In all the Bush-bashing or Kerry-promoting movies that I have seen during this election season — ever wonder whose side Hollywood is on? — I hadn't until now seen one that I thought might sway the election. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is great propaganda, but only if you come to it (as of course so many now do) already persuaded that your President is a really bad and/or stupid guy. The slightly more disguised messages of The Day After Tomorrow or The Manchurian Candidate or Silver City can't emerge effectively, it seems to me, from three such artistic disasters. And the straightforward left-wing agitprop won't be seen by more than a handful of true believers. But in George Butler's Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, I think we have a winner. This paean to the Democratic standard-bearer as a Lincolnesque figure, a war hero and also a hero of the (Vietnam) anti-war movement, actually might change some minds — those of wavering Kerry supporters who may well be persuaded by it to vote for Bush.

Bwahahaha!

Kerry's obsession with Vietnam has always been curious. At the Democratic convention he tried to make his service in Vietnam his chief qualification for the presidency. But Going Upriver reveals that it is not really the short war — the four months he spent in Vietnam before his third purple heart allowed him to go home — that he is proud of but the "long war" which began with his assumption of the leadership of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and has continued ever since. This he regards as the truest expression of his patriotism. I think a majority of Americans will disagree. He does too, or he would not have taken the trouble to create that misleading impression at the convention.

At any rate, the movie lets the cat out of the bag. It begins with an anonymous voiceover telling us that we can't understand John Kerry at all without understanding what Vietnam means to him. It is the central episode in his life. He has throughout his political career applied what he believes to be the "lessons" he learned from his short period in-country.Whatever else this may mean, it certainly seems to mean that he measures all American foreign policy initiatives, including the war against Islamic terrorism, by the yardstick of Vietnam — which is to say the anti-war movement's version of Vietnam. Thus, George Bush fills the Nixon role as Tricky George, deceiving the country into the "quagmire" of Iraq, the new Vietnam, which is "the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place." That's why Kerry says that the President "owes the American people the truth and he owes the troops the truth" — as if he took it for granted that Bush were another Johnson or Nixon, routinely lying about the war.