular when he first took power. It didn't last of course.

Zinn isn't fabricated, its just grossly incomplete, like most history text books that inspired him to start writing his own equally biased version. There are enough facts out there to support what Zinn says, but there are a whole lot of other facts that are equally true, important, part of the complete story, which he leaves out. That is because it is much more work to be really comprehensive, and almost every author has an ax to grind.

In my seldom humble opinion, there shouldn't be ANY "assigned text books" in history class. ALL history professors should be REQUIRED to teach from their own lecture material (documented and footnoted of course -- I don't care exactly what the prof teaches, as long as s/he teaches what my fourth grade teacher taught: "It is not true because it is in a book, but you must always know where you got the information from." Then EVERY class should require reading original documents, doing a good deal of reading from a number of sources, and an original history research project. Likewise, if I taught in a public school, the day would not routinely start with the Pledge of Allegiance, which gets boring fast, but wtih each student assigned to do a patriotic presentation from original material every day -- maybe the pledge some days, but the preamble to the constitution, a paragraph from the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address... No correct line, just a lot of digging in to how much there is to learn and how much more there will still be when class is over.

History is always being rewritten, because it is always distorted, because new facts are always coming to light, and because someone is always proposing some new distortions to fit their own updated psyche. It should be some comfort to know that Howard Zinn is beyond boring to most inner city school children. Somehow, the working class never really connects to a scholarly grandfather trying to lecture them on how their great-grandparents missed the boat. There is plenty of good, bad and ugly about the American Revolution. There is plenty of good, bad and ugly about the United States Constitution. The problem with the text books I had in 8th and 11th grade is that they played up, and sometimes made up, an inspiring march of freedom and justice, which was part of the story, but not exactly enlightening by itself. The problem with Howard Zinn is he wants to present "another way of looking at it" instead of "another layer of a very complex truth." Almost every inspiring event in history had venal motives, and associated atrocities on the way to some sort of progress. Some of the militia that turned out to save the union in Colorado and North Carolina were among the most viciously anti-Indian thugs around. The Buffalo Soldiers, widely vaunted during Black History Month, were also agents of genocide against Native Americans. Kenneth Roberts's historical novels provide plenty on the ugly underside of the American Revolution, and even tell the Tory side of the story, but not at the expense of what motivated people to fight for independence, no matter how badly Congress and most of the general officers led them.

This doesn't sound like ACORN to me. This sounds like a wierd take-off on how the Irish National Party and the Land League were brought low by exposure of Charles Stewart Parnell's affair with Kitty O'Shea. But I agree that its kind of banal when dramatic shows parody other shows or recent events. The strong point of shows like Law and Order was when they showed how every day crimes are, and are not, solved, with all the complexities of real life situations that seldom make the headlines. It reminds me of "Fantasy Island" doing an episode copied directly from that Italian art film, "Swept Away..."

I think the southern irregular forces loosely associated with the Continental Army had similar allegations made against them by the colonial-born adherents of Tarleton's Legion. And vice versa of course. Many of the stories were true. Some were not. To get a really well balanced view of Che Guevara, read the English translation of his diary from the year or so in Africa. If you can read it in Spanish, so much the better. It was locked up in a vault in Havana for 45 years, for obvious reasons, but it is a cold hard look at what was and was not real in the guerilla movements Castro placed such hope in during that time. If it had been in print before Joseph Kabila emerged as figurehead in the Rwandan-financed overthrow of Joseph Mobutu (not a bad idea in itself), somebody else would have been leading that revolution, because Che had Kabila's number long before the left-wing press belatedly realized it. But I must warn the gentle reader, while you will come away with a clear-eyed understanding of why revolution is not always such a great boon to humanity, you will also come away with the idea that Che Guevara is no more a monster than he is a chic hero -- he was a complex human being with many admirable qualities, and considerable ability to learn from his mistakes. Not fast enough, of course, or he wouldn't have gone off on that mad adventure in Bolivia. By the way, did you say that JFK killed dogs in his youth? I didn't think so, just checking.

One of the great hoaxes of the century is posing Ronald Reagan as a "fiscal conservative." He lowered taxes while borrowing far more money than he trimmed from the budget, leaving the national debt larger than ever. The theory was that lower taxes would have such a powerful stimulating effect on the economy that net government revenue would rise, which turned out to be something of a Laughter Curve. Bill Clinton, whatever his moral proclivities, and Charleton Heston was correct that we wouldn't trust him with our daughters, did at least generate budget surpluses, and begin paying down the national debt. George W. Bush, a pale parody of Reagan, looked at the budget surplus and said "Let's give it back to the people." That would have been a GREAT idea, EXCEPT that "The People" were in hock for $5 trillion dollars of debt, bearing interest, and the main buyer of that debt was the People's Republic of China. Its like saying, let's take out a second mortgage, quit our jobs, and take an around the world cruise. Oh yeah, Cheney said, Reagan said, "deficits don't matter." So Georgie ran our debt UP to $10 trillion, and never blinked an eye. Then, when the economy tanked, since we hadn't been saving in good times for a rainy day, we had to spend on top of record debt. Bush said "We are all Keynesians now" for the simple reason that he was out of any other options. At least Obama has his eye on trying to deal with the deficit next year -- Bush went for eight years without even noticing.

The operative word is "every." Anybody with an ax to grind wants the "other side's" politicians to watch this film. Ask any liberal, they will tell you Newt Gingrich and Larry Craig and Saxbe Chambliss Jim DeMint need to watch this film. Mr. Smith was so nonideological that anyone can hold him up as a standard.

Sour grapes. Anyone who doesn't like current government policy can blame voters for ignorance, fecklessness, or any other bad condition that may come to mind. That's what liberals said about people who voted for George W. Bush. All it means is, somehow a majority of my fellow citizens actually supported something I don't like. That happens in a democracy. Grow up and deal with it like a big boy. There were all kinds of things wrong with my textbooks when I was growing up. I knew it, and I didn't let it define me. I knew how to check out my own books from the library. Driving a bus during both of the last two presidential elections, I had my finger on a totally unscientific pulse of the electorate. I know that the margin of victory in 2004 was voters who hadn't even made up their minds until the morning of the election. They were going to hold their noses no matter who they voted for. Likewise, I knew weeks before the election that older, traditionally Democratic, blue-collar Roman Catholic "white" voters were solidly for Obama. Not all of them. For God's sake, not all of any demographic is united on anything. Ask Thomas Sowell.