30 Jul 2004 Michael Moore and Military Morale: Soldier’s Essay Strikes a Chord

The last few days I have been doing a lot more blog reading than blog writing, particularly those blogs (69 by informal count) who have reprinted or commented upon Joe Roche’s e-mail blog post about the impact of Michael Moore’s movie, Fahrenheit 9-11, on troop morale. As he often seems to do, Joe struck a chord.

Little Green Footballs‘ coverage alone received over 500 comments from readers.

Other blogs and websites covering this or linking to it included the Drudge Report, Blackfive, Kim du Toit, Sgt. Missick’s A Line In the Sand, Everything I Know Is Wrong, Ben Shapiro’s Blog, Betsy’s Page, Citizen Smash – The Indepundit, dcthornton.com, Enter Stage Right, eTalkinghead, Free Kentucky, JunkYardBlog, KeystoneSoldiers.com, Lucianne.com and many others. (If I did not mention your site, it is due to time constraints, not because I do not heartily thank you. Please accept my thanks.)

Oh, and Daily Kos covered Joe, too. Called Joe a Freeper. I don’t know why. Having spent the last 15 months in combat and combat-related duty in Iraq, Joe’s barely had time and opportunity to send out individual e-mails, let alone spend time posting at Free Republic. Free Republic folks defend freedom with keyboards. Joe’s been doing it with a rifle. Both are important, but there is a difference.

A Toronto Star columnist, Antonia Zerbbisias, also wrote about Joe in his July 27 column. By coincidence, I saw the author on Fox a few days before this piece. As I recall it, he opined that he’d rather see Al Jazeera on Canadian TV than Fox, because Al Jazeera provides more “diversity” (of opinion, presumably). I’m not sure that’s true in Canada. The Al Jazeera point of view seems to get a lot of play there.

Andrew Sullivan also provided a link to Joe’s writing as posted on the Perry on Politics blog.

Over the last four days, on this blog alone, Joe’s individual post on Fahrenheit 9-11’s impact on military morale has received 63,000 pageviews. I assume that’s but a small fraction of the total who read Joe’s remarks on Fahreheit 9-11 across the Internet, given the number of bloggers who quoted or reprinted his post. Thanks to you all. The Internet is an amazing resource.