A little over a week ago, a few details from Bob Woodward’s new book conveniently leaked to the press, including some downright dirty words from our President, Joe Biden, to describe Benjamin Netanyahu, the thrice-criminally indicted (so far) Prime Minister of Israel.
According to Woodward, Joe Biden has a very low opinion of Netanyahu. In one section, Woodward explains that Biden believes Bibi has “no strategy” — a fair criticism when a country’s leader pulls back his army from a border where on the other side of the fence two million people are wallowing in an open air prison — and then said-leader feigns surprise when the people who escaped from that prison are able to freely slaughter 1200 of his people whom he was supposed to be protecting. Actually, that may imply that the leader did have a strategy, which was, it seemed, to sacrifice his own people to an almost certain death, leaving many Israelis to wonder was there something in it for him? Ouch. Too harsh? Too soon? Or just too Bibi? Whatever the pain and the sorrow we all feel, this madness was preventable, it doesn’t need to continue, and please, everyone, turn away from those who say this is a lost cause. If you believe that, then we all are doomed.
Elsewhere in the book, Woodward reports that at one point Biden was screaming at Netanyahu, “Bibi, what the fuck?” after Israel bombed Lebanon this summer. Boy, that must’ve had Netanyahu quakin’ in his boots.
Earlier in the year, Woodward writes that Biden groused to his top staff: “That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad fucking guy!”
President Biden also told his top aides, “18 of the 19 people who work for Netanyahu are liars.”
Some people immediately doubted Woodward’s accounts, as though the co-Watergate scribe just likes to make things up. But I didn’t. These quotes sounded exactly like a guy I know: Joe Biden, the man from Scranton.
The first time I met Joe Biden it was 20 years ago, at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston. My film, Fahrenheit 9/11, was a surprise summer blockbuster (it had beaten the previous opening weekend box office record held by Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi), and it had made the covers of Time magazine and Rolling Stone. I received a personal invitation to attend the Convention and sit in the presidential box with President Jimmy Carter. Sitting in that box with Mr. Carter — he told me to call him “Jimmy,” but I just couldn’t do it — and his wife Rosalynn (Mrs. Carter), the former President told me stories, spun yarns, made me laugh and critiqued the Democratic Party that was in the middle of helping our nation bumble itself into a disastrous and deadly decade-long war in Iraq, despite all the obvious lies the other party had used to sell it.
And during those hours in the convention hall, various people stopped by to say hello. One of them was Sen. Joe Biden. When he saw me, he greeted me heartily: “Michael Fucking Moore!” and shook my hand and gave me a big bear hug. Then he exclaimed, “FLINT MEETS SCRANTON! I was raised in the Flint of Pennsylvania!,” he said and then proceeded to drop a dozen F-bombs over the next 20 minutes. After all, this is the same guy who got caught on a hot mic just a few years later telling President Obama during the Obamacare signing, “This is a big fucking deal!”
So when I read the quotes from Woodward’s book, the F-ing attitude of Joe F-ing Biden rang very, very true. Maybe Joe should think about that now. Is Netanyahu “a bad fucking guy”? Fuck yes! Did Joe Biden call him that? You’re damn fucking right he did! I don’t know, maybe from now until January 20th, the only bombs Joe should be sending Bibi are more F-Bombs.
Back in February 2023, I wrote about my time with President Carter. This was when he and Rosalynn were first entering hospice care. I didn’t know if that was the last time I’d be able to get him a message. Sadly, Mrs. Carter passed away last November at the age of 96. But President Carter has pressed on — just like every moment of his life — on a mission.
Last month, President Carter’s grandson, Jason, told the press that his grandfather held a singular focus. President Carter would turn 100 years old on October 1st, 2024 (the first president in American history to live to 100), but that his grandfather was “more excited to cast his ballot for Vice President Harris.”
The younger Carter continued: “It would be an incredible story at the end of his hundred-year life, to have grown up in the segregated South, and for one of his last political acts to be helping elect a Black woman as the President of the United States, I do think it would be important.”
