Outfoxed

Someone posted a comment about Outfoxed further down the page. Well, we saw it last night. It wasn't anything too surprising -- definitely a preaching to the choir kind of movie -- if you already recognize FOX/Rupert Murdoch as a right-wing propaganda machine, you're going to find that there's no new ground here, and if you're the sort of person whose major media source is FOX, you're probably not seeing this movie. Still, there were a few good clips.

The more I watch stuff like this the angrier I get, though. I suppose that's the intention, but sometimes it makes me angry in unproductive ways: it makes me angry that my mother is campaigning for George W. Bush, and that my father doesn't like George W. Bush and was ardently opposed to the war in Iraq but is voting for the guy anyway. My first reaction after watching that movie last night was not, "I'm hopping mad at Rupert Murdoch/George Bush/Karl Rove" or anything so sensible; it was more like, "I'm hopping mad that my mother could be so stubborn and irrational about all this." Which, no matter what your politics, says more about my mother and me than it does about any media bias or bogus justification for military activity.

In the meantime, though, there's still this election. With the country so polarized it's shaping up to be very close. Polls may be changing minutely from day to day, but it seems as though most people have already made up their minds. Of course, with things so close, it only takes a small number of people shifting from one candidate to the other to produce a different outcome. The enduring frustration of everything for me is that I think John Kerry is just sort of... fine. Better than the alternative, but by how much?