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I went to see the movie documentary Why We Fight last night. Here’s my first impression.

While Fahrenheit 9/11 employs Michael Moore’s assertive, in-your-face, no-apologies antipropaganda style — which has its place, brimming with passion, which I appreciate — Why We Fight strikes me as sound historical documentary: powerful nonpropaganda, a defuser of propaganda. Yes, it has a point of view (though not immediately obvious); yes, it’s polemical in effect even as it’s graceful in delivery; yes, its historical accuracy leaves BushCo eviscerated as current kingpins of Eisenhower’s foreseen “military-industrial complex.” But its thinking about what that term means precedes BushCo and will outlast BushCo.

Structural evil is structural evil, and while the filmmaker never uses that term, that’s what I see the movie exposing, with honesty and thoughtfulness.

And, unlike U.S. TV under BushCo influence/control, it shows bodies. Not to excess, but unflinchingly. Because war is about lots and lots of dead and mangled bodies. To hide them is to lie about what war is.

Impressive work, masterfully edited. My hunch is this could become a significant historical record for this era.

I try to explain to my own family why [U.S. politics of] these past five years [has] pierced my soul, stoked my rage, caused my hope to ebb more than flow; in general, why [it’s] exacerbated my melancholy. I end up writing a half-vast sermon.

“What Americans are finally catching onto is the utter incompetence of this crowd. And if we didn’t know before, we’re learning now, in the harshest possible ways, that incompetence has bitter consequences.”

Friday’s news that “in 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, [this Marine] squad had ceased to be” hoists my ass once more onto the [theological] soapbox.

NY Times: Frank Rich: ‘The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats.’

TPM: Josh interviews George Soros: ‘This administration’s ideology of power and dominance doesn’t work and is profoundly un-American.’

Eric Blumrich makes hard-hitting, thought-provoking political animation features. I think of them as Bush war machine anti-propaganda that is presented — for effect — in propagandistic style. This one, “Victory” (870KB), concludes with a striking juxtaposition of two speeches:

See also Eric’s video Dr. Bushlove (600KB), which is also striking. Its title refers to the movie Dr. Strangelove, and in doing so (as I read into it) it’s a comment on the strange kind of “love” that’s willing to kill thousands and thousands of innocent civilians under the guise of “liberating” them.

Note that both animations contain graphic still photos of the carnage in Iraq.