On October 1st, President Carter turned 100. And just this past Tuesday, October 15th, early voting in Georgia began, and one of the first people to cast his vote for President Kamala Harris was… President Jimmy Carter, fulfilling his wish to live long enough to do just that:
But Jimmy was not alone.
He was but one of 328,000 people who voted early in Georgia on Tuesday. This was a record number — more than doubling the previous record, set in 2020. And the next day, Wednesday the 16th, another 300,000 people voted in Georgia!
The Biden/Harris campaign won Georgia by 11,779 votes in 2020, and this year, a 100-year-old former President set his mind to staying alive long enough to vote again, just to be one more vote that couldn’t be denied. A man who dedicated much of his post-presidency to ensuring Democracy around the world, now willing himself to stay on Earth long enough to ensure it here at home.
What if we all had, in us, what Jimmy Carter has in himself? The absolute, unstoppable commitment to do whatever needs to be done in these next 18 days. I mean, if he could do that from a 20-month stay in a hospice (i.e., the place where you are supposed to go to die in the next week), what is our excuse? “Ohhhhh, knocking on all these doors is killing me!” No it’s not. He’s actually dying. You making 5 more calls to Pennsylvania or Georgia is only cutting into a few minutes of your NCIS: New Orleans time. Listen up! We are all in the French Resistance (non-violent battalion)! A Nazi division will be crossing the bridge entering our town at 1600 hours. I know you have couple’s therapy at 3pm, but that can wait. The fate of our country is at stake. We have to take out that bridge. The two of you should just try to get along until mid-November. Then seek help. But for now, we all have a job to do. And if a 100-year-old man can look into the face of God and say, “I’m just not ready to go yet, sorry, Bubba,” then the least we can do is make that list of the non-voters we’re taking to Early Voting this weekend — and then friggin’ do it.
We must defeat all fascists. Four years ago, Trump and his goons tried to overturn the vote in Georgia that Biden and Harris had legitimately won. But, like almost everything else Donald Trump does, it turned out he was really bad at committing treason. The worst. No one has ever been more bad at committing treason than Donald Trump. Everyone has said this. All the historians. “Trump is the absolute worst at trying to commit treason.” I swear to God if he was trapped in a paper bag and committing treason was his only way out, he would still be trapped in that paper bag.
But… Trump and his confederacy of weirdo allies, including the 121 members of Congress who four years ago voted to overthrow the U.S. government, and who two years ago were nevertheless re-elected by their constituents to Congress have not been sitting idle since 2020.
Instead, Trump, and his gang of thugs and fellow seditionists, have been hard at work, trying to figure out how to steal this election after failing miserably in their attempts to steal the last one. For example, since July 1st of this year, MAGA activists and election officials in Georgia have tried to expunge 63,000 voters from the rolls in Georgia. Remember: Biden/Harris fairly won the state, but only by 12,000 votes. And that 63,000 is just the number they’ve challenged since July. In the first half of 2024, they tried to erase another 18,000 from the voter rolls. Hmmm. Who do you think it is they are trying to kick off the voter rolls?
On top of that, all across Georgia, local and county election commissions have been taken over by these Republican/Trump voter conspiracy theorists and it has gotten so serious that state Courts have had to get involved, warning and ordering local election officials to count and certify all votes, as ProPublica reported yesterday:
If county election board members were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in the ruling. “Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.”
Georgia — your vote is at stake. Your voice is at stake. And these people are trying to steal and silence it. Do not let them silence your voice. Whether you just turned 18 a week ago or just turned 100, we have to vote in numbers so huge that whatever’s become of whatever’s left of the Republican Party cannot steal and silence enough of our votes to win.
We are the majority. Now, all we have to do is vote.
If early voting is possible in your state or where you live, vote early. If not, make a plan to vote now. Just like “Jimmy.”
It’s never too early to plan ahead, even if you’re about to turn 100.
And if you know anyone in Georgia — literally anyone! — call them or text them or message them and remind them to vote now.
As for me, I already know that when I’m in the voting booth, I’m going to look upward and say, in my sincerest Catholic schoolboy voice, “God bless Jimmy Carter. And God bless peanut farmers everywhere. May I have their strength for the next 30 years.”